Sexy Climate Change: I Hate Earth Day

Last time you heard from me I declared my hatred for Christmas. Now I have a new target for my vitriol – Earth Day. Rogue statement for someone who works in climate, I know. You’re probably expecting me to be all hippie earth mother and instead all I do is tell you what I hate. But before I get into why, let’s at least learn a little bit about my victim. 

Earth Day was set up in 1970, born out of growing concern about environmental destruction in the U.S.  It was the brainchild of Senator Gaylord Nelson and Harvard grad student Denis Hayes. The first Earth Day saw twenty million Americans demonstrate across different US cities. By the end of the year, congress authorised the creation of a new federal agency to tackle environmental issues, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. So far so good, grassroots action leading to major political change, so why would I hate that? 

I don’t hate Earth Day’s origins, I hate what it’s become. It’s a bit like Ed Sheeran’s career: the first album was interesting and surprising on release but then he pursued commerciality over artistry and made the same album again and again for the next decade. 

I don’t hate Earth Day’s origins, I hate what it’s become.

Earth Day, like Sheeran’s discography, has lost itself to commerciality. It has shed its political roots and instead become another corporate holiday guiding us on ways to  ‘love mother earth’ with the offering of meaningless slogans printed onto fast fashion items and the like. Consumption has been sold to us as the way that we can be a sustainable person, a ‘good consumer’. Let’s not forget that it was BP who developed the concept of the carbon footprint idea, it was part of a PR strategy to make you feel like the climate crisis was your fault and not theirs. Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not telling you that consumption doesn’t matter and you should go feral with your Shein hauls, but what I am saying is that personal consumption is not the balm to the ecological crisis that corporations would love to have us believe it is during Earth Day. It’s a distraction and one that conveniently lets the corporations most responsible off the hook.

To the seasoned activists out there, this is no surprise, we call this process recuperation. Not to get too second-year cultural geography on you, but recuperation occurs when radical ideas or movements get absorbed into a way that perpetuates capitalism, for example the selling of punk rock culture in boutique stores. It’s a way of capturing something revolutionary in its ideology and twisting it back into something that serves capitalism. In my eyes that’s what Earth Day is at risk of becoming: buy a Stanley cup to “make a difference to the planet” instead of organizing, building solidarity, or demanding justice. If the revolutionary impulse to do something to tackle the ecological crisis we face can be distilled into a purchasing behaviour, capitalism effectively saves itself. 

Under our current capitalist hellscape, it’s hard to escape this cycle of recuperation. Just look at feminism as an example, there was a resurgence in the 2010s that succumbed to girlboss feminism evolving finally into billionaires-in-space feminism. What starts as revolutionary gets branded, sanitized, and sold back to us in increasingly hollow forms. It can be hard to see how we prevent this evolution from a radical ideology into a product.

But we can resist. We can choose differently and learn from the legacy of other radical movements. Punk did—at least, some of it did. In 2016, Joe Corré (son of Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren and designer Vivienne Westwood) famously burned £5 million worth of punk memorabilia on the Thames. Corré did this to resist the institutional celebrations of 40 years of the punk movement stating that “Punk was never, never meant to be nostalgic – and you can’t learn how to be one at a Museum of London workshop. Punk has become another marketing tool to sell you something you don’t need. The illusion of an alternative choice. Conformity in another uniform.”. “But what about recording history?” I hear you cry. Well, by burning the items and keeping the memorabilia out of museums, Corré was attempting to hold the process of recuperation at bay. It’s at this point that recuperation gets locked in, as  Jane Jacobs wrote by becoming a part of ‘officially sanctioned heritage’ oppositional places and ideas are ‘sanitised and depoliticised’ and by extension contributing to the capitalist recuperation of the ideas. The edges are dulled, the politics removed. The rebellion becomes respectable—and crucially is presented as dead or a thing of the past.

We often think belief leads to action. But it’s actually the other way around – action drives belief. That shifted something for me. Instead of doom scrolling myself into paralysis, I’ve focused on small ways to act. 

