Reclaiming Earth Day’s lost unity in divisive times

This post originally appeared in The Sustainability Story Substack. Read it here and subscribe.

When you look at a photo or video of Earth, how does it make you feel?

While it’s common, if not cliché, to claim that this generates a sense of awe, common humanity, and desire to protect the planet, today indifference is the overwhelming emotion for many. Since the Earthrise photo was first taken from lunar orbit by astronaut William Anders in December 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission, entire generations—including my own Millennials—have grown up seeing regular images of our home planet from space. We’ve also seen photorealistic fictitious depictions of Earth in movies, television shows, and other media that make it feel unremarkable.

When I first saw the Earthset photo taken by Artemis II astronauts on their recent journey around the moon, it was in an Instagram post from the official NASA account. I recall thinking cool and this looks a lot like Star Wars. Scrolling on, I was served funny videos about golden retrievers and babies. Later as I reflected on the experience, I realized that if someone like myself—both a space aficionado and sustainability enthusiast—was barely moved by the images, millions of others must have experienced fleeting amusement, if not indifference.

Images are powerful communication tools—a picture speaks a thousand words, as they say. But in a modern media environment where we’re drowning in torrents of imagery—both real and AI-generated—it’s harder than ever for these images to make us feel anything that motivates us into action.

For nearly sixty years, we’ve known how fragile and lonely our planet is in the cosmos—yet we continue to treat it like it’s disposable.

In many ways, Earthset of 2026 and Earthrise of 1968 came at similar times of social, environmental, and political upheaval. The 1960s saw the Vietnam War, Civil Rights Movement, and several environmental disasters. Today, we’re witnessing the rise of authoritarianism in the United States and across the globe, the ongoing crush of the climate crisis in our communities, unprecedented technological disruption, and wealth inequality that would make a Gilded Age magnate blush.

But while Earthrise helped galvanize an entire generation into environmental action by helping catalyze the first Earth Day in 1970, Earthset earned some likes and reshares on social media. In 1968, mainstreaming of the television made it possible for millions around the world to see their first real image of Earth. In 2026, smartphones and the increasingly cutthroat attention economy made another image of Earth barely register for the masses.

If we want the sustainability movement to succeed, we must find a way to generate the same magic Earthrise and the first Earth Day conjured.

Fortunately, while writing my book, Sustainability Storytelling, I had the privilege of interviewing Denis Hayes, the first Earth Day coordinator.

What I learned: environmentalism was once a unifying force—and it can be so again.

Environmentalism as a unifying force

A thousand years from now, humans—assuming we’re still here—will look back on today and ponder over how environmentalism could be a divisive issue. Everyone benefits from having a stable climate, fresh air, clean water, and a biodiverse, healthy, and habitable planet.

By the first Earth Day in 1970, Americans rallied around a single idea: the environment was worth protecting and corporations didn’t have a free pass to pollute it in the name of profit.

People across the country were fed up with the consequences of corporate irresponsibility. A few years before Earthrise in 1962, Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, drew attention to the chemical industry’s efforts to spread misinformation about the environmental damages of pesticides. In 1969, the Santa Barbara oil spill coated 35 miles of California coastline in crude oil, and the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland—so polluted it had caught fire multiple times over the decades—burned again, this time in front of television cameras. While environmental destruction was nothing new, television beaming images of rivers on fire and oil-soaked beaches made it impossible to ignore—and set the stage for Earth Day in 1970.

By 1970, Americans were fighting dozens of separate battles—against air pollution, water contamination, pesticides, urban sprawl, the destruction of wild places. Each fight had its own organizers, its own tactics, its own small army of committed people. But they didn’t see themselves as part of the same movement.

Hayes described it to me this way: “The people fighting these myriad narrow battles didn’t realize they were all on the same team. In 1970, Earth Day joined them all together under a banner called ‘the environment.’”

Earth Day gave millions of Americans—conservatives and liberals, city dwellers and farmers, students and retirees—a shared identity and a shared moment.

“Protecting the environment was an issue that could unite all Americans, everywhere,” Hayes told me. “We found a way for almost everyone to feel comfortable participating.”

The result was a flurry of unprecedented legislation aimed at protecting the environment from corporate excess. Earth Day spurred the creation of the EPA, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act—some of the most consequential environmental legislation in American history.

Big business strikes back

Just a few months after the first Earth Day, Milton Friedman asserted in a New York Times op-ed that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits”—a direct attack on the growing sentiment that businesses had certain social and environmental responsibilities to maintain their legitimacy in society.

