Earth Day, Reconsidered

April 22, 2026

I was born in Boulder, Colorado, just as Earth Day was becoming a national ritual. Where I grew up, caring for the natural world was part of daily life with hikes above the tree line, mountains framing every morning, habits of conservation so routine they were almost unconscious. For years, though, I was impatient with Earth Day.

After decades working on climate resilience trying to improve how cities handle floods and heat waves and to support communities when extreme weather events showed how systems fail, the Earth Day narrative began to feel disconnected from the realities I was seeing. There is too much gesturing towards recycling and reusable bags and not enough attention to what we actually face: heat deaths, infrastructure failure, flood risk and communities that may not withstand the next decade without structural change.

I thought Earth Day asked too little of us.

I moved to Chicago in the late 1990s, and the city’s history sharpened that view. The 1995 heat wave killed more than 700 people here in a single week. Eric Klinenberg’s research later found that neighborhood social ties were among the strongest predictors of who survived. People died alone in apartments on blocks where no one knew them. Others lived because someone knocked on their door. That finding stayed with me and changed how I understand resilience.

Resilience is often explained in technical terms like risk maps or hardened infrastructure or  emergency protocols. Those things matter. But the communities that come through disruption with fewer casualties and faster recoveries share something less visible. They know each other. They check on their neighbors. They trust local institutions. They have parks, wetlands and tree-lined streets that cool and connect them. They have relationships with the natural systems around them including watershed that absorbs the storm, the urban forest that shades the block during a heat emergency.

But those natural protections are not evenly distributed. In Chicago, in Boulder and around the US, access to shade, green space and flood protection still follows familiar lines of income and race. Once I started seeing resilience that way, Earth Day began to look different

Earth Day began in 1970 as a collective, civic response to shared risks with big narratives about air pollution, water contamination and public health. Over time, it narrowed into something smaller and individual: recycle more, drive less, make better consumer choices.

The risks have not stayed small. Especially as climate change increases the frequency, severity and intensity of extreme weather, heat, flood and wildfire are growing public health crises. They expose and deepen existing inequities. The neighborhoods that flood first are usually the ones that received the least investment. The blocks with the least tree cover are the ones that will hit 110 degrees first.

I have spent my career in places where the relationship between people and the natural world has been uneven  - where parks are scarce, air quality is worse, and past decisions leave some communities far more exposed than others. Across those places, one pattern holds. The work of resilience and the work of environmental care converge.

Earth Day has persisted for more than five decades through political division, marketing co-optation and public fatigue. In a country that struggles to agree on almost anything, it remains one of the few widely shared moments when people are asked to consider their relationship to the environment and natural world, and how they interact with each other within it.

That is not a small civic inheritance. As climate change risks intensify, it may be one of the more durable shared foundations we have.

Joyce Coffee is a climate change resilience expert with more than three decades of experience working at the intersection of climate risk, public policy and community development. She is based in Chicago.