http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/04/photogalleries/first-earth-day-1970-pictures/photo2.html

"In 1970, with nine staff members (pictured: Judy Moody and Denis Hayes on April 22, 1970) and a $125,000 budget, a Washington, D.C.-based group organized the Environmental Teach-in, which would become became the first Earth Day.

With then senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin as their champion, the staffers brought together volunteers in dozens of cities and college campuses around the country."

Check out this link and Check out the Michael Kimmelman article in the NYT: "Art's Last, Lonely Cowboy", in the reader and here: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/magazine/06HEIZER.html

Heizer, today, is living a lot of what we were talking about last weekend: blasting, scraping... trying to "finish off the European impulse", ... "based on the awareness that we live in a nuclear era", lover of cowboy painters Charles Russell and Frederic Remington, perfectionist, and his new work my be threatened by the military industrial complex.

Round about to the First Earth Day, and thinking about why did the Earth Artists become Earth Artists in the first place, Nancy Holt is quoted, recalling travelling with Heizer and Smithson: "To go outside into the landscape, that sense of liberation, just crossing the Hudson River, it was glorious. The mass media picked up on it quicker than the art media, what was happening. This was when everyone was seeing the earth from outer space for the first time; 'ecology' was a new word. And when you look at the old photographs of us, you can see the joy in our faces."

More faces here: http://www.ubu.com/film/smithson_mono.html

Nancy Holt & Robert Smithson - Mono Lake (1968 - 2004)