On the first Earth Day in 1970 I was at a teach-in in Morristown, New Jersey, covering the story for the newspaper I worked for, the Passaic Herald News. I was bored and I was convinced despite the speakers' optimistic predictions that this was going to be an annual event and grow into a national movement that they were wrong.
Turns out it was I who was wrong and more than 30 years later EarthDay is still going strong, has in fact has become a kind of secular holy day, celebrated in various ways around the world in a sort of nature worship.
Every Sunday the Library of America, the people who are publishing definitive editions of so many US authors, sends me an email, The Story of the Week. Most are fiction and mostly I ignore them. But today, in celebration of Earth Day, they have sent me a story by the famed New Yorker columnist, Berton Roueche, author of "The Annals of Medicine." His pieces have become the plots of many House episodes.
Today they sent me "The Fog," a story published in the New Yorker in 1950 about deadly pollution in 1948 in Donora, Pennsylvania. Here's now it starts:
The fog closed over Donora on the morning of Tuesday, October 26th. The weather was raw, cloudy, and dead calm, and it stayed that way as the fog piled up all that day and the next. By Thursday, it had stiffened adhesively into a motionless clot of smoke. That afternoon, it was just possible to see across the street, and, except for the stacks, the mills had vanished. The air began to have a sickening smell, almost a taste. It was the bittersweet reek of sulphur dioxide. Everyone who was out that day remarked on it, but no one was much concerned. The smell of sulphur dioxide, a scratchy gas given off by burning coal and melting ore, is a normal concomitant of any durable fog in Donora. This time, it merely seemed more penetrating than usual.
At about eight-thirty on Friday morning, one of Donora’s eight physicians, Dr. Ralph W. Koehler, a tense, stocky man of forty-eight, stepped to his bathroom window for a look at the weather. It was, at best, unchanged. He could see nothing but a watery waste of rooftops islanded in fog. As he was turning away, a shimmer of movement in the distance caught his eye. . . .
You can read the entire story here. It comes from the Library of America anthology, American Earth.