Earth Day feels like a funeral now. Not one with black veils or organ music—but a well-staged, well-catered wake. A jazz trio hums near the Science Center. Someone hands out succulent cuttings. There are cookies shaped like the Earth, iced in HUDS-friendly greens and blues—flavorless, but photogenic.
A booth gives away bamboo forks in rice-paper sleeves stamped with the slogan: OUR POWER, OUR PLANET. Ten steps away, the Science Center exhales warm, gas-fired air into a spring breeze still tinged with methane.
No one cries. No one shouts. We smile for the group photo, backpacks slung like credentials.
This is what Earth Day has become: not a reckoning, but a ritual. A polished performance of concern, where optics replace outrage and aesthetic choices stand in for action. We don’t gather to confront what’s been lost—we gather to feel better about it. What once demanded transformation now asks only for symbolism.
My phone buzzes with a clip from “Rick and Morty.” It’s Planetina—a parody of Captain Planet—summoned by four teenage “Planeteers,” each with a magic ring tied to an element: fire, water, earth, and air. In theory, she’s a symbol of environmental hope, justice, and unity. In practice, she’s hollowed out. Planetina isn’t free—she’s franchised. Her powers are controlled by a team of handlers who package her image, sell her merch, and approve her every move. She’s a superhero run through a PR machine.
Eventually, she fights back. She stops asking for permission and starts acting. When she incinerates a coal mine, it’s not a metaphor—it’s vengeance. Morty, once infatuated, dumps her. She’s “too intense.” Too angry. Too real.
It’s played for dark comedy, but the subtext hits hard. Planetina is what happens when conviction crashes into a culture that prefers aesthetics over stakes. She exposes what we won’t admit: that conviction without packaging gets ignored. That passion, unfiltered, gets sidelined.
As she floats above the coal mine, rings blazing, smoke curling around her. Her voice cuts through the flames, setting ablaze dozens of workers:
“There’s only one solution to Earth’s pollution!”
It’s a joke—but it stings. We’ve been trained to treat climate change as a personal moral failure. Forgot your tote bag? You’re the problem. Still use a gas stove? Shame. The burden shifts from ExxonMobil to your recycling bin. From Chevron to your LED light bulbs.
Planetina parodies the world we live in—where outrage and virtue are marketable. Her cartoon violence seems absurd only because we’ve already absorbed the message she mocks. We’ve accepted that solving climate change starts with the right shopping habits.
Remember when Trump’s campaign sold half a million dollars’ worth of bright-red plastic straws because “liberal paper straws don’t work?” Pollution morphed into partisan memorabilia—proof that salvation could ship in two-day Amazon Prime. The stunt was absurd, yes, but also refreshingly honest. If you’re going to pollute, at least stop pretending it’s biodegradable.
Fast forward to 2025: Trump signs an executive order halting the federal procurement of paper straws. They’re “nonfunctional,” he says, citing chemicals and plastic wrap as proof of liberal hypocrisy.
But it’s not just conservatives who play the optics game. And it’s not just environmentalism.
This same logic drives so much elite liberal performance: protest when it’s fashionable, post when it flatters, opt in when it feels good.
Recently, in Bryant Park, New York, a protest poster went viral: “If Kamala Harris were president right now, we’d all be at brunch.”
It’s a joke, but also a confession. A subtle acknowledgment that, for many, outrage isn’t sparked by injustice—but by inconvenience. It reveals the truth behind so much surface-level politics: people aren’t angry about the world. They’re angry about how it looks under someone they don’t like.
When the optics improve, the urgency fades. The mimosas come out—plastic straws and all. We don’t protest because we care. We protest because the image demands it. Swap the president, and the appetite for action disappears.
The brunch returns. The urgency fades.
So we soothe ourselves with small victories because they can be completed. Paper straws replace plastic. LED bulbs replace incandescents. We tweet the solar-panel selfie. Meanwhile, global plastic production is set to triple by 2060. That statistic has no feel-good analog, so we cancel it like a show that never made it past the pilot.
What would it look like to celebrate Earth Day without the merchandised mercy?
Picture Widener’s limestone façade transformed into a live carbon ticker, broadcasting Harvard’s emissions like a stock quote. Every desktop left running. Every conference flight booked. Even the midnight tater-tots in the oven scroll the number upward in metric tons. Departments that overshoot their budget write checks—no tax-deduction alchemy—to build rooftop solar in Dorchester or electrify school buses in Lawrence.
Yes, the vibe would sour. No jazz trio. No “I <3 Mother Earth” cookies. No branded compost bins humming in the sun.
But maybe the sourness is overdue.
The comfortable lie of Earth Day is that the problem is spiritual—an attitude issue fixable with flair, not infrastructure. Planetina preaches personal purity. The Trump straw shouts personal defiance. Both shrink the crisis to consumer choices. Both flatter the individual and spare the system.
If we insisted on structural stakes, the celebration would grow dull—and effective.
No iPhone cases are made of “ocean-bound” plastic. A procurement memo banning single-use lab consumables unless medically necessary.
No tote bags. A binding, public divestment schedule—updated quarterly, names attached.
No slogans. A rollback of fossil fuel subsidies. A federal mandate on energy efficiency codes for new buildings. A climate risk disclosure requirement for all endowment assets.
Just the admission that power, properly defined, is a ledger, not a feeling.
Planetina says the planet has no time. But what we’re truly short on is attention.
A planetary drama can’t compete with a meme cycle or a flash sale. We scroll. We sigh. We buy a bamboo fork and feel fractionally better. Then we repeat.
One last glance at the Yard before lecture: the jazz hits a major-seventh chord as someone poses beneath the banner, straw hat tilted just so. The photo will look impeccable. The atmosphere, slightly less so.
I used to love Earth Day. Maybe I still do, in the way you can still love a song even after it’s been overplayed. But this version—the photogenic grief, the compostable redemption—it feels like a eulogy written before the body’s even cold.
Take the picture if you must. Just label it correctly: souvenir from the annual festival of not-quite-enough. Then ask yourself if next year, you’ll do more than pose.
Luke Wagner ’26 (lukewagner@college.harvard.edu) is the Vice President of the Independent.