Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
I’ve written about Earth Day enough times now that I can hear my own arguments echoing back. What good is one more? That’s a fair question. I’m going to write one anyway.
Another April, another Earth Day, another increasingly commercialized call to consider Mother Earth. Whatever works, I guess. That’s the world we live in, where most everything is commodified and sold back to us, including Earth Day. We can ignore those who seek to drive our awareness to their attention and profit centers, and instead let our Earthly home grab our attention. Maybe recover some of the original spirit of Earth Day.
In that vein, what stands out in the noise for me this year is the image from Artemis II of the Earth from space, seen as a whole, literally a mote of dust, gas, and water suspended in the vast, unfathomable universe. Given the wars and polarization and pollution and irrational race to an unknown, climate change world, an image of our only home can help us find ground
Earth Day Before the Merch
The first Earth Day, in 1970, was a beginning. Twenty million Americans took to the streets, about ten percent of the nation’s population at the time, and many genuinely believed that if we could just focus our attention, we could change course in time to “save the Earth.” The environmental movement that rose out of that day had the moral clarity of a fire alarm. Indeed, the rivers were burning from our unconsidered assault on the planet. But there was still time to put out the fire.
Fifty-six years later, the alarm is still going, and the fire has only spread. Most of the people who organized the first Earth Day are gone or nearly so. The world they warned about has largely arrived: rising seas, vanishing species, summers hotter than memory. We didn’t course-correct in time. We also didn’t fall off the cliff all at once. What we’re doing, instead, is living in what I’ve come to think of as the long middle.
The Hardest Part of the Story
The long middle is the hardest part of any story. The dramatic opening is behind you, the ending isn’t in view, and the in-between just keeps going. For climate, this is arguably the stretch we’re in now. Far enough along that the warnings have been proven right. Not far enough along to know what the ending looks like, even as the outlines of that ending are beginning to take shape, moving closer with each passing season.
The old language of beginnings, time is running out, we must act now, has been running for two generations. The newer language of endings (doomerism, collapse) suggests an abdication of responsibility and surrender of hope. Whistling in the dark and pretending it’ll all be ok is much the same, a denial of the truth and our obligation towards it. The science doesn’t support either, and the middle just keeps going. Until it doesn’t, and whatever language we’ve adopted for endings plays out in real time.
One reason Earth Day feels so inauthentic now is that it was built for a beginning. The parades, the school crafts, the corporate promises, the tree plantings: these are rituals that fit a story just getting started, a concentration of energy and passion determined to push change. They make less sense in the middle. It’s hard to plant a sapling in April of 2026 without also noticing the weeks of wildfire smoke that came first, or the neighbor whose insurance won’t renew, or the quieter April birdsong that isn’t the one you remember from childhood. The rituals persist, now with merch. The story, like the climate, has changed.
What the Middle Asks For
I’ve come at Earth Day from different angles over the years. In 2013, I argued we weren’t saving the Earth so much as saving ourselves from what we’d made of it. In 2022, I suggested we pause. Go outside, take a breath, and put a hand on a tree (go ahead and hug it!). In 2024, I leaned on the Overview Effect, what astronauts describe when they first see the planet from space, and something in them shifts.
Each of those pieces was circling the same thing. The real work of Earth Day is attention as much as it is action. Not the brittle, alarmed attention or frenzied action of an emergency, which can’t be sustained for two generations. The steadier kind. The kind that lets you keep seeing a place you love even as it changes. Attention that flows from gratitude for all there is left and inspires motivated, sustained, and courageous action. Attention is what the long middle asks for. And, as we’ve witnessed over the past fifty-six years, it’s harder than it sounds.
There’s a temptation, in a long crisis, to turn away, because turning toward it hurts. There’s an opposite temptation: virtual signaling so loudly that you never have to feel it. The Earth Day Instagram post: “I Care!” The paper straw in a plastic cup. Buying carbon credits. These are exits, ways to assuage our guilt (often handed down by corporations doing the most harm). The middle requires doing the patient, unglamorous work the middle actually requires: consistency, authenticity, and (dare I say it?), empathy.
Less Posturing, More Constancy
What would it look like to observe Earth Day without those exits? Probably something modest. A walk in whatever piece of earth is closest: the park, the block, the yard, the roadside. A willingness to notice what’s thriving and what isn’t, without turning the noticing into a product or a post. A conversation with someone younger than you about what they expect to inherit, and an honest answer when they ask what you did. A small, specific thing you’ll actually do this year. Not a pledge to save the planet. A commitment to one street, one river, one vote, one habit.
None of this solves anything. That’s the other thing the long middle teaches you. The people who founded Earth Day were right about the crisis and wrong about how fast we’d get through it. The ones who say it’s already too late, so why bother, are wrong in the other direction. Between them sits the work of staying attentive to a place you can’t save but can still care for. Slow, ordinary, sometimes boring.
The first Earth Day was a beginning. This one, and every Earth Day for the foreseeable future, isn’t. That’s not a reason to stop observing it. It’s a reason to observe it differently, a grand message adapted to a world unknown way back when.
On April 22, go outside. Notice what’s there. Do whatever the noticing asks. Then come back and do it again next week. That’s what a middle is for. Middles have endings. We can shape that ending into a new beginning, together, one step at a time.
In any case, here’s one more Earth Day article for the books. I’ll see you back here next year.
