Activists are hoping to recreate the magic of 1970’s Earth Day — at a moment when the movement’s future is cloudier than ever.
At the end of a long dirt road through Vermont’s 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. 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. “I’ve been putting them up at intervals for a quarter century,” he said.
Few climate activists have participated in more eras of the environmental movement than McKibben. In 1989, at age 27, he published “The End of Nature,” 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 “greenhouse effect” 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.
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. “In certain ways, it’s the darkest moment,” McKibben said.
He’d been coping by throwing himself into a new project. On Sept. 21, McKibben will spearhead a national “day of action” 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 had also published a book on solar and wind power called “Here Comes the Sun.” He wants to convince Americans that renewable energy is not a pricey, boutique alternative but the accessible, abundant, cost-effective future of electrified life — no longer the Whole Foods of energy, as he put it, but the Costco.
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 “a giant potluck supper” for activists around the country: “We’ve set the date and the theme, and everyone’s bringing their own dish to the floor.”
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’s 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 41 percent cheaper than fossil fuels. “For the very first time in this saga, the force of economic gravity is working in the right direction,” 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.
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’s student strikes, by the emergence of the Sunrise Movement. McKibben has been among the strongest exponents of that era’s climate-activism strategy — 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’ lifestyle options in the short term.
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. “This is clearly the thing that we can work on at the moment that stands a chance of making a difference,” 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?
American public opinion on climate has arrived at a complicated juncture. In a Gallup poll this year, a record 48 percent of respondents said that global warming will pose a “serious threat” to them or their way of life. People can feel the hotter summers, the snowless winters, the hurricanes raging harder. Some surveys 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 regularly place climate near the bottom of the list.
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. “You can make a pretty decent case that everything that I’ve worked on in my entire professional life has gone down the toilet in the last six months,” 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, “I think that window has closed, and perhaps it never really existed.”
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’s Fifth Avenue that it seemed to disappear over the curvature of the earth. “It was like looking at the ocean over the horizon,” Hayes told me.
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’s 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: “On April 22,” it read, “we start to reclaim the environment we have wrecked.”
Hayes had anticipated a good turnout for Earth Day. But he certainly wasn’t 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. “That was when it suddenly hit me,” Hayes said. “This was really a massive new potential political force that we were unleashing on the country.”
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’s Cuyahoga River. The environmental devastation that had accompanied the nation’s economic growth was largely taken as a given. “There were all kinds of individual efforts to deal with particular issues, from sprawl to pollution to endangered species,” said the environmental historian Adam Rome. But until Earth Day, “no one had a sense that they all were part of one big cause.”
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 White House poll in 1969 found that 1 percent of respondents thought protecting the environment was important; by 1971, one-quarter did. 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.
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 concern about air pollution doubling over the course of just three years during the mid-1970s.
Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 helped spur a new generation of environmental activists, McKibben among them. McKibben has written that, as a student at Harvard on election night, he “got grimly drunk,” spending the next day in bed before waking to write a Harvard Crimson essay about America’s turn away from moral responsibility and collectivist thinking. After graduation, McKibben became a staff writer at The New Yorker.
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 — who by then had moved into organizing — 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 “eager to get back to Washington, where we’ve got all this under control.”
“I thought he was kind of whistling past the graveyard,” McKibben said. “But he had a better sense of the political realities than I did.”
In 1990, 73 percent of Gallup poll respondents called themselves “environmentalists.” A decade later, this had fallen to 47 percent. Still, a strong majority of Americans in one 1997 Pew survey said they would accept higher gasoline prices if it would help mitigate climate change.
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 “What Would Jesus Drive?” “It was good, and obviously it was a failure,” McKibben said. “Americans just kept driving bigger and bigger and bigger cars.”
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’s 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’s 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.
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’t support climate legislation. When the Inflation Reduction Act passed in 2022, many saw it as a watered-down version of Sunrise’s demands.
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 — that activists could push people in power to keep fossil fuels in the ground.
But the breakthroughs didn’t last long. The problem wasn’t just Trump; over the past few years, climate has receded as a priority throughout the political and corporate worlds. “The banks and others who made commitments at Glasgow just turned out to be liars,” 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’s war on Gaza, to which many activists — including Thunberg — turned their energy. “We were on the streets, hundreds of people, every Friday,” Neubauer said. “Were they seriously thinking that teenagers would do this for a decade?” 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.
The climate activism of the last 15 years wasn’t fruitless. Prakash believes the divestment effort didn’t just lead hundreds of institutions to take their money out of fossil fuels; it also mainstreamed the idea that “we were fighting with fossil capital,” not just climate ignorance. One study found that 350.org’s divestment campaigns shifted public debate by providing a radical flank, such that more moderate calls to climate action seemed reasonable by comparison.
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’s strategies of the past few years — “a tendency toward over-mobilization,” she said, “with diminishing impact.”
With the sun 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. “Electric cars!” he exclaimed.
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 from wide-eyed enthusiasm (“The liberating effects of clean energy are astonishing”) into a mode of urgent admonition (on clean energy, “the Chinese are going to completely own the future”). And he knows, perhaps better than anyone, how difficult the climate movement is to brand.
