Excellent book on Earth Day: "The Genius of Earth Day" by Adam Rome
This book describes the origins of Earth Day, its activities and impact on a generation, and how the 1970 Earth Day created the environmental movement.
Prior to Earth Day environmental activism consisted of outdoor recreation organizations lobbying to protect their members' interest and single issue anti-pollution actions.
Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin conceived the idea of Earth Day, as a national environmental teach-in. Earth Day was organized as a decentralized grass roots effort, with local organizations given wide latitude to create their own Earth Day activities.
Earth Day 1970 welded together previously independent concerns about environmental issues into a coherent political movement and energized thousands of young people to support this cause. It built an infrastructure of envirnmental organizations that weild political influence to this day.
