More than four decades after Jimi Hendrix died and Simon & Garfunkel released ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, Earth Day remains one of the world’s major environmental campaigns.

International Business Times shares the history of Earth Day, an idea launched by Gaylord Nelson, then a Democratic senator from Wisconsin. Earth Day was born in the aftermath of the 1969 oil spill in Santa Barbara, Ca — then the largest oil spill in America’s water.

The Environmental Protection Agency was created, along with passage of the Clean Air, Clean Water and Endangered Species Acts.

Earth Day went global two decades later with a massive campaign mobilizing 200 million people in 141 countries. It kickstarted recycling programs worldwide and paved the way for the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

This year’s campaign is called ‘The Face of Climate Change’, and it will “unite the myriad Earth Day events around the world into one call to action at a critical time,” Franklin Russell, director of Earth Day, at Earth Day Network, said.

The World Meteorological Organization announced last year that the first decade of the 21st century was the hottest on record for the entire planet. Organizers have asked participants in Earth Day 2013 to use Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (#FaceOfClimate) to spread awareness.

Will the Redwoods Rise Again?

In celebration of Earth Day, ceremonial plantings of two dozen clones from California’s mighty coastal redwoods will take place in seven nations: Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, Ireland, Canada, Germany and the US.

“This is a first step toward mass production,” said David Milarch, co-founder of Archangel Ancient Tree Archive, a nonprofit group spearheading the project. “We need to reforest the planet; it’s imperative. To do that, it just makes sense to use the largest, oldest, most iconic trees that ever lived.”

Tiny Goes Big: InsideClimate News Wins Pulitizer Prize

Dwarfed by earlier winners, online publications ProPublica and Huffington Post, InsideClimate News with an editorial staff of just seven, won a Pulitzer Prize in journalism last week. Lisa Song, Elizabeth McGowan and David Hasemeyer led the investigative story about an undercovered oil spill in Michigan.

InsideClimate News particularly covers news as it relates to climate change, which executive editor Susan White calls “the biggest story of our time.” But in a year that the New York Times and other major newspapers are closing their environmental desks, it is also a coverage area that is increasingly neglected by conventional news organizations. “We may be the largest environmental desk in the country,” says publisher David Sassoon.

In the committee’s words, InsideClimate won for its “rigorous reports on flawed regulation of the nation’s oil pipelines, focusing on potential ecological dangers posed by diluted bitumen (or “dilbit”), a controversial form of oil,” – a topic no doubt newsworthy, considering the debate over the Keystone XL pipeline.

InsideClimate is funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fun and other foundations. Surely this Pulitizer Prize win will help the group win future grants in their hopes to expand their staff to 20 or 25. The group presently works out of the New York area, with contributors as far flung as Tel Aviv and India.

Are Regulations Totally Bad?

It’s doubtful that Congress could even pass legislation for the Environmental Protection Agency today, given the huge growth of Tea Party and ultra conservative climate change deniers in the Republican party. To be fair, the federal bureaucracy is full of inter-agency red tape that makes no sense.

Also, I know our Republican friends in Texas HATE government regulation almost as much as they hate us damn progressive Yankees. But what do they say about the West Fertilizer plant failing to alert the DHS (I know, another damn government agency employing deadbeats and sucking up the taxpayers money) that they were storing 1,350 times the amount of ammonium nitrate allowable without mandatory security checks.

While not a direct environmental issue, the events in Texas last week demonstrate the lengths that business will go to to put people and the environment at risk.

The West Fertilizer plant which exploded, killing at least 14 and partially razing a small Texas town, failed to alert the Department of Homeland Security that it was storing 1,350 times the amount of ammonium nitrate allowable without mandatory safety checks, Reuters reports.

Pentagon explosives experts say that a blast entailing 270 tons of ammonium nitrate would dwarf virtually any non-nuclear weapons in the US arsenal.

It was also more than 100 times the weight of the ammonium nitrate and fuel-oil mix used in the deadly 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 and injured over 800.

The company had previously told Texas regulators that any accident at the facility would not be large enough to cause an explosion. A risk management plan filed by the company in 2011 had further failed to mention the presence of ammonium nitrate at the site.

More Reading:

Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks The Guardian Feb. 14, 2013

No, Global Warming Has NOT Stopped Slate March 18, 2013

More Than a Pipe Dream Slate April 22, 2013

Ten Times More Hurricane Surges in Future, New Research Predicts Science Daily March 18, 2013

Climate change deniers strike out — even in energy-rich Kansas Christian Science Monitor April 18, 2013

Lawrence Solomon: Climate changing for global warming journalists Financial Post April 13, 2013

A sensitive matter The Economist March 30, 2013