2003/09/01 by Adam Rome · 8 citations
Environmental Science · #American Environmental and Regional History
paper · doi:10.2307/3659443
In 1969 the Environmental Action for Survival Committee at the University of Michigan began to sell buttons with a slogan that played off a rallying cry common in the protests against the Vietnam War. Instead of “Give Peace a Chance,” the buttons urged Americans to “Give Earth a Chance.” Newsweek soon asked if the buttons might be symbols of a new age of conservation. By spring 1970, when the nation celebrated the first Earth Day, the slogan was ubiquitous. In an Earth Day march in the nation's capital, for example, thousands of people joined the folk singers Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs in a great refrain: “All we are saying,” they sang, “is give earth a chance.”1 The popularity of the “Give Earth a Chance” slogan was not happenstance. The rise of the environmental movement owed much to the events of the 1960s. Yet scholars have not thus far done enough to place environmentalism in the context of the times. The literature on the sixties slights the environmental movement, while the work on environmentalism neglects the political, social, and cultural history of the sixties.