One of McKibben’s goals for Sun Day was to urge officials in blue states and cities to remove permitting barriers for solar installation. But “if you set out to do a campaign about solar-permitting reform, the problem is that you’ve now picked a couple of the most boring words in the English language,” he said.
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. “It just became clear to me that you can’t really draw a picture of the sky,” McKibben said. He decided that there was also a catchy symmetry to the sun’s role in the problem of climate change. “We’ve managed to screw up our relationship with the sun,” McKibben said. “We’re 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.” The Sun Day website invites people to submit their own drawings of the sun, examples of which flash brightly across the homepage.
Positioning Sun Day politically was a challenge, too. Jamie Henn — a climate activist who co-founded 350.org with McKibben and has been working on Sun Day — said in a recent interview with the podcast Volts that, when they began organizing Sun Day, he thought, “One of the things that the clean-energy movement needs is a really good villain.” But then they tested some language along the lines of “Big Oil is standing in the way of solar. Trump doesn’t want you to have it.” The response, Henn said, was more or less: “I don’t want to hear this stuff — like, I’m already depressed.”
Even in simpler times for environmental activism, messaging could be tricky. In 1970, Senator Nelson originally conceived of Earth Day as a nationwide “Environmental Teach-in” on college campuses. But Hayes and his staff found that the name turned people off. “It was academic, and it sounded a little bit preachy, and it sounded passé,” like a relic of the Vietnam years, Hayes told me. Then, one day, an advertising executive who had created Volkswagen’s “Think Small” 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. “‘Earth Day’ just rang my chimes,” he said.
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. “There’s a kind of Hollywood quality to the whole thing, that they’re happening at exactly the same time,” McKibben said.
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 — a matter of capitalizing on technological opportunity. The Council on Foreign Relations has named its latest initiative “Climate Realism,” which could hardly feel further from the utopian “We Are the World” tone of Earth Day.
So in some ways, Sun Day’s 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 — “Solar energy is now the cheapest source of power on the planet” — that feels more like an appeal to individual priorities than communal ones.
Still, you can see plenty of the old attitude, too. “We all feel better when the sun comes out, so let’s be the bright light of hope that changes the world,” 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’t own green lights.
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. “I think conservatives are very taken with the idea that, ‘Give me some panels and my house really is my castle; I don’t have to depend on anyone for anything,’” he said. “And liberals are all like, ‘It’s networked the groovy power of the sun into a clean grid!’”
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 “tone deaf, and maybe a little naïve” alongside the G.O.P.’s blows to clean energy. She is doubtful that an event applauding people for purchasing heat pumps will do much: “We don’t really need any more kumbaya at this point,” she said. She wonders if Sun Day will “backfire, 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.”
On the other ideological end of the climate movement, Ted Nordhaus, who runs the environmental think tank Breakthrough Institute, doesn’t 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 “a rear-guard defense of, literally, ideological commitments that have defined this sort of underlying environmental view of energy since the mid-1970s.” Sun Day, in his view, “is a nostalgia for the old environmental politics that’s just dead.”
These two critiques 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’t 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’s hard not to wonder if catering to everyone is a near-impossible project, one that risks having a constituency of zero.
I asked McKibben if he saw Sun Day as a push for climate activism to align itself with the “abundance” movement’s 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. “I do think we need a new world,” 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 “pragmatic and about cost,” McKibben said, but it’s also about “beauty and liberation.” When I mentioned that I’d heard criticism of Sun Day as wishfully retrograde, he gave me a resigned smile. “I’m always happy to be called naïve,” he said.
After we visited the solar panels, we stopped for creemees — Vermont’s take on soft serve — and took our cones to go. As we drove through the Green Mountains, McKibben reflected on what the future of this place might hold. “I was very attached to winter,” he said. “The sap in the maple trees would be cracking and swelling, and limbs cracking. You’d hear popping at night.” But “we really haven’t had cold weather in years now.” He looked down at his lap, where a chocolaty puddle was forming on his pants.
In McKibben, you can see climate activists’ 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 “bringing our local star down to Earth so we can make use of it.” 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.
For all the work McKibben put into Sun Day, he’s not sure if it will continue beyond this year. If it does, someone else may have to lead it. “I’m getting old,” he told me. But he’s 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 before that. What were activists doing in that time of less momentum — when Trump was elected, and Brexit passed, and wildfires decimated Europe? “We need to fight the cynicism a bit more effectively than we’re doing right now,” Neubauer said.
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.
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’s version of the divestment campaigns of the 2010s. Prakash sees potential, too, in Sun Day’s economic argument for solar and wind. “I think it’s an interesting experiment,” she said, “in trying to take the fight around renewable energy to a wider audience than just the climate left.”
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’s campus, smack-dab in the path of totality. It had been a while since he’d seen the student body so excited. “It was the biggest event in Vermont in ages,” McKibben said. He stood there on the quad and took it in: hundreds and hundreds of students, craning their faces upward, rapt. “Happily,” McKibben said, “they had a deep affection for the thing we most need to get us out of the jam we’re in.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES
