What It Will Take to Fulfill the Promise of Earth Day

Earth Day, a global effort to educate people on growing environmental threats and propel them to action, marks its 55th anniversary today. The day, which its organizers say billions of people across 200 countries celebrate, is also embraced by a host of major corporations and governments across the globe. For many, it’s an opportunity to embrace the day’s alluring symbolism—despite the activities of many participating corporations and government entities often running in deep opposition to environmentalism’s aims.  

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The promise that Earth Day held at its 1970 inception, when climate change was a nascent concept and environmentalism was a bipartisan concern, looks very different than today’s promise. But one thing has remained: the environmentalist movement as a whole has yet to enact a clear, racially unifying plan for action, particularly now as environmental justice is under heavy attack in President Donald Trump’s second administration.

Over the years, some advocates in the field have disseminated an assemblage of pleas and hashtags for greater “attention” to environmental injustice, coupled with a reluctance to name the racist causes or highlight practical solutions. But this isn’t new: Environmentalists have had a deep legacy of inattention, or agnosticism, to the question of race. Gaylord Nelson, a progressive white U.S. Senator in Wisconsin, concocted the idea of an Earth Day, recognizing the growing perils facing conservation efforts as post-war industrialization in the U.S. and abroad accelerated. He was one of the first American politicians to advocate for national environmental regulations, riding the wave created by Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, a literary tentpole in the conservation space that chronicled the proliferation of industrial toxic chemicals.

Nelson saw Earth Day as not just a celebration of all things Mother Nature, but an organized, action-oriented rebuke of anti-environment industrialists and their D.C. enablers. And it initially was. Mere months after the creation of Earth Day, the EPA was created. Greenpeace, the largest and most influential environmental advocacy organization in the world, launched a year later.

Like other prominent white environmentalists of their time, though, Nelson and Carson largely ducked or downplayed the race factor. Carson, who died at the height of the Civil Rights movement in 1964, is not known to have publicly conveyed any particular thoughts on the racial aspects of environmentalism. Nelson, on the other hand, spoke eloquently, but vaguely, on the topic. On the day before the first Earth Day, Nelson gave a speech trumpeting the need for an environment that was “without ugliness, without ghettos, without poverty [and]… without discrimination.” Here, the senator was passively alluding to environmental injustices, which were commonplace in the 1970s and long before then. Still, it wasn’t until the 2000s—with racially disproportionate disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the Flint Water Crisis occurring in full view of a global audience—that major environmental movements began to publicly discuss and validate the existence of environmental injustice.

Read More: For Elizabeth Yeampierre, the Environment Is a Civil Rights Issue

In understanding these connections, it’s helpful to know that the modern environmentalism movement grew out of a stridently segregationist conservation movement. Like most other public amenities, in the early and mid-20th Century, many National and State Parks were long off-limits to Black people owing to Jim Crow laws. This dynamic snowballed into Black people generally having less access to outdoor recreation and many of the amenities and joys offered in nature, disparities that exist to this day.

The Sierra Club, among the largest national environmental organizations in the U.S., was founded in 1892 by conservationist John Muir. In writings, Muir described Black people as “Sambos” (a derogatory anti-Black term) and Indigenous people as dirty and a blight on the purity of nature, sentiments that were not uncommon among early white American conservationists. Following the 2020 racial reckoning in response to the murder of George Floyd, The Sierra Club was pushed, at last, to release a statement condemning Muir.

Even as Muir’s views and those of his ilk have receded, exclusion in the environmentalism movement has persisted. The Sierra Club, for instance, didn’t have a Black leader until 2015. Greenpeace announced that it had made a Black person its first Black executive director only in 2023. (Greenpeace’s executive director, Ebony Twilley Martin, previously shared a “Co-Executive Director” title with a white woman).

While the enduring popularity of Earth Day might suggest otherwise, over the half-century of its existence nearly every significant measure of environmental progress has substantially worsened, namely reducing atmospheric atmosphere carbon dioxide levels. And the consequences—a dramatic deepening of the climate crisis in terms of the frequency and intensity of extreme weather like floods and heatwaves—has been most commonly experienced by Black, Latino, and Indigenous individuals living in America and by people in the “Global South” (Africa, Asia, and Latin America). This is despite these populations having a far smaller carbon footprint relative to wealthy, white populations.

In 2025, Earth Day is a chilling reminder of the collapsed support for racial minorities from those in the world—institutions and people alike—best positioned to provide it. But without meaningfully engaging these groups, we’re not just sowing the seeds for a deluge of humanitarian crises in the near future, but we’re also missing out on collaborations that can help us optimize future climate interventions.

In the deepening absence of government support, efforts to promote environmental justice are going to require grassroots approaches. To this end, advocates must do a much better job of explaining environmental justice and its universal benefits, to generate a broad coalition that focuses on not just race but things like class. Currently, environmental justice is mired in racial identity politics, from the left and right, that mask the movement’s otherwise objectively important goal of improving the quality of the environment for everyone—albeit with the need to first focus on those most inequitably impacted. Second, we should hold corporations accountable for both developing and maintaining practices that support a healthy environment and engage in boycotts when those efforts aren’t approached earnestly. Recently organized boycotts against corporations that have substantially curtailed their DEI efforts, like Target, have been effective and provide environmentalists with a powerful blueprint to follow. 

With environmental advocacy under more duress now than ever before, the future success of Earth Day, and all that it represents and should represent, will ultimately rest in the moral clarity of those involved—including not just everyday people, but corporations, politicians, universities, and community organizations. Without this, Earth Day and its commitments will remain fixed in a state of surface-level notability—platitudes and small gestures that are forgotten until the next one rolls around.