{"id":16693,"date":"2025-09-08T08:22:19","date_gmt":"2025-09-08T15:22:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=16693"},"modified":"2025-11-15T22:53:05","modified_gmt":"2025-11-16T06:53:05","slug":"issue-of-the-week-environment-8","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=16693","title":{"rendered":"Issue Of The Week: Environment"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/planetearthfdn.org\/news\">Back to News<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image is-resized\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2025\/09\/21\/magazine\/21mag-Climate-Activism-images\/21mag-Climate-Activism-images-articleLarge-v3.jpg?quality=75&amp;auto=webp&amp;disable=upscale\" alt=\"A vintage-looking photograph of marchers carrying signs for Earth Day on a New York City street.\" style=\"width:841px;height:auto\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>The 1970 Earth Day was the country\u2019s largest single-day demonstration to date, on any issue. Credit&#8230;Paul Fusco\/Magnum Photos<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In yesterday&#8217;s Sunday edition of The New York Times Magazine, the past, present and perhaps future of the enviroment and climate movements are covered in a fascinating, surprising, thought-provoking and crucially educational article by Christina Cauterucci.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To comment on it at this point would simply be to regurgitate it. The article does the job beautifully. A necessary read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here it is: <\/p>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"link-7e3abaf7\">The Old Climate-Activism Playbook No Longer Works. What Else Can?<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<p>Activists are hoping to recreate the magic of 1970\u2019s Earth Day \u2014 at a moment when the movement\u2019s future is cloudier than ever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Credit&#8230;Illustration by Hayley Wall<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>By&nbsp;Christina Cauterucci<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>Published&nbsp;Sept. 5, 2025 Updated&nbsp;Sept. 8, 2025<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>At the end of a long dirt road through Vermont\u2019s Green Mountains, Bill McKibben sat on his screened-in porch, surrounded by birdsong and the drone of buzzing insects. The July sun beat through a canopy of trees.<strong>&nbsp;<\/strong>McKibben sipped a cup of green tea and pointed outside, to the ground just past the edge of the house, where an array of solar panels tilted toward the late-morning sky. The roof, too, was loaded with panels of different vintages. \u201cI\u2019ve been putting them up at intervals for a quarter century,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/09\/05\/magazine\/climate-change-activism-renewable-energy.html\">Listen to this article, read by Gabra Zackman<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Few climate activists have participated in more eras of the environmental movement than McKibben. In 1989, at age 27, he published \u201cThe End of Nature,\u201d often described as the first book on global warming for lay readers, which became an international best seller. Then he turned to activism, eventually shifting his focus from combating the \u201cgreenhouse effect\u201d to organizing pipeline protests and fossil fuel divestment campaigns. Over the decades, he has evolved from a concerned observer to an elder statesman of the climate movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I met McKibben at a uniquely bleak time for that movement. Republicans in Congress had shredded the Inflation Reduction Act, a Biden administration law meant in part to lower greenhouse gas emissions, and President Trump was making every effort to thwart progress on renewables while boosting the oil-and-gas industry. The president had also pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement, a climate accord that advocacy groups had helped catalyze. \u201cIn certain ways, it\u2019s the darkest moment,\u201d McKibben said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2025\/09\/21\/magazine\/21mag-Climate-Activism-images-05\/21mag-Climate-Activism-images-05-articleLarge-v5.jpg?quality=75&amp;auto=webp&amp;disable=upscale\" alt=\"A man wearing a hard hat and glasses speaks into a microphone at an outdoor space surrounded by trees.\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Bill McKibben speaking at a climate rally in Washington in 2011.Credit&#8230;Zuma Press\/Alamy<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>He\u2019d been coping by throwing himself into a new project. On Sept. 21, McKibben will spearhead a national \u201cday of action\u201d called Sun Day, for which activists across the country are organizing local events to hype up solar power and energy-efficient innovations. There will be electric-car shows, open houses at all-electric solar homes and solar installation tours. In August, McKibben also published a book on solar and wind power called \u201cHere Comes the Sun.\u201d He wants to convince Americans that renewable energy is not a pricey, boutique alternative, but the accessible, abundant, cost-effective future of electrified life \u2014 no longer the Whole Foods of energy, as he put it, but the Costco.