* Radical environmentalist group
* Deems capitalism the scourge of the environment
* Condemns U.S. for its disproportionate consumption of natural resources
The earliest roots of the Earth Day Network (EDN) can be traced back to 1969, when Democratic U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson and Stanford University professor Paul Ehrlich decided to organize a nationwide teach-in on environmentalism. They recruited Denis Hayes, who would later become president and CEO of the Bullitt Foundation, to coordinate and implement the first-ever Earth Day celebration on April 22, 1970, the centennial of Vladimir Lenin’s birthday. Author and meteorologist Brian Sussman emphasizes that the selection of that date was no coincidence:
“After careful consideration a name and date for the event were chosen: the inaugural Earth Day would be celebrated April 22, 1970—Russian dictator Vladimir Lenin’s Centennial.
“Environmentalists have always admired Lenin. He was the first disciple of Karl Marx to capture control of a country, and the opening act of his seven-year reign commenced with the abolition of all private property—a Marxist priority. Despite overseeing a bloody civil war, a devastated economy and a citizenry without hope, Lenin made it a priority to implement his signature decree, ‘On Land.’ In it he declared that all forests, waters, and minerals to be the exclusive property of the state, and he demanded these resources be protected from use by the public and private enterprise. Selling timber or firewood, mining minerals, or diverting water for farming was strictly prohibited.”
One self-proclaimed Earth Day co-founder, Ira Einhorn, who served as master of ceremonies at the first Earth Day celebration at Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, would later be found guilty of murdering his ex-girlfriend and stuffing her “composted” body into a trunk. After being charged with that September 1977 killing, Einhorn jumped bail and then spent the next 23 years traveling throughout Europe in an effort to evade authorities. When he was finally captured in France, he was extradited to the U.S., where he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life-in-prison for murder. “Taking the stand in his own defense,” reported NBC News, “Einhorn claimed that his ex-girlfriend had been killed by CIA agents who framed him for the crime because he knew too much about the agency’s paranormal military research.”
Ever since that 1970 event, which is widely regarded as the launch point of the modern environmental movement, Earth Day has been celebrated annually on that same date. In 1994, EDN evolved beyond being just a yearly event and was officially founded as an international network dedicated to promoting environmental activism on a year-round basis. By EDN’s telling, Earth Day is now “the largest secular holiday in the world,” with over a billion people participating in its festivities each year.
Dedicated to building “broad-based citizen support for sound, workable and effective environmental and sustainable development policies for all,” this Network today strives to help its ideological allies “connect, interact, … impact their communities, and create positive change in local, national, and global policies.” All told, EDN works with more than 22,000 organizational partners in 192 countries.
While emphasizing environmental issues above all else, EDN’s focus commonly extends to other matters as well. Its New York chapter, for instance, became a member organization of the Abolition 2000 nuclear-disarmament coalition. Six months after the 9/11 attacks, EDN president Kathleen Rogers said that while violent terrorism was worthy of Americans’ attention, “there is [the] more insidious and pervasive terrorism of poverty, hunger, homelessness, inadequate education and health care, and population growth that remains a daily, mortal threat to the vast majority of the world.”
On Earth Day 2003, EDN launched its “One Million New Voters” (OMNV) campaign, an aggressive voter-registration initiative whose motto was: “If you want to do one thing for the environment, register to vote!” Though EDN denied that it was endorsing any particular candidate for the following year’s presidential election, Democrat John Kerry attended the 2003 Earth Day events in Boston and vocally supported the OMNV initiative. EDN’s co-founder, Denis Hayes, and its president, Kathleen Rogers, were both on hand as well, with Rogers publicly thanking Kerry for his “leadership in environmental stewardship.” Joining EDN in its voter-registration effort were such groups as MoveOn, the NAACP National Voter Fund, and the ACORN affiliate Project Vote. In subsequent election cycles, EDN coordinated similar projects in partnership with the NAACP and the Southwest Voter Registration Project.
