Fires were nothing out of the ordinary on Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River in the 1960s. The city was still a manufacturing hub and the river, which empties into Lake Erie, had long been a dumping place for sewage and industrial waste. But on June 22, 1969, a spark flared from the ...read more
The Endangered Species Act was created by a somewhat unlikely hero: President Richard M. Nixon. Although Nixon expressed personal disgust with environmentalists in private, he also recognized that Americans’ interest in the environment was not a passing fad. Nixon used his ...read more
The Nazis’ efforts to protect one of their biggest battleships from Allied attacks during World War II left a lasting mark on the Norwegian landscape. Commissioned in 1941, the German battleship Tirpitz spent much of the war stationed in various fjords along the coast of Norway, ...read more
Mount St. Helens is a volcano located in southwestern Washington state. It’s the most active volcano in the Cascade Range, a mountain range that extends from British Columbia through Washington and Oregon to northern California. For thousands of years, Mount St. Helens has ...read more
The Exxon Valdez oil spill was a manmade disaster that occurred when Exxon Valdez, an oil tanker owned by the Exxon Shipping Company, spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound on March 24, 1989. It was the worst oil spill in U.S. history until ...read more
Can something that happened 1,000 years ago still affect people today? Of course it can. Just ask Iceland. When Vikings came to Iceland over a millennium ago, they slashed and burned trees to make room for farming. Within a few centuries, they’d wiped out most of the region’s ...read more
Henry David Thoreau is known for living in the woods on the shore of Walden Pond, in self-sufficient isolation. Less known, however, is that a year before building his cabin in Concord, Massachusetts, the famous American author and environmentalist accidentally started a forest ...read more
For centuries, communities spanning the globe have found various ways to honor nature and the environment. However, the appreciation of trees and forests in modern times can be largely attributed to Arbor Day–which literally translates to “tree” day from the Latin origin of the ...read more
1. Anne Frank’s Chestnut Tree (Amsterdam, Netherlands) For the two years that Anne Frank remained hidden in the “secret annex” of her father’s workplace, a lone attic window offered her only glimpse of the outside world. The teenager often gazed out and took comfort in the ...read more
1. Dust Bowl Around World War I, homesteaders flocked in mass to the southern Great Plains, where they replaced the native grasses that held the topsoil in place with wheat and other crops. Eschewing sustainable agricultural practices, such as crop rotation, they managed to reap ...read more
As reported in the New York Times this week, a team of scientists headed by Dr. Maureen E. Raymo of Columbia University traveled to the southern and western coasts of South Africa last summer to find prehistoric beaches that could contain invaluable records of past climate ...read more
The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was a work relief program that gave millions of young men employment on environmental projects during the Great Depression. Considered by many to be one of the most successful of Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, the CCC planted more than three ...read more
The green movement has gained momentum since April 22, 1970, when 20 million people participated in the very first Earth Day. But can we really call ourselves the greenest generation? Eco-friendly initiatives—many closely resembling our modern efforts—date all the way back to ...read more
In Auckland harbor in New Zealand, Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior sinks after French agents in diving gear plant a bomb on the hull of the vessel. One person, Dutch photographer Fernando Pereira, was killed. The Rainbow Warrior, the flagship of international conservation group ...read more
On February 3, 1953, French oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau publishes his most famous and lasting work, The Silent World. Born in Saint-Andre-de-Cubzac, France, in 1910, Cousteau was trained at the Brest Naval School. While serving in the French navy, he began his underwater ...read more
Earth Day, an event to increase public awareness of the world’s environmental problems, is celebrated in the United States for the first time. Millions of Americans, including students from thousands of colleges and universities, participated in rallies, marches, and educational ...read more
John Muir, a dedicated advocate for the protection of American wild lands, is born in Dunbar, Scotland. When he was still a boy, Muir’s parents immigrated to the United States. He grew up on a farm in central Wisconsin in the 1850s, a time when the region was still a relatively ...read more
Uncompromising environmentalist and author Edward Abbey is born in Home, Pennsylvania. A self-proclaimed “enemy of the modern military-industrial state,” which he believed was destroying the natural world and human freedom, Abbey’s passionate dedication to protecting and ...read more
The Ballinger-Pinchot scandal erupts when Colliers magazine accuses Secretary of the Interior Richard Ballinger of shady dealings in Alaskan coal lands. It is, in essence, a conflict rooted in contrasting ideas about how to best use and conserve western natural resources. ...read more
