Make Earth Day Depressing Again

Earth Day is becoming a drag. Good. That was the idea all along

Thursday is Earth Day and I’m depressed already. But my inbox is full of cheerful PR emails about Earth Day bargains and promotions, just like every year.

2021’s exciting Earth Day offers include:

• A socially distanced outing to clean up the LA River followed by a refreshing glass of sustainable beer available only to participants.

• An invitation to a Zoom conference where I can learn about using my copious liquid assets to stop climate change through investing.

• The announcement of a pair of sneakers that are green—as in the color—for a limited time.

• A bakery offering me an Earth-shaped vegan cookie, also green, and also available for a limited time.

• OK this one is technically from last year, but: a message about honoring Mother Earth, sent to me by (not joking) a trade association “dedicated to raising awareness about the importance of diesel engines, fuel and technology.” 

PR flaks, municipal parks departments, and maybe kindergarten teachers are the only people who don’t seem to know Earth Day sucks. And in the era of climate despair it really sucks. “Celebrating” Earth Day is a little like rebranding 9/11 as “Skyscraper Day” and making it a kid-friendly celebration of our tallest buildings, and how much we all love when they are upright. You don’t celebrate it, because it commemorates a tragedy. And unlike other commemorative holidays, this tragedy is ongoing, making Earth Day arguably the most depressing day on the whole calendar.

But maybe it’s good that Earth Day sucks, and I’m not the only one thinking this.

In 2017, Pete McCloskey, who was once one of the congressmen enlisted by Earth Day creator Gaylord Nelson in 1970 to co-chair a nationwide campus Earth Day event, called Earth Day 2017 a “day of mourning” and a “black day.” Dominique Browning founder of an organization called Moms Clean Air Force wrote in an Earth Day-themed New York Times op-ed last year, that Earth Day shouldn’t be a celebration. “We are suffering, we are mourning and we are fearful,” Browning wrote. 

Another Times op-ed from this time last year, written by a former United Nations official named Hugh Roberts, suggested that Earth Day be transformed into a time of repentance. “Is it enough to say that we fell under the spell of ideas that were tragically wrong?” Roberts writes. “Those ideas are now so pervasive they are as much habit as belief. We set out to make a paradise on Earth, and have achieved the opposite.” 

Even the simple fact that Earth Day is timed to the start of spring (it was originally going to fall on the spring equinox) is now a painful reminder that milestones that mark the natural end of winter now routinely happen earlier than they have in hundreds or even thousands of years.

But Earth Day was never meant to be a cheerful Hallmark holiday in the first place. It was originally an urgent call to action. When he spoke to Teen Vogue last year, the environmental historian Adam Rome called the first Earth Day “a day to ask soul-searching questions about why we had environmental problems.” Coverage of the very first Earth Day in 1970 was tinged with impending doom. Walter Cronkite’s news segment about Earth Day kicked off with a clip of biologist and environmental legend Barry Commoner telling a crowd, “This planet is threatened with destruction, and we, who live in it, with death.” 

Cronkite’s field reporter sounds pretty skeptical, noting quite correctly that Earth Day events seemed to be, in practice, a bunch of white college kids picking up litter. But those events coincided with the start of an era of real reform, with US environmentalists chalking up an impressive string of legislative wins. These included the 1972 Clean Water Act, the 1973 Endangered Species Act, and of course, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, which happened just months after Earth Day Prime.

Richard Nixon of all people was president through all this, meaning he’s the guy who signed the bills, and created the EPA. He wrote in a favorable statement after the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, “I believe that the deepest significance of the Conference lies in the fact that for the first time in history, the nations of the world sat down together to seek better understanding of each other's environmental problems and to explore opportunities for positive action, individually and collectively.” That’s extraordinary for a Republican who, according to his own domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman, once said “In a flat choice between smoke and jobs, we’re for jobs, [b]ut just keep me out of trouble on environmental issues.” So the activists deserve the credit, not the president, who only did the right thing because he wanted them to fuck off.

The greens of those days were seen as a threat to Republicans—and not just pathologically paranoid Republicans like Nixon. Somehow, those tame crowds full of treehuggers managed to spook powerful people enough to actually get regulations passed. Probably because protesting back then had a tendency to get not-so-tame very quickly. In 1970, the government could, say, shut down a park, and the result might be a massive riot.

But whether or not Earth Day was the main driver of all that change in the 70s, those same Earth Day participants, who had been such an effective force for good, transformed into the Reagan-era environmentalists who became complicit in the extraction of their own fangs, as I’ve written before in this newsletter. And during that time, Earth Day itself took one hell of a wrong turn. Perversely, it’s generally thought of now as something for kids.

