Earth Day: a 40 year long experiment in environmentalism

It’s been 40 years since activists got together to set aside a special day to encourage people to think about our environment. Denis Hayes, the principal organizer of the first Earth Day back in 1970, says this day wove together some of the disparate agendas within the fractious environmental movement. But Heather Rogers, journalist and author of the new book “Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy Is Undermining the Environmental Revolution,” says that while Earth Day was originally a good idea, a new tension exists today in how the movement should move forward.

Rogers says environmentalism has been co-opted by green consumerism and has lost its power to make real policy changes at the local and federal level.