, when people around the world come together to support the protection of the environment, is commemorating its 50th anniversary this year. The covid-19 pandemic will mean celebrations are muted, but it is worth looking back at its achievements and seeing if it can still make a difference in today’s world.

I was there at the beginning. In 1970, I was a 17-year-old intern, part of a roughly 80-person team running Earth Day from its headquarters in Washington DC. The event was described as a national day of environmental teach-ins. Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson turned much of the event planning over to youth activists. This gave the movement a feeling of playful exuberance as well as passionate commitment, much like the climate school strikes movement launched by Greta Thunberg decades later.

We couldn’t have imagined that Earth Day would be the largest public event in US history.

Collectively, the events in spring 1970 were 80 times as big as the Woodstock music festival in the summer of 1969. On 22 April 1970, 20 million US citizens took part in local events, from teach-ins at 1500 colleges and universities to environmental clean-ups. For example, 300 scuba divers collected debris lying on the coastal shelf of the Pacific.

Earth Day soon went global. In less than two decades, 200 million people were taking part in at least 140 countries. Although sheer numbers in and of themselves don’t tell us much about Earth Day’s impact, it also spawned a new intensity of environmental activism across the world.

Momentum from the first Earth Day undoubtedly helped the passing of legislation in the US around endangered species and clean water and air, as well as the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency to deal with health challenges from industry.

This momentum carried forward into the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, which involved delegations from 114 governments as well as dozens of ethnic minority groups, including Hopi Native American farmers from the US Southwest, fishers from the Shuswap Nation in Canada and Sami herders from Norway. The conference’s final declaration was perhaps the first to spell out the fundamental human right to environmental justice: “Man has the fundamental right to freedom, equality and adequate conditions of life, in an environment of a quality that permits a life of dignity and well-being.”

This year, the covid-19 pandemic will overshadow Earth Day. Gatherings will be cancelled and, articles and social media posts aside, the event will be meek compared with previous years.

And yet the fiery spirit of Earth Day has been rekindled in recent years by people involved with organisations such as . The young people at the heart of these movements are as committed to halting climate change as my generation was to halting segregation and the Vietnam war. So that their own lives won’t be diminished by climate catastrophes, dead oceans and food rationing, they want to overhaul the ways we access our food and energy – two of the most significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.

More than that, this generation of activists has grown up thinking of themselves as truly global citizens, and covid-19 is but one more indication that we are all in this together, and must row in the same direction. My friend, environmental biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer, summed it up well when she said: “When times are easy and there’s plenty to go around, individual species can go it alone. But when conditions are harsh and life is tenuous, it takes a team sworn to reciprocity to keep life going forward.”

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THIS author is down to earth in every sense. David Montgomery, a research geologist at the University of Washington, is one of our most eloquent and precise earth science communicators. In his latest book, he takes on one of the toughest problems contributing to climate change and resource depletion: the impoverishment of the soil. On top of being a catastrophe in itself, the collapse of the soil microbiome also impairs its capacity to sequester carbon and retain moisture.

Montgomery visits farmers, range managers and others who set out to show that improving the diversity and resilience of the soil microbiome can be economically viable and have a lasting ecological impact. This point has been made before, in and by Eric Toensmeier in his practical guide . Montgomery’s meticulous scientific research deepens the discussion, reviewing the recent technical literature to explain and evaluate farmers’ claims.

Montgomery is one of the most prolific science writers in the US, and sometimes that industriousness takes its toll. For my money, the best book ever written on the fungi, nitrogen-fixing bacteria and insects that run the world from beneath our feet is , which Montgomery co-wrote with his wife. In contrast, these latest journalistic accounts of visiting “carbon farmers” and “carbon cowboys” around the world feel a little thin.

Much of value remains. Montgomery steers clear of the suggestion that there is a single biotechnological fix to soil ecology – a one-size-fits-all approach like or . He looks instead for a mix of tactics, which will be applied in different proportions to fit different landscapes.

“We can restore beneficial microbes to our skin, might we really perform the same feat for the soil?”

If there is any flaw in Montgomery’s scientific assessments, it may lie in his optimism. He has high hopes for annual crops, though many ecologists think they are ecologically quite damaging. It is hard to imagine that any annual herbaceous crop could sequester much carbon, compared with longer-lived perennial crops in the same settings. “Food forests” of fruit and nut trees, or even deep-rooted grasses and other herbaceous crops do far less damage to the soil because they require less tillage.

The effort that farmers of annual crops expend to make their operations more sustainable are noble. But I’m wary of any hype, never mind whether it comes from the biotech industry or the biodynamic farm movement, suggesting that annual crops can be as ecologically sound and mitigate climate change as effectively as orchards and perennials.

If Montgomery is indeed “growing a revolution” then his next steps are clear, and it will be fascinating to know whether some of the suggestions he floats before us will bear fruit. Might future agricultural systems be able to apply lessons drawn from elsewhere in biology to solve our current agricultural crisis? Montgomery explains how microbial ecologists working in hospital operating rooms are learning to reverse the devastation caused by antibiotics, and restore beneficial microbes to our skin and gastrointestinal tracts; might we really perform the same feat for the soil?

Montgomery has a knack for opening our minds to large, critically important questions. Plausible answers to those questions can be slow in coming, and this can be frustrating. But that, to my mind, is why we need more risk-takers like Montgomery in our midst.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Don’t desert the earth”