120 free Environmental trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 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 120 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01On what date is Earth Day held every year?
April 22
The first one, in 1970, was focused on the United States.
Q 02Which US senator proposed the nationwide environmental teach-in that became Earth Day?
Gaylord Nelson
He hired the young activist Denis Hayes as national coordinator.
Q 03Who coined the name 'Earth Day'?
Advertising writer Julian Koenig
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
Denis Hayes said that without it 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
By 2016 the Paris Agreement was being signed on Earth Day.
Q 06Who wrote the 1962 book Silent Spring?
Rachel Carson
Discover magazine later named it one of the 25 greatest science books of all time.
Q 07Silent Spring documented the environmental harm caused by which pesticide?
DDT
The book led to a nationwide US ban on its agricultural use.
Q 08What prompted Silent Spring, according to its author's account?
A friend's letter about dead birds
Olga Owens Huckins wrote to The Boston Herald about her land in Duxbury, Massachusetts.
Q 09Which 1951 bestseller won the author of Silent Spring a US National Book Award?
The Sea Around Us
It gave her financial security and let her write full time.
Q 10Which US president posthumously awarded the author of Silent Spring the Presidential Medal of Freedom?
Jimmy Carter
She died two years after the book came out.
Q 11Which Swiss chemist won a Nobel Prize in 1948 for discovering DDT's insecticidal power?
Paul Hermann Müller
DDT itself had been synthesised in 1874 by Austrian chemist Othmar Zeidler.
Q 12In what year did the US ban DDT for agricultural use?
1972
Limited public-health use for malaria control is still permitted under WHO guidelines.
Q 13Which 2004 treaty on persistent pollutants largely banned agricultural DDT worldwide?
Stockholm Convention
It covers persistent organic pollutants.
In what year did the US Environmental Protection Agency begin operating?
Q 21Which Ohio city does the river that famously burned in 1969 bisect?
Cleveland
American Rivers named it River of the Year in 2019 for 50 years of resurgence.
Q 22Love Canal, the toxic-waste neighbourhood discovered in 1977, is in which city?
Niagara Falls, New York
Hooker Chemical had dumped 19,800 tonnes of chemical byproducts there.
Q 23For how much did Hooker Chemical sell the Love Canal site to the local school district in 1953?
$1
The Superfund cleanup that followed demolished the neighbourhood, ending in 2004.
1970
Richard Nixon proposed it that July and it opened on December 2 after an executive order.
Q 15How many regional offices does the EPA have?
Ten
It also runs 27 laboratories around the country.
Q 16In what year was the US Clean Air Act first enacted?
1963
It has been amended many times since.
Q 17Which president signed the Endangered Species Act on December 28, 1973?
Richard Nixon
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
Section 9 of the act prohibits unlawful 'take' of listed species.
Q 19In what year was the bald eagle removed entirely from the US endangered and threatened list?
2007
It had been downgraded from endangered 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
A Hazard Ranking System score of 28.5 puts a site on the National Priorities 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
It entered into force on 1 January 1989.
Q 28The 2016 Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol targets which gases?
Hydrofluorocarbons
Countries promised to cut them by more than 80% over 30 years.
Q 29Which team of British Antarctic Survey scientists first reported the ozone hole in 1985?
Farman, Gardiner and Shanklin
Satellite software had been filtering out the low readings as errors.
Q 30Crutzen, Molina and Rowland won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on what?
Stratospheric ozone
DuPont's chairman had called the ozone theory 'a load of rubbish'.