Drexel University and the Earth Day Awakening
The year was 1970. The energy in West Philadelphia was like lightning in a bottle. Activists, researchers, professors, students, and townspeople gathered to chant, protest, and lay out demands that culminated into something greater than the sum of their parts; greater even than the sum of tens of thousands of demonstrations around the country populated by over twenty million Americans: the makings of a movement. West Philadelphia served as a pivotal mobilization hotspot for the inaugural Earth Day and the grounds for the earliest activism surrounding the nation’s modern environmental movement. The Rachel Carson Council took a trip to West Philadelphia on Earth Day 2023 to see where it all came alive.
Drexel University was a focal point in Philadelphia for environmental organizing around the momentous first Earth Day demonstrations as well as environmental justice and legislation. The University hosted a daylong teach-out with the Philadelphia Ecology Action Group a month before Earth Day to educate the community on the issues most pertinent to the movement, including the right to clean air. Drexel student leaders also led a “pollution trail” tour which bussed over five hundred tourists to site locations owned by the area’s biggest polluting culprits, including the city incinerator and corporate smelting plants. Temple University, the University of Pennsylvania, the then Philadelphia College of Art, and Swarthmore College boasted their own student pioneers of the Earth Day tradition, solidifying Philadelphia’s role in shaping the movement.
Fifty-three years later, Drexel continues to be a leading academic institution in environmental education and research. The University’s Academy of Natural Sciences is the oldest natural history museum in North America and a national leader among scientific institutions. Founded over 200 years ago, the Academy’s millions of remarkably curated, preserved, documented, and studied specimens and pieces provide current Drexel students unique opportunities for research on biology, health, and climate change. Of all the environmental public policy issues the Academy’s collections have helped further, water is at the forefront. Academy scientists’ research was integral to the passage of the 1972 and 1977 Clean Water Acts.
Drexel’s commitment to combating the climate crisis transcends historical preservation, however. The University has launched an ambitious and democratic Climate Action Plan this year and, as a member of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) participates in the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment, and Reporting System (STARS). Drexel is on a clear path to a Silver rank, steadily improving both their sustainability performance and their self-reporting of their accomplishments.
The relationship between the RCC and Drexel is young but strengthening by the year. The organization awarded Fellowships to two stand-out Drexel students in the 2022-2023 RCC Fellowship cohort, Kacy Gao and Sean Vanson, who advocate for both Drexel University’s and the city of Philadelphia’s land management transition from toxic herbicides to organic inputs. Their time organizing on behalf of the RCC has resulted in collaboration between ‘herbicide free’ campus campaigns across the country and coalition building with Philadelphia area environmental justice advocates at the city-government level.
The RCC was then invited to participate in the University’s Earth Fest event on April 19, 2023, a fair at which the organization shared original resources on the exploitative wood pellet industry as well as a call to join our efforts to end offshore oil and gas drilling in federal waters. Associate Directors of Climate Justice and Communications & Strategic Development, Isabella Jaramillo and Claudia Steiner represented the RCC at the event, speaking with hundreds of students about the organization’s environmental justice organizing and policy work at the federal, state, local, and grassroots levels organization in Washington, D.C. as well as the Fellowship program through which the organization funds organizing projects by ambitious collegiate environmental leaders. More Drexel students will be represented in the 2023-2024 RCC Fellowship class as well, continuing the campaign to transition to organic land management and initiating a public awareness campaign on fracking in Pennsylvania.
And so, three days shy of Earth Day 2023, Drexel University was officially inducted as the 65th school in the RCC Campus Network. It is certain that many of the preeminent environmental leaders of tomorrow will have garnered inspiration from the rich activist history that took place right on West Philadelphia’s Drexel campus. The RCC is proud to continue to play a role in shaping these leaders’ futures.
Claudia Steiner, Associate Director of Communications and Development
A tireless environmental advocate, Claudia Steiner serves as the Associate Director for Communications and Strategic Development at the Rachel Carson Council. She is a magna cum laude graduate of American University where she studied International Studies and Environmental Science. As an undergraduate, Claudia was instrumental in the university’s student-led divestment movement to secure full divestment from the fossil fuel industry.
