The Earth Day Emblem

In the fall of 1969, environmental cartoonist Ron Cobb presented an ecology symbol in a cartoon printed in the L. A. Free Press, and he placed it in the public domain.  It was simply a broadened upper-case Greek theta, which looks like a globe crossed by an equatorial line-- obviously it's meant to suggest Earth.  And in fact, the ancient symbol for the planet Earth is a circle either quartered by a cross, or halved by a horizontal.  But Cobb's ecology symbol (henceforth 'ecologo') derives supposedly from superimposed lower-case 'e' and 'o'-- the e for 'environment' and the o for 'organism'.  Actually, 'oe' is a next-best form of o-umlaut (o with two dots over it), which was used in the German biologist Ernst Haeckel's coinage 'Oekologie'-- when he invented the scientific discipline we know as ecology-- was it in 1866? 

On the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, the ecologo was widely used on banners, or on an ecology flag modeled after the American flag.  At the time, the word 'ecology' was unfamiliar, but soon came to be conflated with the common 'environmentalism'-- a term I always hated-- it usually meant 'pollution' (=cancer) or 'littering', to most people.  But then 'ecology', the name of a particular discipline of biological science, soon came to be used as well for the conservationist cause.--  oh, the muddleheadedness of the mass mind!

But Ron Cobb's symbol, I think, must have come out of the new awareness of Earth produced by seeing NASA photographs of the whole planet taken by high-orbit satellites in the late 60s, and then there was the famous photo of 'Earth-rise' on the Moon, taken during the first lunar landing (Apollo 11) in June, 1969.  For many people around the world, these photographs had a profound effect-- a shift in consciousness.

A 'whole Earth' flag was also used at the first Earth Day-- one of the satellite images printed on a deep blue field.  But the ecology flag had a more specific meaning.  This flag had green and white horizontal stripes with a yellow ecologo in a square green field in the upper left-hand corner, resembling the American flag.  Earth Day was an American event, after all, though I'm sure conservative Americans were provoked by this desecration of their emblem.  In 1971, a simple green and white ecologo flag was used by a 16-year-old girl in Louisiana for an Earth Day commemoration at her school, and that version eventually caught on with 'ecologists', who of course see beyond national boundaries.

Every cause needs its symbol, its banner, and the ecologo is ours.  I particularly like the curvilinear form of it without sharp corners, where the horizontal's lines widen smoothly from the middle into the inner curves of the oval, which also is wider on the sides and smoothly narrows into the top and bottom.  I don't remember if this was Ron Cobb's original version.  It seems Art Nouveau (a big influence in late 60s psychedelic art) but also Streamlined Futurist.  It has a sense of continuous flow appropriate to such a holistic symbol of interconnected ecologic flows in cycles.  More on the deeper meanings of the ecologo will follow in the next shtook.