There is some hope, though, in unexpected places. Marketing, one of the horsemen of the recuperation apocalypse, is coming to terms with its role in this mess. In his recent Guardian article Marketing’s ‘woke’ rebrand has ultimately helped the far right, Eugene Healey discusses the era of brand purpose that existed between 2015-2022 where brands tried to turn themselves into profitable agents of social reform where our purchasing decisions became moral declarations. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of that Pepsi ad. 

What Healey argues is that this era didn’t just neutralize leftist movements – it blurred the lines between progressivism and corporatism. At this point we find ourselves in new territory with recuperation where not only has the radical potential of left wing ideology been neutered, the conflation of corporatism and progressivism has fuelled the progress of the far right. So now when people are rightly pissed off about economic injustice (shoutout to my new internet boyfriend Gary’s Economics), they can fall victim to the call of the far-right influencers who position themselves as “the real counterculture.” Rightly these people want to attack the corporations driving our cost of living crisis, but because of how marketing has linked progressivism and corporatism, they’re seen as part of the same team which leads people into the arms of the right and their false alternative. Healy writes that “In a bizarre inversion of reality, it’s somehow become punk to champion the same power structures that have dominated society for centuries.” 

Have you lost hope yet? Feeling like capitalism eats all that is good and drives us deeper into alienation from each other and our environment? Well that’s the hole I’ve been trying to dig myself out of since the start of this year, so I’ll tell you what’s made me feel better at least. Healy ends his article by writing that marketers need to “reckon with how we’ve trivialised activism by turning it into comms strategy, how we’ve co-opted movements only to abandon them when the winds changed.” But he also leaves a crumb of hope for those worried that we’ve marketed ourselves into fascism. He states that brands’ swift exit from social justice positioning in the recent months gives space for more authentic acts of resistance to return to centre stage. It allows us to take a breath and remember that meaningful progress occurs beyond purchasing five different stanley cups and instead it is about building grassroots movements, political organising and policy reform.

From the hopeless hole I fell into this year, there has been one thing that has been a rope ladder out of it and that’s action. When I heard climate neuroscientist Kris De Meyer speak back in March at the Vital Signs exhibition, he said something that really stuck. We often think belief leads to action. But it’s actually the other way around – action drives belief. That shifted something for me. Instead of doom scrolling myself into paralysis, I’ve focused on small ways to act. 

When we shift away from the narrative of individual responsibility (and the consumerism that goes with it), and move toward community, collective action, and mutual care, it starts to feel like we can make a difference.

I’ve become more interested in how I can build my own connection to nature this Spring (shoutout to Merlin Bird App for teaching me that there are multiple types of pigeons and seagulls!), I’m thinking about my community building work in the climate space (cheeky self plug – if you want to find a fun climate community you should come along to Hothouse Book Club), thinking about what sort of organising work I can get involved in, and simply just showing up when my friends are actively organising about issues they care about. 

When we shift away from the narrative of individual responsibility (and the consumerism that goes with it), and move toward community, collective action, and mutual care, it starts to feel like we can make a difference. bell hooks reminds us of the importance of action, that love is an action, not just a feeling: “If we were constantly remembering that love is as love does, we would not use the word in a manner that devalues and degrades its meaning.” I think the same applies to sustainability. Sustainability is an action to, it is something that we do and more importantly it is something that we do together. Sustainability is not something that we buy like corporate recuperation of Earth Day would have us imagine. To steal bell hook’s syntax: Sustainability is as Sustainability does, we would not use the word that devalues and degrades its meaning and corporate consumerist framings of Earth Day do just that. 

So maybe I don’t hate Earth Day. Maybe it’s more like an ex. I miss the idealised early days — the politicised and community led day that drove IRL climate action, not the IRL toxic consumerist half assed corporate pledges day it’s turned into. This Earth Day, I’m asking you: don’t fall for the myth that we can buy our way out of the climate crisis. Let’s work our way out by using the various capacities we have and taking action in our immediate communities — through organizing, through solidarity with other social justice movements, through showing up for each other. Much like love, social change is not a thing to be bought, it is an action. 

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