We Turned Earth Day into a Hashtag. And That’s a Problem.
The dark basalt walls of the Maui backcountry swallow the light the deeper you hike. By the time you reach the base of Waimoku Falls, the sheer noise of the drop drowns out every thought in your head.
Picture this.
It’s 1970. The air smells like leaded gasoline and cigarette smoke. Richard Nixon is in office, Jimi Hendrix is still alive, and rivers are literally catching fire. Bald eagles are nearly extinct. People were angry enough to chain their physical bodies to old-growth timber. On April 22nd of that year, twenty million Americans walked into the streets. Students, farmers, and combat vets yelled until their throats bled. Enough.
That was the first Earth Day. It was a chaotic, sweaty middle finger to an establishment that was pumping smog into kids’ lungs and treating the oceans like a septic tank. It was radical. It worked.
Now it is 2026. Earth Day is a curated Instagram dump of mountain selfies and recycled Pinterest quotes about "treading lightly." We slapped a filter on the fury. We turned a riot into a branding opportunity.
The Earth Doesn’t Care About Your Grid
The air above the tree line in Banff National Park carries a bitter, metallic bite. You hike for hours over loose shale just to get a clear look at the geological violence that forced these peaks into the sky.
I am talking to myself here. I make my living dragging a point and shoot setup through the mud. I shoot old-growth forests, I post them, and I stare at the engagement metrics like they validate my existence. A photo is a digital ghost. A caption does not clean up a toxic spill. A hashtag is an illusion of action.
Posting has its place. Viral movements shift laws. But we treat Earth Day like a corporate performance review. We prove how much we love the wild, hit upload, then drive our SUVs through the drive-thru for a six-dollar latte served in a compostable cup that will still outlive our grandchildren. We broke this planet. No amount of aesthetic content is going to glue it back together.
Convenience is the God We Worship
I captured this image of a pelagic shark three miles off the coast of Oahu on a dive with Ocean Ramsey and the One Ocean Diving team.
We live lives completely at war with the dirt we claim to worship. We want pristine wilderness and next-day shipping. We want quiet trails and cheap pine lumber at Home Depot.
The modern world is engineered for speed. We built a machine that survives by extracting everything it touches, and we soothe our conscience by slapping a green leaf logo on the packaging.
Look at BP. The oil giant literally invented the “carbon footprint” calculator. It was a PR masterclass designed to shift the guilt from their offshore rigs to your living room thermostat. While they pumped millions of barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico, they told you to bike to work. Fast fashion brands drop "conscious" lines made of ten percent recycled plastic while burning through oceans of freshwater to make a five-dollar t-shirt. Airlines sell you carbon offsets for three dollars so you can sleep on your flight to Denver.
Corporations know you want things fast and cheap. They brand destruction as progress. Politicians cash the checks. It is just business.
So What Do We Do?
This is the part of the essay where I am supposed to give you a cheerful checklist of eco-friendly life hacks. I am not going to do that. You already know you consume too much. I know I do. The actual challenge is giving a damn when it is terribly inconvenient. Most days, I don't feel like it.
Start with honesty. Let go of the desperate need for digital applause.
Plant a native redbud in your yard and tell absolutely no one about it. Pick up the rusted beer cans off the trail without tagging the state park. Walk into the hardwood forest, leave your phone in the glovebox, and just listen to the dirt breathe.
The planet is not a green screen for your personal brand. It is a messy, violent, irreplaceable home. It is worth protecting even when nobody is looking.
Lake Superior settles into glass at dusk. Low-angle sunset light reflects off the wet, rounded stones at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in Michigan. A silhouetted tree branch frames the open water and the orange horizon.
More Reading
If you want to understand how I try (and often fail) to capture the reality of these landscapes without ruining them, read my essay on Beginners Mind: What I Learned from My Worst Photos. We can all afford to be a little more honest about our mistakes.