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>With Sun Day, McKibben hopes to recapture the spirit of the first Earth Day, in 1970, the earliest wide-scale mobilization of the environmental movement, which helped catapult issues like pollution and conservation onto the national agenda. Like Earth Day, McKibben told me, Sun Day is meant to be \u201ca giant potluck supper\u201d for activists around the country: \u201cWe\u2019ve set the date and the theme, and everyone\u2019s bringing their own dish to the floor.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In some ways, focusing on renewable energy right now is a logical bet. In March, the United States hit a new milestone when fossil fuels generated less than half the nation\u2019s electricity. In June, solar was the largest source of electricity for the European Union for the first time ever. Last year, over 90 percent of new power globally came from clean-energy sources. The United Nations announced in July that solar power is now on average&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/news.un.org\/en\/story\/2025\/07\/1165460\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">41 percent cheaper than fossil fuels<\/a>. \u201cFor the very first time in this saga, the force of economic gravity is working in the right direction,\u201d McKibben said. His hope is that engaging people in small ways, where they live, could hasten the clean-energy transition that is already underway in the U.S.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But Sun Day also feels like a tactical swerve for McKibben. Climate activism over the past decade has been defined by global protests against fossil fuels, by Greta Thunberg\u2019s student strikes, by the emergence of the Sunrise Movement. McKibben has been among the strongest exponents of that era\u2019s climate-activism strategy \u2014 confrontational, morally stark, bent on shutting down economic activity that endangered humanity in the long-term even if it meant reducing corporate profits and curtailing Americans\u2019 lifestyle options in the short term.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now McKibben is taking a different tack, one that seems to share a message with a more moderate, adaptationist wing of the climate world while also harking back to the innocence and idealism of Earth Day. \u201cThis is clearly the thing that we can work on at the moment that stands a chance of making a difference,\u201d he told me. His own shift in strategy comes as many activists are asking themselves some difficult questions: What has climate activism really given us? And where should it go from here?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2025\/09\/21\/magazine\/21mag-Climate-Activism-images-04\/21mag-Climate-Activism-images-04-articleLarge-v2.jpg?quality=75&amp;auto=webp&amp;disable=upscale\" alt=\"The Swedish activist Greta Thunberg marches in New York City with many other climate activists. \"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Greta Thunberg protesting for climate action in 2019.&nbsp;Credit&#8230;Michael Nigro\/Associated Press<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>American public opinion<\/strong>&nbsp;on climate has arrived at a complicated juncture. In a Gallup poll this year, a record&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/news.gallup.com\/poll\/659387\/record-high-call-global-warming-serious-threat.aspx\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">48 percent<\/a>&nbsp;of respondents said that global warming will pose a \u201cserious threat\u201d to them or their way of life. People can feel the hotter summers, the snowless winters, the hurricanes raging harder. Some&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.pewresearch.org\/science\/2025\/05\/29\/americans-views-on-how-to-address-the-impacts-of-extreme-weather\/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">surveys<\/a>have found evidence among Republicans, too, of a willingness to link extreme weather to climate change. Yet when asked to rank the issues that affect their votes, Americans&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.pewresearch.org\/politics\/2024\/02\/29\/americans-top-policy-priority-for-2024-strengthening-the-economy\/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">regularly<\/a>&nbsp;place&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/news.gallup.com\/poll\/651719\/economy-important-issue-2024-presidential-vote.aspx\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">climate<\/a>&nbsp;near the bottom of the list.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so for many people who are passionate about the climate threat, recent years have inspired a difficult reckoning about the power of climate activism and its limits. \u201cYou can make a pretty decent case that everything that I\u2019ve worked on in my entire professional life has gone down the toilet in the last six months,\u201d said Denis Hayes, 81, a longtime environmental activist who was the lead organizer of the first Earth Day, when we spoke in July. Varshini Prakash, 32, a co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, told me that she once believed activists could pressure governments to make changes that might stop global warming outright. Now, she said, \u201cI think that window has closed, and perhaps it never really existed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There was a moment, five and a half decades ago, when such a window seemed to swing open. On April 22, 1970, Hayes sat in the back of a truck, marveling at the biggest crowd he had ever seen. The throng of demonstrators stretched so far down New York\u2019s Fifth Avenue that it seemed to