A century before the first Earth Day, there was the Forest Festival in the Middlesex Fells – The Boston Globe

On Oct. 15, 1880, climate activists and citizen scientists gathered atop Bear Hill in what is now the Middlesex Fells Reservation for the Boston area’s first Forest Festival — a 19th-century precursor to Earth Day. Over the next five years, the Forest Festivals would galvanize metropolitan Bostonians to protect many of the green spaces that…