On April 22, 1970, a trio of radical dreamers rolled out the first Earth Day. Their hope was that the well-planned, nationwide event would effectively assault capitalism, free markets and mankind.
The initial concept was conceived by Sen. Gaylord Nelson, D-Wis. Nelson was Congress' first environmentalist activist. He was also the mastermind behind those radical public school "teach-ins" that were vogue throughout the '60s and '70s. During the teach-ins, mutinous school teachers would scrap the day's assigned curriculum, pressure their students to sit cross-legged on the floor, "rap" about how America was an imperialist nation and converse about why communism really wasn't such a bad form of government – it just needed to be implemented properly.
Nelson's teach-in efforts were aided by a young man named Denis Hayes. Hayes was student body president while at Stanford University and well-known for organizing anti-Vietnam War protests. Hayes heard about Sen. Nelson's teach-in concept and eventually helped Nelson institute the practice nationwide.
Rounding out the troika was professor Paul Ehrlich, also from Stanford. In 1968 Ehrlich authored the Malthusian missive, "The Population Bomb," in which he infamously spouted wild allegations that included equating the earth's supposed surplus of people with a cancer that needs to be eradicated: "A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. … We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions," he wrote.