Beyond the campaigns, the slogans, the limited editions, this Earth Day, a consideration of traces, not trends.
Tears streamed down my daughter’s face as the wall of flames moved fast in her direction on an early January evening, disrupting dinner at her dad’s house. In the few moments they had to pack up what they could — pets and all — it wasn’t clear yet whether the house would be there in the morning.
It wasn’t.
Her dad lost everything in the Eaton Fire. My daughter was lucky; she came home to her cozy bed, stuffed animals, and other familiar comforts. But she also came home with the kind of terror that no child should ever feel. Because the fire didn’t care who she was. It didn’t care how much we compost or recycle every week. How many veggie burgers we eat. It didn’t wait for clearance. It came because the planet is burning.
California is no stranger to wildfires. But the fire season, once measured in months, now runs nearly year-round. According to Cal Fire, the state saw more than 8,000 wildfires in 2024, burning more than one million acres. According to the European Commission, the wildfire seasons in both 2022 and 2023 ranked among the five most severe on record. In 2024, wildfires and vegetation fires worldwide released an estimated 1,940 megatonnes of carbon monoxide into the atmosphere. These numbers aren’t just warnings. They are happening. They are lived experiences. They are my daughter’s trauma and our collective reckoning.
One day, likely much sooner than we think, the Earth will be measured not by all that we lost, but by what was strong or lucky enough to endure — like those lone houses that somehow survived and now stand in the otherwise sparse Altadena landscape. It’s not the unprecedented temperatures or sea levels that future generations will remember most, but what hid in the margins, the traces we didn’t think would matter, the shattered relics that, when pieced together, offer glimpses of a world on the brink of becoming unrecognizable.
Once a revolutionary act, Earth Day has been co-opted by marketing calendars and hollow corporate promises. It is now little more than a hashtag or a reason to launch a limited-edition water bottle in a slightly greener hue. There was a time when Earth Day meant protest and action. Now it means promotion.
There is no shortage of messaging. Some Most of it completely absurd: a plastic-wrapped product rebranded with bucolic imagery, its packaging otherwise unchanged. A climate pledge printed on single-use delivery boxes. A clothing tag labeled “Join Life” drifting lifeless in the gutter.
These are not the exceptions. They are the language we’ve learned to speak fluently — a language of laziness, as if just saying something is the same as doing it. My sixth-grade English teacher called efforts like this “snow jobs” and said they were failing the assignment in the worst possible way. That stuck with me all these years later. Yet we accept this lip service now as the currency of a dying planet: broken promises and self-serving assurances.
In 2023, the European Commission found that more than half of green claims made by brands were vague, misleading, or unfounded. In the U.S., the FTC is currently revisiting its Green Guides that are meant to address this problem. But everywhere we look, corporate branding relies heavily on environmental themes. Lululemon markets its products using climate-conscious language while continuing to rely on synthetic, petroleum-based fabrics. Apple claimed the company’s 2023 watch was its “first carbon-neutral product,” while third-party analyses noted that much of that neutrality was based on offset credits of questionable impact. Zara’s “Join Life” initiative presents as a sustainability pivot, but the brand’s output — more than 450 million items annually — remains tied to a fast-fashion model inherently at odds with long-term planetary boundaries. Starbucks aimed to end its plastic straw problem by putting more plastic into straw-like lids. Were it not for the urgency of fixing it all, it would be so marvelously comical.
But it is urgent. My daughter is now a statistic — a climate victim before age 12. The United Nations estimates that more than 3.6 billion people — 45 percent of the global population — live in areas highly vulnerable to climate change. The fires, floods, and temperature spikes are not anomalies; they are patterns. In the very near future, there will be millions of girls just like my daughter, fleeing disaster, or worse. Yet, in much of the public conversation, climate discourse is distilled into seasonal campaigns. Awareness becomes a fleeting formality. The campaigns roll on. The Earth has been branded — visually, rhetorically, seasonally. Earth Day is an annual marketing vernissage.
But step outside that frame, and something else emerges.
It becomes harder to draw neat lines between what we buy, what we say, and what actually changes. A bottle labeled “climate neutral” sits beside a shipping label marked overnight. A reusable tote declares “no planet B,” manufactured in a factory thousands of miles away. The symbolism has outpaced the systems.
And still, despite our plunderous destruction, the Earth continues. Photosynthesizing. Decaying. Sprouting. It is not waiting for us to fix it or finish the thought. It is not trending. It does not care whether the campaign landed. We know it will self correct, with or without us. And that’s the most bitter part of the pill. Because we aren’t saving the planet — we’re saving ourselves, if we’re lucky. And, it seems, the closer one gets to the mechanics of the climate crisis, the harder it is to see where solutions are meant to come from. Because, like naturalist John Muir said more than a century ago, when one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world. And these days, the cure is often just as poisonous as what it’s aiming to treat. Everything is polluted. No prescription can fix us.
Earth Day does not need more slogans. It needs memory. It needs noticing. Not the kind that can be optimized or shopped — but the kind that lingers. The inventory of what we touched and what, eventually, will be left behind. The scent of ozone after rain. The corner of a billboard torn by wind. Bees in the rosemary bush, even if fewer than in years prior.
It’s easy to blame the brands, the politicians, the governments. But if we’re honest, it’s us too. We want to believe our tote bags are enough. We want to believe the problem can be solved with less plastic and more oat milk. We want to keep buying, just more responsibly. But the truth is, we cannot consume our way to a cooler planet.
This is the rot inside the glossy veneer of Earth Day. Companies sell Earth Day collections packaged in virgin plastic and ship them overnight with fossil fuels. Brands that pour billions into carbon-intensive operations buy a moment of credibility with a tree-planting campaign — trees that may never grow, or that burn like the hills that edged my daughter’s neighborhood just a few months ago.
The IPCC has made it clear that global warming is accelerating due to human activity, and that the window to act meaningfully is closing fast. Yet the louder the alarms ring, the more curated the Instagram grids become. Earth tones. Faux candid compost shots. Wellness influencers posing in hemp. We’ve made the apocalypse aspirational.
Perhaps Earth Day would feel different if it made space for something less resolved. If it treated the climate crisis not as a marketing campaign but as the countdown it is. If it acknowledged that repair isn’t always visible and that responsibility is often quieter than messaging.
I say this not as a cynic, but as someone who believes we can do better. I believe the industries that give our lives meaning can align with values that protect our planet. But that belief only holds if we are willing to be honest, especially with ourselves. And the truth is: we’ve turned the climate crisis, that big, bright wall of flames rushing toward us, into a brand.
The fire that destroyed my daughter’s home was just one of many that month. Others will come. Children just like her will continue to ask us why. The most we can do, perhaps, is try to live in ways that make the answer a little clearer. Or at least, less confusing. Because the next generation isn’t waiting for us to get it perfect. They already know that’s an impossible ask. They’re simply waiting for us to mean it when we say we’re trying.
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