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In 1804, the world population reached about 1 billion. This obviously calls for a higher quantity of necessities to sustain the population.
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123 years after the population reached 1 billion, it was estimated to hit about 2 billion in 1927
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The IUCN was founded on October 5, 1948. The organization creates adequate solutions to ecological challenges. Its original goal was to provide scientific knowledge and resources to guide conversation awareness.
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Minimata was a disease caused by the daily consumption of fish and shellfish that were polluted and contaminated with toxic chemicals. With the outbreak people began to understand the importance of keeping the oceans clean and unpolluted.
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The population was said to hit 3 billion in 1960 which is obviously well after several steps that activated the environmental movement and resources to live became a hug concern.
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Barry Commoner (a Nobel prize award chemist) and others lead a protest in front of the White House against national atmospheric nuclear testing. People joined in on this effort to protest the Earth's atmosphere.
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Rachel Carson's novel "Silent Spring" was a book that released in 1962 that references the negative effects of chemical pesticides that highly impacted agriculture.
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The Clean Air Act of 1963 was the first national legislation about pollution control. It established a federal program and authorized techniques for monitoring and controlling air pollution, It was enacted in 1963 and then amended several times after.
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The third recorded oil spill in the world and the biggest oil spill in America. Occurred in Saint Barbara California. It killed many birds and definitely ignited a spark in the environmental movement as people reacted to this catastrophe.
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The Cuyahoga River in Ohio was so polluted that it caught on fire. The reaction to this catastrophe helped bring attention to water pollution control activities such as the Clean Water Act and the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. The catastrophe got so much federal attention it led to the creation of the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.
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President Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act on January 1, 1970. This policy did exactly as it seems it might've done. It officialized the nation's involvement and participation in international and national environmental issues. To date, over 100 nations worldwide have enacted national environmental policies modeled after NEPA.
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The Gaia hypothesis, also known as the Gaia theory proposes the idea that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet.
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On April 27, 1970 millions of Americans celebrated the first national Earth Day. This was known as one of the biggest demonstrations of large-scale environmental activism which led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] and the Clean Air Act
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Save the whales was created in 1977 and its primary focus is to educate the public about the safety of marine mammals and the fragile ocean environment and was made officially illegal in 1986.
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Recycling goes curbside. Woodbury, New Jersey becomes the first town to make its curbside pickup program mandatory for residents. This obviously is a direct step in the environmental movement in that it caused residents to participate in one of the most basic forms of environmental preservation.
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On the night of December 2, 1984, chemical, methyl isocyanate was spilt from Union Carbide India pesticide factory and it basically turned the city of Bhopal into a huge gas chamber. More than 15,000 people were killed and over 600,000 workers were affected.
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A 7.3 million-square-mile hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica was discovered in 1985. About two years later, the United States and more than 100 other countries pledge to wing off from the use of ozone-depleting compounds known as chlorofluorocarbons, of CFCs.
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The Chernobyl catastrophe was a nuclear accident that occurred on April 26, 1986 at the No. 4 reactor in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, near the city of Pripyat in the north of the Ukrainian SSR in the Soviet Union. This was another event in which the reaction from the event caused national concern and forming another step in the environmental movement.
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Toyota introduces the Prius in Japan, making a hybrid gas-electric vehicle widely available to consumers for the first time. Hybrid models, emit about half as much carbon dioxide as gasoline-powered vehicles which decreases carbon emissions.
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The Kyoto Protocol was an international treaty that commits state parties to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, based on the consensus that global warming exists and occurs and that man-made CO2 emissions is what's driving it.
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An Inconvenient Truth, American documentary film, released in 2006, featuring the multimedia presentation of former U.S. vice president Al Gore that formed the basis for his traveling lecture tour on the emerging human challenge of global warming and climate change. This brought more attention to global warming and environmental issues in a relatable and real-life way.
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The Paris Agreement goes into effect. As part of the Paris Agreement, a landmark international accord to combat climate change, countries agree to limit global temperature rise in the 21st century to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.
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