From its inception 40 years ago Earth Day has been a student-centric event.
Not surprisingly, Earth Day's origins can be traced to a single instance of environmental devastation when Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson was touring the Santa Barbara coastline assessing the damage caused by an oil spill.
Nelson had long been contemplating a way in which to infuse environmental issues into the political discourse in Washington D.C. During a flight from Santa Barbara to San Francisco, Nelson was reading about the effectiveness of student led anti-war teach-ins on college campuses across the U.S. and concluded that the same format could prove just as successful for environmental issues: