Environmental Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
164 free Environmental trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This environmental trivia quiz covers the human side of the planet's story: the pollution disasters that shocked the world, the activists and organisations that fought back, the laws and treaties that followed, and the everyday habits (recycling, Earth Hour, plastic bans) that came out of it. The easy questions are ones most people half-know already: when Earth Day falls, who wrote Silent Spring, what the recycling symbol looks like, and which gas leak made Bhopal infamous. From there it digs into the detail: the burning Cuyahoga, Love Canal and the birth of Superfund, the Great Smog of 1952, the Torrey Canyon bombed by the RAF, Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon, the Aral Sea shrinking into desert, the ozone hole and the Montreal Protocol, leaded petrol's long goodbye, the Rainbow Warrior sinking, Chipko tree-huggers, Wangari Maathai's Green Belt Movement, Julia Butterfly Hill's 738 days in a redwood, and the bald eagle's comeback. If you want the pure science of ecosystems, try our Ecology quiz; for warming and emissions specifically, our Climate Change quiz goes deeper. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries for the events, people, laws and organisations named before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question.
30 of 164 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01On what date is Earth Day held every year?
April 22
Earth Day falls on April 22. The first one, on April 22, 1970, drew about 20 million Americans to teach-ins and rallies across the United States.
Q 02Which US senator proposed the nationwide environmental teach-in that became Earth Day?
Gaylord Nelson
Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson proposed the nationwide teach-in in 1969 and hired the young activist Denis Hayes as its national coordinator.
Q 03Who coined the name 'Earth Day'?
Advertising writer Julian Koenig
Advertising writer Julian Koenig coined 'Earth Day'; he liked it partly because April 22 was his birthday and 'birthday' rhymes with 'Earth Day'.
Q 04Which labour union was the most important outside backer of the first Earth Day?
United Auto Workers
The United Auto Workers was the biggest outside financial and operational backer; Denis Hayes said that without the UAW the first Earth Day 'would have likely flopped'.
Q 05In how many nations did Denis Hayes organise Earth Day events when he took it international in 1990?
141
Earth Day 1990 went global with events in 141 nations, mobilising some 200 million people and giving a major boost to recycling efforts worldwide.
Q 06Who wrote the 1962 book Silent Spring?
Rachel Carson
Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was named one of the 25 greatest science books of all time by Discover magazine.
Q 07Silent Spring documented the environmental harm caused by which pesticide?
DDT
DDT's agricultural use was banned nationwide in the US in the wake of the book.
Q 08What prompted Silent Spring, according to its author's account?
A friend's letter about dead birds
Carson said a friend's letter about dead birds prompted the book: in 1958 Olga Owens Huckins wrote about songbirds killed by DDT spraying near her Duxbury, Massachusetts home.
Q 09Which 1951 bestseller won the author of Silent Spring a US National Book Award?
The Sea Around Us
The Sea Around Us (1951) won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and spent 86 weeks on the bestseller list, giving Carson the financial security to write full time.
Q 10Which US president posthumously awarded the author of Silent Spring the Presidential Medal of Freedom?
Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter awarded Rachel Carson the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 1980; she had died of cancer in 1964, two years after Silent Spring appeared.
Q 11Which Swiss chemist won a Nobel Prize in 1948 for discovering DDT's insecticidal power?
Paul Hermann Müller
Paul Hermann Müller won the 1948 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering DDT's insecticidal power in 1939; the compound itself had been synthesised in 1874 by Othmar Zeidler.
Q 12In what year did the US ban DDT for agricultural use?
1972
The EPA banned DDT for agricultural use in the United States in 1972, a decade after Silent Spring; the WHO later allowed limited indoor spraying for malaria control.
Q 13Which 2004 treaty on persistent pollutants largely banned agricultural DDT worldwide?
Stockholm Convention
Q 21Which Ohio city does the river that famously burned in 1969 bisect?
