In June 1989, five months after running aground and spilling its cargo in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, the Exxon Valdez limped home to San Diego, still leaking a trail of oil.

I went down to the shipyard where it was docked, but the public wasn’t allowed in close and there wasn’t much to see. The true costs of the American car culture are often hidden from view. 

Earth Day is now observed in more than 180 countries. Which makes sense when you think about it. Humanity has many religions and nations, but so far only one planet.

The first Earth Day was a response to a massive oil spill near Santa Barbara, twenty years before the Exxon Valdez disaster. Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, an early opponent of the Vietnam War, toured the California coastline in the aftermath of the spill, and thought that the energy of the anti-war protests could be brought to bear on environmental issues. 

Senator Nelson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995 by President Bill Clinton, who praised him as “the father of Earth Day.”

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The Santa Barbara disaster occurred in the heart of America’s car culture, within view of the Pacific Highway. More than 3 million gallons of crude oil fouled some of the most popular beaches in the world, and killed untold thousands of birds, fish and sea mammals.

The Los Angeles Times reported that the Jan. 28, 1969, blowout was caused by inadequate safety precautions taken by Union Oil. The explosion cracked the sea floor in five places, and crude oil spewed out of the rupture for a month before it could be slowed.

It was the worst oil spill in the nation’s history – until 20 years later, when the Exxon Valdez dumped 11 million gallons of crude in Alaska.

In those twenty years, California and the United States passed reams of environmental legislation. There is little doubt that these laws have improved all of our lives. Los Angeles still has smog, but not like it did in 1969, thanks to the requirement that all vehicles pass an emissions test before they can be registered. We still have bad oil spills, but we also have an enhanced awareness of our impact on the planetary ecosystem.

In the wake of the Exxon Valdez spill, Greenpeace ran an ad campaign with this message: “It wasn’t the tanker captain’s driving that caused the Alaska oil spill. It was yours.” 

Even the car-happy cities of southern California are starting to take this to heart, and invest in public transportation. If we are serious about the environment – and the ever-expanding observance of Earth Day shows that many of us are – there is no mission more important than promoting alternatives to the private car.