Before April 22, 1970, most Americans did not think much about pollution. Factories dumped waste into rivers. Cars filled the air with smog. Then twenty million people gathered across the country for the first Earth Day. Artists played a huge role in spreading the message. Graphic designers created bold posters showing polluted landscapes next to clean ones. The contrast was powerful. One famous poster showed a tiny blue Earth floating in black space. It read: "We have met the enemy and he is us." Musicians wrote songs that became anthems for the movement. Pete Seeger performed folk songs about clean water along the Hudson River. Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" warned about paving over paradise. Her lyrics became one of the most quoted lines in environmental music. She sang, "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot." Photographers like Ansel Adams had already been capturing stunning black-and-white images of American wilderness. After Earth Day, his photographs took on new significance. They were no longer just beautiful pictures. They were arguments for protecting the places they showed. The Whole Earth Catalog, first published in 1968, used a satellite photograph of Earth on its cover. That single image changed how millions of people saw the planet. Seeing Earth as one small sphere made people realize it was fragile and worth protecting.