Earth Day 2026 is two days in the rear-view mirror. I can’t help but wonder what the founders and organizers of this day, designed to demonstrate support for environmental protection, would think about our current situation. Denis Hayes, the young activist hired as national coordinator for Earth Day in 1970, is the only one still living. He went on to found the Earth Day Network, expand it to over 180 countries, and has dedicated his work life to environmental advocacy. In a 2021 Chatting Green interview, Hayes posited, “I’m now 76. But I have a daughter, a son-in-law, and a granddaughter. All of them will be carrying on this fight long after I’ve reached the end of the line. As will hundreds of millions of others! I’m hopeful that they will succeed where my generation—for all its strenuous efforts—has fallen short.”
Two weeks ago, the Trump administration began taking steps to dismantle the United States Forest Service. On April 9, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin headlined a climate denial conference, while concurrently, climate scientists around the world inform us that the last three years have been the hottest on record. They tell us that we must act urgently because we are hitting a point of no return. I feel so confused. Our government leaders have children and grandchildren. What are they doing? What are we doing? In the previously mentioned interview, Hayes also said, “Regardless of objective reality, I will always force myself to be hopeful, because, in Darwinian terms, there is no survival advantage to pessimism.”
How do we remain hopeful when things are moving in the wrong direction? Since action absorbs anxiety, that must be how we do it. We carry on. We keep making progress, even if it’s just on a personal level or in our own community. CEA hosted a mending event at UCM on Earth Day, and it was well attended. Volunteers patched holes, hemmed pants, sewed on buttons, and fixed zippers, or at least attempted to. We worked the whole time and had to pack up quickly, so I did not hear the conclusion of the zipper saga. This is our second Earth Day mending event, and I admit my favorite part is the community building. When we hold these events, we are keeping clothes from being tossed out and making their way to the landfill, and we are saving people money. We are also having conversations about our mothers and grandmothers. We are teaching college students how to sew on buttons and why it’s sometimes helpful to have a thimble. We passed out sewing kits that we mostly assembled from the donations made by generous community members. Stories were told and connections were made. I heard one of our volunteers recount her skydiving adventure with her son where they later learned a 14-year-old had packed their parachutes. We were a bunch of people, spending time together, celebrating Earth Day and holding onto hope.
That’s all I know right now. We have to hold onto hope. We have to gather and build community. We can center our actions, at least some of them, on protection for this beautiful planet we all share. We can consume less, waste less, pollute less. We can grow some of our food. We can plant native plants that support pollinators. We can replace fossil fuel usage with renewable energy.
We can compost, recycle, and reuse. The fact remains, though, that we absolutely have to vote out politicians who refuse to legislate environmental protection. If we want to stay on this side of the point of no return, we must elect leaders who will protect us. The same scientists who keep us informed about atmospheric carbon dioxide, average temperatures, and the state of our oceans know how we should mitigate the problems we face. We have the solutions! We need leaders who will listen.
We cannot afford to ignore climate change. We have the power to make the difference. The question we face today, as we begin counting off the days until Earth Day 2027, is whether we will?