But Friedman wasn’t alone. Earth Day’s success and the wave of environmental regulation that followed caught Corporate America off guard—and the response was swift and highly organized. In 1971, future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote his famous Powell Memo, urging corporations to fight back through coordinated lobbying, media campaigns, and legal action. Within a decade, corporate lobbyists grew from 175 firms to 2,500. New think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute emerged to provide ideological cover under the banner of “free enterprise.” The Business Roundtable, founded in 1972, became the organizational vehicle for Corporate America to push back against the regulatory tide that Earth Day had helped create. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce was revived and recalibrated to fight for a narrow set of corporate interests.

In the decades that followed, this so-called Friedman Doctrine would shape how sustainability is interpreted across boardrooms, markets, and political discourse.

Corporate sustainability as we know it today is still captive to this ethos of shareholder value maximization—rather than stakeholder capitalism.

Why unity is so much harder now

Earth Day’s original unity has largely disappeared. Today, we find ourselves in a world where unsustainable narratives frame what feels possible, reasonable, or worth prioritizing.

This is the fiction that we must choose either economic prosperity or a healthy planet—even though we can’t have the former for long without the latter.

A shared media environment—three television networks, the local paper—has been replaced by a fragmented one where people curate their own information diets and rarely encounter a challenging idea. Political identity has consumed environmental identity for many Americans, turning climate action from a civic value into a culture war battlefield.

Hayes was direct about this. “Today, we live in an era where people don’t turn to political leaders for truth—they turn to them for what’s the lesson of the day for the tribe they belong to,” he told me. “That’s a terrible way to run a planet.”

The Heritage Foundation, created largely as a fear response to the progress and corporate accountability generated by the first Earth Day, is the primary architect of Project 2025—which has proven to be a blueprint for the Second Trump Administration’s policy decisions undermining decades of social and environmental progress.

We can see the consequences all around us. Companies that once proudly championed environmental commitments are quietly scrubbing the language from their websites out of fear of being targeted by the Trump Administration. Sustainability professionals are losing their jobs. The federal government is actively rolling back the environmental protections that Earth Day helped create.

Why hope remains

Here’s the thing about Hayes: after more than five decades at the center of the environmental movement, he is not a pessimist.

“Remember that the pendulum swings both directions,” he told me. “We’re in an anti-environmental epoch right now, but that inevitably means we have a pro-environmental epoch coming. That’s when you need to be ready with real substance to communicate about.”

That framing—prepare now, so you’re ready when the moment comes—is both strategically sound and historically grounded. Earth Day didn’t emerge fully formed. It was built over years of quiet organizing, scientific work, community action, and storytelling. April 22, 1970 was the moment of ignition, but the rocket fuel had been accumulating for years.

Hayes also had pointed advice for companies trying to figure out how to show up authentically—not just on Earth Day, but every day.

“For business, companies have had a difficult time figuring out how to participate meaningfully,” he told me. “The companies that have done an extraordinary job focus on doing the work rather than just the communications around Earth Day. The companies with more questionable records sometimes say things that are laughable.”

“Don’t lie,” he added. “You’re going to get caught. The biggest advice is to get the C-suite to do things that are actually good for the environment so you can communicate truthfully about them.”

People power this movement

Hayes pushed back on something I think a lot of us in corporate sustainability can lose sight of—the idea that the real action happens inside boardrooms or even in Washington.

“The environmental movement’s real heart isn’t the lobbyists in Washington—it’s the tens of thousands of little groups pushing for change in their communities. That distributed nature is our strength, and good communication should support and amplify those local efforts.”

The movement that produced Earth Day was fundamentally local. The digital tools we have today make that kind of distributed organizing more powerful than ever, if we choose to use them that way rather than just scrolling past Earthset photos on Instagram.

I don’t know what the next Earthrise will be. I don’t know what image, moment, or story will cut through the noise the way that photo did in 1968.

What I do know is that the conditions for unity—and hope—still exist as long as we continue to persist.

Environmental problems are real and getting worse—and the science is clear. And somewhere beneath the algorithmic fragmentation and political tribalism, most people still want to live on a habitable planet and leave something worth inheriting to the next generation.

As I prepare to become a father in just under two months, that feels more personal than it ever has. The work we do now—the stories we tell, the substance we build behind them, the communities we serve—is the preparation Hayes is talking about. We won’t always know when the pendulum swings. But we can make sure to be ready when it does.

Happy Earth Day 2026, everyone.