Most of us don’t know or remember just how radical and momentous the first Earth Day was. April 22, 1970 marks one of the largest mobilizations in US history; it launched the modern environmental movement and the work of countless organizers and activists, as well as giving rise to major legislation that defines the legal and regulatory terrain half a century later. On Earth Day, Saturday, April 22 from 3-4:30pm, a panel of interdisciplinary scholars invited us to look at the clarity of purpose, and the sense of integration with social movements, that the nascent environmental movement was building on Earth Day 1970, and it related this history to where we are in the movement for climate justice today.

Panelists included Kara Schlichting, Associate Professor of History at Queens College, CUNY, environmental historian of New York City, and author of New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore; Mia White, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at the New School and interdisciplinary scholar whose work links social science concepts of space and race to the humanities via art and protest; and Teona Williams, Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University whose work explores the roles of disaster and hunger in shaping Black feminist ecologies from 1930 through the 1990s. Museum director Miranda Massie moderated.