disappear over the curvature of the earth. \u201cIt was like looking at the ocean over the horizon,\u201d Hayes told me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Earth Day began in a meeting room above a fast-food restaurant in Washington, D.C., where Gaylord Nelson, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin, had tasked a group of mostly 20-somethings with planning a national day of environmental action. A friend of Nelson\u2019s had offered them free office space in a downtown building, but the activists worried it seemed too corporate. So they found some grungier digs where smoke from the downstairs burger joint blew through the ventilation system. Hayes, then 25, and the other organizers took out a full-page ad in The New York Times: \u201cOn April 22,\u201d it&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/michiganintheworld.history.lsa.umich.edu\/environmentalism\/exhibits\/show\/main_exhibit\/item\/385#?c=0&amp;m=0&amp;s=0&amp;cv=0&amp;xywh=-203%2C-1%2C919%2C800\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">read<\/a>, \u201cwe start to reclaim the environment we have wrecked.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Hayes had anticipated a good turnout for Earth Day. But he certainly wasn\u2019t expecting it to draw some 20 million participants across the country, which at the time made it the largest single-day demonstration in the U.S. to date, on any issue. The mayor of New York City let them take over 45 blocks. \u201cThat was when it suddenly hit me,\u201d Hayes said. \u201cThis was really a massive new potential political force that we were unleashing on the country.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2025\/09\/21\/magazine\/21mag-Climate-Activism-images-02\/21mag-Climate-Activism-images-02-articleLarge-v2.jpg?quality=75&amp;auto=webp&amp;disable=upscale\" alt=\"A vintage-looking photo showing thousands of people in New York City for the first Earth Day in 1970.\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">On the first Earth Day, in 1970, demonstrators in New York spanned 45 city blocks.Credit&#8230;Leonard Freed\/Magnum Photos<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>In those days, city skies were dark with smog. Pesticides were rampant. In 1969, oil slicks defiled the beaches of Santa Barbara, Calif., and caught fire on Cleveland\u2019s Cuyahoga River. The environmental devastation that had accompanied the nation\u2019s economic growth was largely taken as a given. \u201cThere were all kinds of individual efforts to deal with particular issues, from sprawl to pollution to endangered species,\u201d said the environmental historian Adam Rome. But until Earth Day, \u201cno one had a sense that they all were part of one big cause.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That mobilization came on the heels of the civil rights era, a time of great confidence in the power of grass-roots activism to produce radical change. A&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.epa.gov\/archive\/epa\/aboutepa\/earth-day-recollections-what-it-was-when-movement-took.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">White House poll<\/a>&nbsp;in 1969 found that 1 percent of respondents thought protecting the environment was important; by 1971, one-quarter did.<strong>&nbsp;<\/strong>Little political opposition rose up to meet Earth Day outside the far-right John Birch Society, which labeled it a communist plot. Congress closed for the day, and two-thirds of its members spoke at Earth Day events.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Within three months, Richard Nixon introduced the Environmental Protection Agency; within three years, Congress passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act. Leaded gasoline was phased out. Superfund cleanups were phased in. One survey showed&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.resources.org\/archives\/environment-an-enduring-concern\/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">concern about air pollution<\/a>&nbsp;doubling over the course of just three years during the mid-1970s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ronald Reagan\u2019s election in 1980 helped spur a new generation of environmental activists, McKibben among them. McKibben has&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/catdir.loc.gov\/catdir\/enhancements\/fy0828\/2007039609-s.html\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">written that,<\/a>&nbsp;as a student at Harvard on election night, he \u201cgot grimly drunk,\u201d spending the next day in bed before waking to write a Harvard Crimson essay about America\u2019s turn away from moral responsibility and collectivist thinking. After graduation, McKibben became a staff writer at The New Yorker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In 1988, the NASA scientist James Hansen testified to the Senate that burning fossil fuels was heating the Earth, helping to reframe the national debate as one about human-made climate change rather than just environmental preservation. Through the years that followed, political opposition intensified. In 1997, McKibben \u2014 who by then had moved into organizing \u2014 attended the U.N. gathering that yielded the Kyoto Protocol, a landmark treaty committing developed nations to reducing emissions. After the agreement was reached, McKibben found himself next to a fossil fuel lobbyist who had formerly worked for an automobile trade association. The lobbyist told McKibben he was \u201ceager to get back to Washington, where we\u2019ve got all this under control.