It is now all the rage, but can you remember when everyone in American was not “Going Green”? AMERICAN EXPERIENCE’s Earth Days looks back to the dawn and development of the modern environmental movement through the extraordinary stories of the era’s pioneers — among them Former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, biologist/Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich, Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand, Apollo Nine astronaut Rusty Schweickart, and renewable energy pioneer Hunter Lovins.

Widespread concern about the environment in America was on the rise in the early 1950s after a small group of scientists began to document the impact of our technology on the Earth’s ecosystem. Within a decade it seemed to many Americans as if the post-war dream of a better world brought about through science, technology and economic growth — the American dream — was turning into an unfathomable nightmare. The post-war economic boom had fueled industrial expansion, and the Interstate Highway program had encouraged mass migration to the suburbs, but emissions from new vehicles and production factories clogged the skies, and cities around the country experienced “smog episodes.” More!