Earth Day is more than a ‘feel good’ day, its also a time when everyone gets an opportunity to consider what they should be doing to preserve our planet.

However, it has become the key activity for numerous politicians in the past decades.

Here are four of the political figures who have helped shape Earth Day.

1. The first earth day was in 1970 when Congress introduced the Clean Air Act designed to protect Americans from air polution. President Nixon signed it into law and also created the Environmental Protection Agency.

2. The first Earth Day succeeded in building support from Republicans and Democrats alike. It lead to the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of the Clean Air, Clean Water and Endangered Species Acts. In 1990, Earth Day gained global support—its organizers were able to mobilize 200 million people from 141 countries. The 1990 Earth Day brought the importance of recycling to the forefront. Earth Day 2000 drew together 5000 environmental groups and reached out to hundreds of millions of people in 184 countries

3. President George Bush snr signed into law the Clean Air Amendment Act in 1990 and in 2011 a study found that the previous year reductions in fine particle pollution and ozone pollution had prevented over 160,000 premature deaths, millions of asthma attacks and 130,000 heart attacks, as well as 13 million lost workdays.

4. President Obama is now having the clean power plan implemented by the EPA, building on the work carried out by his two, Republican predecessors and designed to cut dirty energy pollution by 30 per cent.

5. Former Secretary of State George P Schultz is working on the development of a carbon free plan that would seek dirty energy pay fees that would send revenue back to American households, speeding up the transition towards clean energy and cutting dirty energy pollution by up to 90 per cent