April 20, 2026: Earth Day Founders: Rod Nash

[Earth Day has been around for more than 50 years, but it’s more important than ever here in 2026. So for this year’s commemorations I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of the folks who helped create & popularize the holiday, leading up to a special weekend tribute to the work of two of our most impressive young environmental activists!]

On two complementary ways that a groundbreaking professor helped kickstart the movement.

The first Earth Day celebrations in 1970 stemmed very directly from a horrific environmental tragedy: the January 1969 oil spill in Santa Barbara, California. This oral history of the spill and its aftermaths is a must-read for this entire blog series, so I’ll ask you to check it out at that hyperlink if you would and then come back here for some thoughts on one of the prominent voices and Santa Barbara residents featured in that oral history, Professor Roderick “Rod” Nash.

Welcome back! As Nash and others discuss in that oral history, observing and protesting the oil spill and its many frustrating contexts led Nash to propose a groundbreaking new academic program at his home institution of the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB): the Environmental Studies Program and Major that he would chair for many years (and remains a professor emeritus of to this day). As someone who is increasingly dedicated to the multilayered goals of public scholarship, I really appreciate the idea that an academic program should be entirely connected to the world beyond the university—as Nash puts it in Section VI of that oral history, he saw this as “a more permanent change” alongside the initial Earth Day celebrations, believed that “creating a new major for students to study” would indeed help make sure that the celebrations were not “a one-shot thing.” Since this was one of the world’s first Environmental Studies programs and they have now become ubiquitous (my older son Aidan is minoring in it at Vanderbilt), I’d say that Nash and his colleagues succeeded at that goal!

Academic study is one way to ensure individual moments become more consistently part of our conversations; powerful and enduring documents are another. And in late 1969, while on a boat trip to survey the oil spill’s damage on local islands (and carrying with him a copy of the Declaration of Independence), Nash drafted such a document, the 1970 Santa Barbara Declaration of Environmental Rights (which he would read aloud at the January 1970 conference on the spill’s one-year anniversary that truly kickstarted Earth Day). Every word of that brief but potent Declaration is worth reading, but I would highlight in particular the first item in the bullet-pointed list of things the movement is fighting for: “We need an ecological consciousness that recognizes man as member, not master, of the community of living things sharing his environment.” Or, as Midnight Oil put it in the beautiful song “To the Ends of the Earth” from their climate-focused album Resist (2022): “People of the world rise up/We have been unconscious for too long/Every creature drinks from the same cup.”

Next Earth Day figure tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?