Cleveland
The Cuyahoga River splits Cleveland into east and west sides before emptying into Lake Erie; American Rivers named it River of the Year in 2019 for 50 years of recovery.
Q 22Love Canal, the toxic-waste neighbourhood discovered in 1977, is in which city?
Niagara Falls, New York
Love Canal is a neighbourhood of Niagara Falls, New York, where Hooker Chemical had buried about 21,800 tons of chemical waste before selling the site in 1953.
Q 23For how much did Hooker Chemical sell the Love Canal site to the local school district in 1953?
$1
Hooker Chemical sold the site to the Niagara Falls school board in 1953 for $1, with a deed clause warning of buried chemical waste; the later federal cleanup demolished the neighbourhood and ended in 2004.
The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, adopted in 2001 and in force from May 2004, restricted DDT to disease-vector control such as malaria programmes.
Q 14In what year did the US Environmental Protection Agency begin operating?
1970
The EPA opened on December 2, 1970; Richard Nixon had proposed it that July and created it through Reorganization Plan No. 3 of 1970.
Q 15How many regional offices does the EPA have?
Ten
The EPA has ten regional offices, numbered Region 1 (Boston) through Region 10 (Seattle), alongside its headquarters in Washington, DC.
Q 16In what year was the US Clean Air Act first enacted?
1963
The Clean Air Act was first enacted in 1963; the sweeping 1970 amendments created national air-quality standards, with further major amendments in 1977 and 1990.
Q 17Which president signed the Endangered Species Act on December 28, 1973?
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act on December 28, 1973; in TVA v. Hill (1978) the Supreme Court called it the most comprehensive endangered-species law enacted by any nation.
Q 18Which two federal agencies administer the Endangered Species Act?
Fish and Wildlife Service and Marine Fisheries Service
The US Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service administer the act; its section 9 prohibits unlawful 'take' of listed species.
Q 19In what year was the bald eagle removed entirely from the US endangered and threatened list?
2007
The bald eagle was delisted on June 28, 2007, after recovering from about 417 nesting pairs in the lower 48 states in 1963 to nearly 10,000; it had been downgraded to threatened in 1995.
Q 20The Ohio river that caught fire in June 1969 and helped spark the US environmental movement was the what?
Cuyahoga
It had caught fire at least 14 times.
Q 24The Love Canal scandal led Congress to pass which law in 1980?
Superfund (CERCLA)
About 70% of cleanups have been paid for by the polluters themselves.
Q 25Which small US state holds about a tenth of all priority Superfund sites?
New Jersey
New Jersey has more National Priorities List sites than any other state, around 115 of roughly 1,300, close to a tenth of the total; a Hazard Ranking System score of 28.5 puts a site on the list.
Q 26What was the ozone-protecting Montreal Protocol the first treaty to achieve?
Universal ratification by every UN state
Kofi Annan called it perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date.
Q 27In what year was the Montreal Protocol agreed?
1987
The Montreal Protocol was agreed in Montreal on 16 September 1987 and entered into force on 1 January 1989.
Q 28The 2016 Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol targets which gases?
Hydrofluorocarbons
The Kigali Amendment, agreed in Rwanda in October 2016, phases down hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), potent greenhouse gases used in refrigeration, by more than 80% over about 30 years.
Q 29Which team of British Antarctic Survey scientists first reported the ozone hole in 1985?
Farman, Gardiner and Shanklin
Joe Farman, Brian Gardiner and Jonathan Shanklin of the British Antarctic Survey published the ozone hole in Nature in May 1985 from Halley Bay readings; satellite software had been discarding the low values as errors.
Q 30Who calculated in 1896 that doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide would warm Earth's surface by several degrees?
Svante Arrhenius
Svante Arrhenius published the calculation in 1896, estimating that doubling carbon dioxide would raise surface temperatures by about 5 to 6 degrees Celsius; he won the 1903 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for unrelated work.