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI thought he was kind of whistling past the graveyard,\u201d McKibben said. \u201cBut he had a better sense of the political realities than I did.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In 1990, 73 percent of&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/news.gallup.com\/poll\/1615\/environment.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Gallup poll respondents<\/a>&nbsp;called themselves \u201cenvironmentalists.\u201d A decade later, this had fallen to 47 percent. Still, a strong majority of Americans in one&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.pewresearch.org\/politics\/1997\/11\/21\/americans-support-action-on-global-warming\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1997 Pew survey<\/a>&nbsp;said they would accept higher gasoline prices if it would help mitigate climate change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>McKibben, meanwhile, spent years trying out different forms of climate activism. In the early aughts, he started a campaign against S.U.V.s; activists picketed car dealerships and offered test drives in their Priuses. Some evangelical communities joined in under the slogan \u201cWhat Would Jesus Drive?\u201d \u201cIt was good, and obviously it was a failure,\u201d McKibben said. \u201cAmericans just kept driving bigger and bigger and bigger cars.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So he changed course. In 2008, he founded 350.org with some recent Middlebury College graduates, aiming to organize grass-roots climate action and fight the fossil fuel industry. After Barack Obama\u2019s election, advocates zeroed in on the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry bitumen from Canada to the Gulf Coast. Indigenous activists organized protests over the pipeline\u2019s proposed route through Native lands. In 2011, McKibben helped coordinate a 10,000-person demonstration encircling the White House. When Obama rejected the pipeline in 2015, it seemed to many like proof of concept for climate organizing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Then came the Sunrise Movement, founded in 2017 by young people who had mostly gotten their starts pushing for universities to divest from fossil fuels. Earlier organizations had often depicted climate change as a problem for lonely polar bears on ice floes, but Sunrise wanted to highlight its effects on the everyday lives of people. The group framed climate as a social-justice issue and became known for aggressive tactics like bird-dogging Democratic politicians who didn\u2019t support climate legislation. When the Inflation Reduction Act passed in 2022, many saw it as a watered-down version of Sunrise\u2019s demands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2025\/09\/21\/magazine\/21mag-Climate-Activism-images-07\/21mag-Climate-Activism-images-07-articleLarge-v2.jpg?quality=75&amp;auto=webp&amp;disable=upscale\" alt=\"A teenage girl speaking into a megaphone leads a large group of people carrying signs and marching down a Washington D.C. street.\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A Sunrise Movement protest in Washington in 2021, pushing for government action on climate change.&nbsp;Credit&#8230;Evelyn Hockstein\/Reuters<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>These were also the years when the Paris Agreement was adopted, propelled partly by activists from small island nations, and when Thunberg began skipping school on Fridays to protest for climate action. In the lead-up to the 2021 U.N. climate conference in Glasgow, the visibility of those demonstrations helped pressure dozens of banks to pledge to reach net-zero emissions across their investments by 2050. In those days, one could look around and easily believe that this brand of in-your-face climate activism might win the future \u2014 that activists could push people in power to keep fossil fuels in the ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But the breakthroughs didn\u2019t last long. The problem wasn\u2019t just Trump; over the past few years, climate has receded as a priority throughout the political and corporate worlds. \u201cThe banks and others who made commitments at Glasgow just turned out to be liars,\u201d McKibben said. According to Luisa Neubauer, 29, a prominent activist who helped organize school strikes in Germany as a college student, momentum among young climate advocates petered out for several reasons, including the pandemic, the challenge of keeping students engaged after graduation and Israel\u2019s war on Gaza, to which many activists \u2014 including Thunberg \u2014 turned their energy. \u201cWe were on the streets, hundreds of people, every Friday,\u201d Neubauer said. \u201cWere they seriously thinking that teenagers would do this for a decade?\u201d On the weekend of Sun Day, she plans to join a series of demonstrations called Draw the Line, which 350.org helped organize. Though Neubauer will be focusing on clean energy, these protests illustrate the expanded range of priorities for young activists now: Draw the Line is pushing not just for a transition away from fossil fuels but for the redistribution of global wealth and an end to wars and genocide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The climate activism of the last 15 years wasn\u2019t fruitless. Prakash believes the divestment effort didn\u2019t just lead hundreds of institutions to take their money out of fossil fuels; it also mainstreamed the idea that \u201cwe were fighting with fossil capital,\u201d not just climate ignorance.