Apart from its annual Earth Day festivities, EDN currently administers the following major programs:
* The Building the Climate Movement project seeks to broaden the reach of EDN’s environmentalist message by recruiting athletes, musicians and artists to convey it directly to their respective fans. This project also aims to augment the influence of environmentalist dogma by conflating environmentalism with identity-politics movements. For instance, EDN works to “mobilize the U.S.’s growing Latino population” by convening the annual National Latino Congreso and working closely with the National Latino Coalition on Climate Change. The Network also works with the National Religious Coalition on Creation Care to help “coordinate the national faith-based eco-justice movement and connect religious leaders with decision makers in Washington.”
* The Green Economy campaign supports local, state and federal policies that promote a “shift” to a “green,” “post-carbon” economy based on solar, wind, and hydroelectric power. The “unsustainable economic growth” fostered by capitalism, says EDN, has “accelerated consumption of fossil fuels and deforestation” to a point where “our lifestyles … are exhausting the planet’s natural resources and accelerating climate change.”
* The Green Schools/Environmental Education program, conducted in partnership with the U.S. Green Building Council and the Clinton Foundation, focuses on “integrating environmental education” into school curricula. Toward that end, EDN provides resources and lesson plans for some thirty-thousand K-12 teachers and school administrators nationwide. Implicit in many of these lessons is the notion that capitalism is inherently destructive to the environment, and that the U.S. routinely turns a blind eye to the needs of poor people around the world while squandering the Earth’s natural resources.
* EDN’s National School Lunch Campaign calls for the elimination of junk-food from the meals that are served to children in school each day. The Network seeks to tie this initiative to a number of other political and social issues, as evidenced by its assertion that “children’s health and nutrition in the U.S. is in a state of crisis that affects our nation’s educational success, job readiness, global competitiveness, the surging cost of healthcare, and environmental sustainability.”
* The Earth Stewardship Program for People of Faith seeks to inject environmental activism into religious congregations nationwide, on the theory that “faith leaders have been a driving force behind the most important and successful social movements” in American history.
* EDN’s National Civic Education Project awards grants to “support teachers and their students from diverse schools across the country to combine civic and environmental education inside their classroom with hands-on learning experiences outside the classroom.”
* The Green Ribbon Schools program is a federal initiative launched by the Obama administration in 2011 to honor public and private schools that “demonstrate dramatic gains in both environmental literacy and reducing their carbon footprint while improving learning conditions.” Ribbon winners are announced each year during Earth Day celebrations in Washington, DC.|
* The EDN website features an Ecological Footprint Calculator that asks readers a series of questions about their lifestyles and then, based on their answers, compares their annual consumption of natural resources to the consumption patterns of people elsewhere in the world. Accoding to EDN, the “ecological footprint” of the average American is nearly 6 times larger than the worldwide per-capita average.
EDN also administers several international programs:
* The Women and the Green Economy Campaign “promotes women’s leadership in designing and advancing the green economy” throughout the world, in an effort to address “the scarcity of women players in bodies that govern and shape our economy, specifically in approaching global solutions to climate change.”
* The India Program was launched in 2010 to help schoolteachers in that country “incorporate environmental education into their classrooms” and thereby build “a network of environmentally-active youth” who will become “the next generation of leaders.”
* The Canopy Project seeks to “protect natural lands and preserve the environment for all people” by planting trees in impoverished communities around the world, on the premise that trees “reverse the impacts of land degradation,” “filter the air,” and “help stave off the effects of climate change.” Between 2010 and 2013, the Canopy Project planted over 1.5 million trees in 18 countries.
* The Save Yasuni National Park Project aims to protect the trees, wildlife, and indigenous populations that are native to this massive natural preserve in the western Amazon region. Always with an eye toward preventing climate change, EDN lobbies to restrict oil exploration and timber extraction in the Park.
EDN’s Global Advisory Committee includes such notables as Debbie Allen, Leonardo DiCaprio, Al Gore, Ben Jealous, Donna Karan, Bill McKibben, Shaquille O’Neal, John Podesta, Carl Pope, Bernie Sanders, Larry Schweiger, Martin Scorsese, Pete Seeger, Barbra Streisand, and Ted Turner, among others. For a comprrehensive list of Committee members, click here.
EDN has received grant money from numerous foundations over the years, including the AT&T Foundation, the Beldon Fund, the Blue Moon Fund (formerly called the W. Alton Jones Foundation), the Bullitt Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Compton Foundation, the David & Lucile Packard Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Turner Foundation, and many more.