Environmental Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
163 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 163 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01On what date is Earth Day held every year?
April 22
April 22 was picked for the first Earth Day in 1970 because it fell on a weekday between spring break and final exams, when the most students could join the campus events.
Q 02Which US senator proposed the nationwide environmental teach-in that became the first Earth Day in 1970?
Gaylord Nelson
Gaylord Nelson, a Wisconsin Democrat, borrowed the idea from the campus teach-ins against the Vietnam War and hired the young activist Denis Hayes to organise it.
Q 03Julian Koenig, the ad man credited with naming Earth Day, also wrote which carmaker's 'Think Small' campaign?
Volkswagen
Volkswagen's 'Think Small' Beetle ads of 1959 made Koenig's name; he said 'Earth Day' came easily because the event fell on his birthday and the two words rhyme.
Q 04Which climate accord was opened for signature at the United Nations on Earth Day in 2016?
Paris Agreement
The Paris Agreement was signed by 175 parties in New York on its first day, and enough countries then ratified it for the deal to take legal effect that November.
Q 05Earth Day 1990, the first held worldwide, is credited with giving a huge boost to which green habit?
Recycling
Recycling got a huge lift from Earth Day 1990, which drew some 200 million people in 141 countries and helped pave the way for the UN Earth Summit two years later.
Q 06Rachel Carson's Silent Spring first reached readers in 1962 as a serial in which magazine?
The New Yorker
The New Yorker ran it before the book came out; chemical companies tried to discredit Carson, but a presidential science panel backed her findings the following year.
Q 07In 2018 the European Union banned outdoor use of three neonicotinoid pesticides to protect which insects?
Bees
Bees were the reason: an EU food-safety review found the three chemicals a risk to honeybees and wild bees wherever they were used outdoors, which left greenhouses as the only place for them.
Q 08What prompted Silent Spring, according to its author's account?
A friend's letter about dead birds
A friend's letter about dead birds reached Carson in 1958: Olga Owens Huckins wrote that a plane spraying DDT against mosquitoes had killed the songbirds around her Massachusetts home.
Q 09Which Apollo mission took 'Earthrise', the 1968 photograph of our planet rising over the Moon's horizon?
Apollo 8
Apollo 8 was the first crewed flight to orbit the Moon; Bill Anders shot the picture on Christmas Eve, hours before the crew read from Genesis in a live broadcast from lunar orbit.
Q 10Which US president posthumously awarded the author of Silent Spring the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980?
Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter gave Rachel Carson the medal sixteen years after her death; chemical firms had once tried to dismiss her as a hysterical woman or a Communist.
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 12Which US agency banned DDT on farms in 1972?
EPA
The EPA, opened in December 1970, cancelled almost all uses of DDT in June 1972 after months of hearings, though the pesticide could still be made for export.
Q 13A 2001 treaty banned DDT on farms but still allows it against the mosquitoes that spread which disease?
Malaria
Malaria is the exemption: the treaty on persistent organic pollutants lets health agencies spray DDT inside homes, where it kills the mosquitoes that carry the parasite.
Q 21Which Ohio city does the river that famously burned in 1969 bisect?
Cleveland
Cleveland is split into east and west sides by the river; the day after the 1969 fire its mayor, Carl Stokes, led reporters to the scorched railway bridge to draw attention to the pollution.
Q 22Love Canal, the neighbourhood built beside a buried chemical dump, is part of which city?
Niagara Falls, New York
Niagara Falls, New York, saw homes and a school go up beside a canal filled with chemical waste; in 1978 a federal emergency was declared and hundreds of families were moved out.
Q 23For how much did Hooker Chemical sell the Love Canal dump site in 1953?
$1
Q 14John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath follows a farming family uprooted by which environmental disaster?
The Dust Bowl
The Dust Bowl was partly man-made: farmers had ploughed up millions of acres of the native grass that held the Plains soil, so drought and wind carried the topsoil away in vast dust storms.
Q 15Which predator was brought back to Yellowstone National Park in 1995, about seventy years after being wiped out there?
Grey wolf
The grey wolf returned when fourteen animals trapped in Alberta were released in the park; without wolves, elk numbers had boomed and stripped the vegetation that beavers relied on.
Q 16Which president signed the first US Clean Air Act in December 1963?
Johnson
Lyndon B. Johnson signed it on December 17, 1963, 25 days after Kennedy's assassination; a 1955 law had only funded research, while this one set up a federal programme to control air pollution.
Q 17Which president signed the Endangered Species Act on December 28, 1973?
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon signed it into law; five years later the Supreme Court used the act to halt a nearly finished Tennessee dam in order to save the snail darter, a three-inch fish.
Q 18Which two federal agencies administer the Endangered Species Act?
Fish and Wildlife Service and Marine Fisheries Service
The Fish and Wildlife Service and Marine Fisheries Service split the work between land and sea, so sea turtles answer to both: one agency on nesting beaches, the other in the water.
Q 19Which bird of prey, once near extinction, left the US endangered list in 2007?
Bald eagle
The bald eagle recovered after DDT was banned and its nests and habitat were protected by law; it moved from endangered to threatened in 1995, then off the list altogether.
Q 20Which Ohio river caught fire in June 1969 and became a symbol of America's polluted waterways?
Cuyahoga
The Cuyahoga had burned more than ten times before, far worse in 1952; the 1969 blaze was out in under half an hour and at first drew little notice.
$1 was the price in 1953, when Hooker Chemical covered the dump with earth and sold it; a school and a neighbourhood of homes were then built on and around the buried waste.
Q 24The Love Canal scandal led Congress to pass which law in 1980?
Superfund (CERCLA)
Superfund (CERCLA) taxed the oil and chemical industries to pay for cleaning up abandoned dumps and made whoever left the waste liable for the bill.
Q 25Which small US state has the most sites on the federal toxic-waste cleanup list?
New Jersey
New Jersey has more National Priorities List sites than any other state, a legacy of its industrial past: the factories that helped build America left contaminated land behind.
Q 26How many UN member states have never ratified the Montreal Protocol on protecting the ozone layer?
Zero
Zero: it and its parent convention were the first treaties in UN history to be ratified by every country, and with CFCs phased out the ozone layer is on course to recover across most of the world by about 2040.
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 targets which gases, used in fridges after CFCs were phased out?
Hydrofluorocarbons
Hydrofluorocarbons spare the ozone layer but trap heat thousands of times better than carbon dioxide; phasing them down could avoid up to half a degree of warming this century.
Q 29British scientists reported in 1985 that a seasonal hole in the ozone layer was opening over which continent?
Antarctica
Antarctica's ozone hole, found by Joe Farman's team, was far deeper than anyone had predicted; the shock pushed governments to agree the Montreal Protocol two years later.
Q 30Who calculated in 1896 that doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide would warm Earth's surface by several degrees?
Svante Arrhenius
Svante Arrhenius published the estimate in 1896 and saw no cause for alarm: he expected a warmer world to bring milder climates and bigger harvests, especially in cold regions.