&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/theconversation.com\/how-bill-mckibbens-radical-idea-of-fossil-fuel-divestment-transformed-the-climate-debate-87895\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">One study<\/a>&nbsp;found that 350.org\u2019s divestment campaigns shifted public debate by providing a radical flank, such that more moderate calls to climate action seemed reasonable by comparison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Still, Prakash worries that the era of digital organizing that arose in the 2010s saw organizations reactivate the same people again and again, without making moves to engage a broader audience that might have notched more political wins. Among her peers, she sees mounting frustration with the climate movement\u2019s strategies of the past few years \u2014 \u201ca tendency toward over-mobilization,\u201d she said, \u201cwith diminishing impact.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>With the sun&nbsp;<\/strong>high in the sky, McKibben and I climbed into his electric Kia, which was cluttered with outdoor gear. On the way to visit a solar installation in a neighboring town, he crossed a double-yellow line to zoom past a slowpoke on the road, showing off an impressive rate of acceleration. \u201cElectric cars!\u201d he exclaimed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>McKibben makes a very compelling pitchman. He is tall and wiry, his brows perpetually furrowed, giving him a look of mild alarm. As he talks, he slides easily<strong>&nbsp;<\/strong>from wide-eyed enthusiasm (\u201cThe liberating effects of clean energy are astonishing\u201d) into a mode of urgent admonition (on clean energy, \u201cthe Chinese are going to completely own the future\u201d). And he knows, perhaps better than anyone, how difficult the climate movement is to brand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One of McKibben\u2019s goals for Sun Day was to urge officials in blue states and cities to remove permitting barriers for solar installation. But \u201cif you set out to do a campaign about solar-permitting reform, the problem is that you\u2019ve now picked a couple of the most boring words in the English language,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He originally wanted to call his day of action Sky Day, to encompass both solar power and carbon emissions. But when a design firm ginned up ideas for logos, every option depicted the sun. \u201cIt just became clear to me that you can\u2019t really draw a picture of the sky,\u201d McKibben said. He decided that there was also a catchy symmetry to the sun\u2019s role in the problem of climate change. \u201cWe\u2019ve managed to screw up our relationship with the sun,\u201d McKibben said. \u201cWe\u2019re trapping too much of its heat, and now we have to fix that relationship. It just so happens that the sun provides the easiest way.\u201d The Sun Day website invites people to submit their own drawings of the sun, examples of which flash brightly across the homepage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Positioning Sun Day politically was a challenge, too. Jamie Henn \u2014 a climate activist who co-founded 350.org with McKibben and has been working on Sun Day \u2014 said in a&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.volts.wtf\/p\/what-does-clean-energy-activism-look\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">recent interview<\/a>&nbsp;with the podcast Volts that, when they began organizing Sun Day, he thought, \u201cOne of the things that the clean-energy movement needs is a really good villain.\u201d But then they tested some language along the lines of \u201cBig Oil is standing in the way of solar. Trump doesn\u2019t want you to have it.\u201d The response, Henn said, was more or less: \u201cI don\u2019t want to hear this stuff \u2014 like, I\u2019m already depressed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Even in simpler times for environmental activism, messaging could be tricky. In 1970, Senator Nelson originally conceived of Earth Day as a nationwide \u201cEnvironmental Teach-in\u201d on college campuses. But Hayes and his staff found that the name turned people off. \u201cIt was academic, and it sounded a little bit preachy, and it sounded pass\u00e9,\u201d like a relic of the Vietnam years, Hayes told me. Then, one day, an advertising executive who had created Volkswagen\u2019s \u201cThink Small\u201d campaign swung by their office and offered to help. He mocked-up ads on newsprint, each with a different name: World Day, Ecology Day, E-Day, Earth Day. Hayes found that there was something about the name of the planet that spoke to their bohemian moment. \u201c\u2018Earth Day\u2019 just rang my chimes,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2025\/09\/21\/magazine\/21mag-Climate-Activism-images\/21mag-Climate-Activism-images-articleLarge-v3.jpg?quality=75&amp;auto=webp&amp;disable=upscale\" alt=\"A vintage-looking photograph of marchers carrying signs for Earth Day on a New York City street.