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Philadelphia committee led by Benjamin Franklin attempts to regulate waste disposal and water pollution. -
Henry David Thoreau publishes Walden to live deliberately, to confront the essentials, and to extract the meaning of life as it is, good or bad. -
The term ecology is coined in German as Oekologie by Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel -
The term acid rain is coined by Robert Angus Smith in the book Air and Rain -
The term smog is coined by Henry Antoine Des Voeux in a London meeting to express concern over air pollution -
Through the Yellowstone and other early park acts, Congress set the course for a rich American legacy. The Organic Act, enacted in 1916, secured this new conservation direction by creating a National Park Service ( and National Park System with a resource protection goal. -
Carson's research on the effect of insecticides (specifically on bird populations coupled with her moving prose made Silent Spring a best-seller, though chemical companies attacked it as unscientific. -
The first step towards the realization of this dream was made in 1968, when OAO-2 was launched into orbit, becoming the first ultraviolet space telescope -
The Sputnik 1 spacecraft was the first artificial satellite successfully placed in orbit around the Earth and was launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome at Tyuratam -
It was a small, spheroidal satellite designed to study trapped radiation of various energies, galactic cosmic rays, geomagnetism, radio propagation in the upper atmosphere, and the flux of micrometeorites. -
On Christmas Eve, 1968 the crew of Apollo 8 captured a spectacular sight as they orbited the Moon: the illuminated Earth appearing above the barren lunar horizon. -
April 22. Millions of people gather in the United States for the first Earth Day. US Environmental Protection Agency established -
US spacecraft Viking 1 becomes the first to successfully land on Mars and send back images of the Red Planet. -
Although the Voyager 2 Probe was sent into space in 1977, it was the first object to venture beyond our Solar System, and reach interstellar -
The US space shuttle Columbia, the first reusable manned spacecraft, makes its first voyage. -
Montreal Protocol on substances that deplete the ozone layer entered into force -
Hubble is the first space telescope to be placed into orbit. -
The Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in Kyoto, Japan in December. Countries commit to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide -
The ISS maintains an orbit with an average altitude of 400 kilometres (250 mi) and circles the Earth in roughly 93 minutes, completing 15.5 orbits per day -
because it exempts 80 percent of the world, including major population centers such as China and India, from compliance, and would cause serious harm to the US economy. -
the European Space Agency places a small robot, Philae, on a comet more than 500 million kilometres from Earth. The first comet lander is part of a mission aiming to explore the origins of the Solar System. -
U.S. announces it will cease participation in the Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation -
U.S. announces it will rejoin the Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation -
First American in Orbit The small Mercury Friendship 7 spacecraft carries John H. Glenn, Jr., the first American in orbit, and orbits the Earth three times July 20, 1969