Speaking for myself, my experience of Earth Day has less to do with marching for change, and more to do with pop culture products. I recall having seen Dr. Seuss’s 1972 The Lorax TV special on several different Earth Days, and the book, released a year earlier than the special, was consciously inspired by the first Earth Day (in conjunction with Dr. Seuss’s own personal battle to protect a bunch of trees in his wealthy San Diego neighborhood). By the time I was a kid, plopping kids down in front of a screen for some cut-rate Earth Day content was standard operating procedure. Ask the nearest person between the ages of 35 and 40 how many times a VHS copy of the movie Ferngully: The Last Rainforest was played for them in an ostensibly educational setting. The release of Ferngully was, of course, timed to coincide with Earth Day.

Over my lifetime, climate change—a global problem that demands that society be completely restructured—has redefined environmentalism as a collective, global struggle against entrenched power everywhere, rather than loose collections of bongo players attempting to stop their local forests from being cut down. Tree-planting isn’t cutting the mustard anymore (in fact there’s reason to think it might actually make the problem worse). Saccharine environmentalist messages aimed at kids have come to be regarded as overly centered on consumption habits, too individualist, and downright insidious. As Adam Rome told Teen Vogue, “for kids [Earth Day] is often a day with some corporate-sponsored lesson about what you can do individually to save the planet”. Captain Planet went from being an earnest, long-running environmentalist cartoon when I was a kid (it ran for four seasons!), to an ironic epithet for an empty environmentalist goody-two-shoes today.

But Ferngully and Captain Planet wouldn’t sit right with today’s kids, because in the past few years, Earth Day messages have gone from pleasant platitudes for children, to harsh rebukes from children. And not a moment too soon.

Here in 2021, to people under 30 contemplating the ethics of, say, a turn toward property violence as a way of fighting climate change, I can understand finding the existence of Ferngully almost surreal.

That’s as it should be, because from 1970 to today, the situation has gone from “serious concern” on the Urgency-O-Meter to “constant, unheeded blood-curdling scream.” Despite the fact that the damage humanity is doing to the livability of the planet can be mitigated, and despite the fact that the worsening effects can perhaps be slowed and eventually stopped, those accomplishments are still nowhere to be seen, and in the meantime, what’s done is done. Extinctions are baked into the pie at this point. Sea levels will rise. Ecosystems all over the world are already less alive, and less beautiful than they once were, and it’s all going to get even worse. It’s likely that no one alive today will ever see the climate get better, assuming it ever gets better. Cities will be destroyed. Whole ways of life will end. Lots and lots of people have died, and those deaths were just the beginning.

Is any of this making you feel like strapping on your green sneakers and lining up for a glass of eco-conscious beer? Me neither.

To be clear: I am absolutely not endorsing the let’s-all-climb-into-our-graves response to climate change proffered by the climate edgelords I’ve criticized in the past. But I’ve also written in the past that we need to be honest about how depressing climate change is. I wrote in 2019 that if climate change makes you sad, it’s probably a good idea to, “Give into it for a moment. Cry it out. Let yourself acknowledge how fucking bad it all is, and how a lot of it is never, ever getting better. In short: grieve.” And that should be the purpose of Earth Day if you ask me. Or rather, that’s what it should go back to being.

Sure, Earth Day, could be a day of environmental action, but I say let the rest of the year be 364 days of environmental action, and let Earth Day continue being what it is: a bummer. As the psychology scholar Renee Lertzman, who wrote the 2015 book Environmental Melancholia told me back in 2019, “We need to actually pause. We need to honor and engage with how we are feeling. That's not the same as wallowing. It's not the same as going into a hole you never come out of."

I don’t have a specific plan for how I’m going to make Earth Day into a day of grieving, but I’m open to suggestions. Personally, I don’t want it to be performative. I do my best grieving at home with my family. So maybe I’ll light a little candle. Maybe I’ll say a little prayer. Maybe I’ll fast (Not going to do this one actually, sorry). Maybe I’ll watch the brilliant Paul Schrader movie First Reformed (Definitely doing this one). Maybe I’ll limit my driving or energy consumption for the day, not because I think my contribution will make a difference, but because it will suck. 

And the next day, maybe it’s like Lertzman says, I’ll feel like moving on. Maybe I’ll even be chipper enough to think up some new ways to restructure society, because the worst holiday ever, Earth Day, is finally over.