\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The 1970 Earth Day was the country\u2019s largest single-day demonstration to date, on any issue.Credit&#8230;Paul Fusco\/Magnum Photos<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Right now, there are two main stories of climate transition unfolding side by side. As the sea ice melts and temperatures rise, renewable energy has never been cheaper or more accessible. \u201cThere\u2019s a kind of Hollywood quality to the whole thing, that they\u2019re happening at exactly the same time,\u201d McKibben said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Accordingly, many politicians and corporate leaders in the U.S. and beyond have pivoted from framing climate action as a moral or collectivist imperative to an economic one \u2014 a matter of capitalizing on technological opportunity. The Council on Foreign Relations has named its latest initiative \u201cClimate Realism,\u201d which could hardly feel further from the utopian \u201cWe Are the World\u201d tone of Earth Day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So in some ways, Sun Day\u2019s messaging seems neatly customized to the current era. McKibben said that he hopes decision makers who were not swayed by campaigns to tax carbon emissions may, under pressure from activists, buy into a framework centered on affordability. Much of the language on the Sun Day website has a plain-spoken pragmatism \u2014 \u201cSolar energy is now the cheapest source of power on the planet\u201d \u2014 that feels more like an appeal to individual priorities than communal ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Still, you can see plenty of the old attitude, too. \u201cWe all feel better when the sun comes out, so let\u2019s be the bright light of hope that changes the world,\u201d the website says. On the weekend of Sun Day, in Yellow Springs, Ohio, musicians will play on the porches of solar-powered houses. In Taos, N.M., children will race solar toy cars and construct sun hats. McKibben had originally called for every home with solar panels to shine a green light through a window that night, but nixed this idea after realizing, he said, that most people don\u2019t own green lights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>McKibben and I arrived at a solar array behind an elementary school, surrounded by an untamed field of flowers and stalks. Walking between the rows of panels, he told me that he thinks the time is ripe for the expansion of solar projects like this one, which he wants Sun Day to support. Despite the dominance of the fossil fuel lobby, he sees an opening for common ground. \u201cI think conservatives are very taken with the idea that, \u2018Give me some panels and my house really is my castle; I don\u2019t have to depend on anyone for anything,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cAnd liberals are all like, \u2018It\u2019s networked the groovy power of the sun into a clean grid!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But advance reactions to Sun Day suggest that this common ground might not be so easy to locate. Dana R. Fisher, a sociologist who studies climate activism, worries that the whole idea seems \u201ctone deaf, and maybe a little na\u00efve\u201d alongside the G.O.P.\u2019s blows to clean energy. She is doubtful that an event applauding people for purchasing heat pumps will do much: \u201cWe don\u2019t really need any more kumbaya at this point,\u201d she said. She wonders if Sun Day will \u201cbackfire, because some people are going to celebrate these little individual actions that have no real effect on getting us where we need to go. And everybody else is going to just laugh at these attempts to shine light on these small glimmers of hope in despair.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>On the other ideological end of the climate movement, Ted Nordhaus, who runs the environmental think tank Breakthrough Institute, doesn\u2019t believe the climate movement is capable of pivoting to economic practicality. He thinks that a fixation on solar and wind instead of, say, nuclear power is not a way to bring new people on board but \u201ca rear-guard defense of, literally, ideological commitments that have defined this sort of underlying environmental view of energy since the mid-1970s.\u201d Sun Day, in his view, \u201cis a nostalgia for the old environmental politics that\u2019s just dead.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2025\/09\/21\/magazine\/21mag-Climate-Activism-images-06\/21mag-Climate-Activism-images-06-articleLarge-v2.jpg?quality=75&amp;auto=webp&amp;disable=upscale\" alt=\"A man with his hands cuffed behind his back is led away by a police officer while other people and another officer walk behind them.\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">McKibben during a protest against fossil fuels in 2024.Credit&#8230;Eduardo Munoz\/Reuters<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>These two critiques<\/strong>&nbsp;from opposing directions capture a key tension within the climate movement. The activist, grass-roots side tends to want bold political action and a message that doesn\u2019t sugarcoat or soften the threat of climate change. The other side wants political and economic realism and an end to so-called climate scaremongering. It\u2019s hard not to wonder if catering to everyone is a near-impossible project, one that risks having a constituency of zero.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I asked McKibben if he saw Sun Day as a push for climate activism to align itself with the \u201cabundance\u201d movement\u2019s primary instinct: the idea that the only way forward is building, that the only political path is to create the world that has to replace our own. \u201cI do think we need a new world,\u201d he said. But he is resistant to framing Sun Day in fully economic terms. After all, many in the abundance movement support fossil fuels; some conservatives have glommed on to its message as a way to empower corporations to build whatever they want. Sun Day is partly \u201cpragmatic and about cost,\u201d McKibben said, but it\u2019s also about \u201cbeauty and liberation.