Earth Week Earth Day 50th anniversary: Exploring the 1980s Written by Jared Wolf April 20, 2020February 6, 2023 Saving Bookmark this article Bookmarked Welcome to the second installment in our Earth Day series, the 1980s. The decade started with a win for environmental justice and the literal “defining moment” for sustainable development. Everything was bigger in the 1980s – big hair, leg warmers, and boom boxes, big phones, big junk bonds and trading scandals, and, of course, the advent of MTV and personal computing. It also may have been the decade in which we “lost Earth”. The second half of the decade included one of the most successful international environmental negotiations and brought climate change and its impacts to the public consciousness for the first time. This is Earth Day, 1980s edition.