In the fall of 1969, 25-year-old Harvard Kennedy School student Denis Hayes travelled to Washington, D.C., for a meeting with Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, who was promoting environmental campus “teach-ins.” Hayes returned with a charter to organise Boston, as detailed by the Harvard Gazette in How Earth Day gave birth to the environmental movement . Working with a shoestring budget and a team of mostly student volunteers, Hayes helped mobilise roughly 20 million Americans on April 22, 1970, in what remains one of the largest coordinated demonstrations in the country's history.
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