\u201d When I mentioned that I\u2019d heard criticism of Sun Day as wishfully retrograde, he gave me a resigned smile. \u201cI\u2019m always happy to be called na\u00efve,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>After we visited the solar panels, we stopped for creemees \u2014 Vermont\u2019s take on soft serve \u2014 and took our cones to go. As we drove through the Green Mountains, McKibben reflected on what the future of this place might hold. \u201cI was very attached to winter,\u201d he said. \u201cThe sap in the maple trees would be cracking and swelling, and limbs cracking. You\u2019d hear popping at night.\u201d But \u201cwe really haven\u2019t had&nbsp;<em>cold<\/em>&nbsp;weather in years now.\u201d He looked down at his lap, where a chocolaty puddle was forming on his pants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In McKibben, you can see climate activists\u2019 particular bind: the dual imperative to provide both real talk and inspiration, the way the grim facts are always fighting with an uplifting, imagined future. When he talks about renewables, he can sound as much like a philosopher-poet as a clean-energy expert. Solar power, he said, is about \u201cbringing our local star down to Earth so we can make use of it.\u201d This kind of rhetoric might be a tonal mismatch for our moment. It might not ignite a broad, popular movement. Then again, no one knows what will.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For all the work McKibben was putting into Sun Day, he\u2019s not sure if it will continue beyond this year. If it does, someone else may have to lead it. \u201cI\u2019m getting old,\u201d he told me. But he\u2019s far from alone in trying to figure out a path for the climate movement. Neubauer told me that young activists have been asking her lately how they can recapture the excitement of the prepandemic student strikes. Instead of trying to get back to 2019, she wants them to think of imitating the years&nbsp;<em>before<\/em>&nbsp;that. What were activists doing in that time of less momentum \u2014 when Trump was elected, and Brexit passed, and wildfires decimated Europe? \u201cWe need to fight the cynicism a bit more effectively than we\u2019re doing right now,\u201d Neubauer said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Prakash, meanwhile, believes that the firsthand experience of extreme weather is what will urge people to political action, the way oppressive pollution did in the lead-up to Earth Day. The question for the climate movement in the next decade, she said, is not just how to limit warming as much as possible but how to help communities recover from natural disasters as they come with greater frequency and ferocity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>She feels encouraged by some new projects, like the Make Polluters Pay campaign, which seeks to sue fossil fuel companies for damages in proportion to their contribution to emissions. She thinks it may be this decade\u2019s version of the divestment campaigns of the 2010s. Prakash sees potential, too, in Sun Day\u2019s economic argument for solar and wind. \u201cI think it\u2019s an interesting experiment,\u201d she said, \u201cin trying to take the fight around renewable energy to a wider audience than just the climate left.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As McKibben and I wound through the mountain roads in his Kia, dense foliage crowding in on the pavement, he recalled the exact moment when he decided to start planning Sun Day in earnest. In the spring of last year, he watched the solar eclipse from Middlebury\u2019s campus, smack-dab in the path of totality. It had been a while since he\u2019d seen the student body so excited. \u201cIt was the biggest event in Vermont in ages,\u201d McKibben said. He stood there on the quad and took it in: hundreds and hundreds of students, craning their faces upward, rapt. \u201cHappily,\u201d McKibben said, \u201cthey had a deep affection for the thing we most need to get us out of the jam we\u2019re in.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p>Christina Cauterucci is a senior writer at Slate and host of the podcast \u201cOutward.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Read by&nbsp;Gabra Zackman<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Narration produced by&nbsp;Tanya P\u00e9rez<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Engineered by&nbsp;Devin Murphy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Back to News The 1970 Earth Day was the country\u2019s largest single-day demonstration to date, on any issue. Credit&#8230;Paul Fusco\/Magnum Photos In yesterday&#8217;s Sunday edition of The New York Times Magazine, the past, present and perhaps future of the enviroment and climate movements are covered in a fascinating, surprising, thought-provoking and crucially educational article by [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55,54],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16693"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16693"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16693\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17239,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16693\/revisions\/17239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}