Earth Day Was Born From Protest. Now Protest Is a Crime.
The Misinformation Keeping People Home & The Legislation Making Sure They Stay On The Couch.
The 1960s were a decade of upheaval with civil rights battles, political assassinations, and a deeply unpopular war, and by the end of it, many Americans felt the country was coming apart at the seams. Out of that turbulence came something else: a reckoning with the world beneath our feet, above our heads, and running through our cities.
It started with a book. In 1962, marine biologist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a damning indictment of the chemical industry and its assault on the natural world. It was controversial and it was attacked. But it also lit a fuse.
Seven years later, a river caught fire.
The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, was so choked with industrial waste and sewage that, as Time magazine put it, it “oozed rather than flowed.” When it ignited in 1969, the images were impossible to ignore. How does water burn? The question forced a nation to confront what it had been willing to look away from for generations.
The outrage that followed was real and swift. The Clean Water Act passed. Environmental protection agencies were created at the state and federal level. On April 22, 1970, millions of Americans took to the streets, college campuses, and town halls for the very first Earth Day, the largest environmental demonstration the country had ever seen.
Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, the event’s chief architect, said the goal was simple but audacious: to generate “a nationwide demonstration of concern for the environment so large that it would shake the political establishment out of its lethargy” and force the issue permanently onto the national agenda.
It worked. The question now, more than fifty years later, is whether we’re willing to be shaken again.
The Myths We Need to Leave Behind
The environmental movement has never been more necessary or more misunderstood. A stubborn set of myths continues to cloud public conversation, slow meaningful action, and let the industries most resistant to change off the hook.
It’s time to name them, examine them, and let them go.
Myth 1: The movement is for “saving trees.”
The “tree hugger” label has long been used to dismiss environmentalists as sentimental and out of touch. Protecting the environment has always been about protecting people, and nothing makes that more clear than water.
In Flint, Michigan, a cost-cutting decision to switch the city’s water supply exposed tens of thousands of residents, mostly Black and low-income, to dangerous levels of lead. Children suffered irreversible neurological damage. Families couldn't drink from their own taps. It wasn’t a nature story, it was a human rights crisis. And it happened here in the United States (under a Democratic president).
Air pollution remains the leading environmental risk factor for death around the world, contributing to 7.9 million deaths in 2023, with the largest health impacts seen in low- and middle-income countries where people have higher exposures and limited access to healthcare and other services.
In the U.S., nearly half of us breathe unhealthy levels of air pollution, according to the American Lung Association’s 2025 “State of the Air” report. The report finds that 156 million people live in communities that received an “F” grade for either ozone or particle pollution. Extreme heat and wildfires contributed to worse air quality for millions of people across the U.S. as well.
Clean air, clean water, and a stable climate aren’t fringe concerns, they are fundamental human rights.
Myth 2: Environmentalists are out-of-touch elites.
I’ve met a lot of people in my work and most of them would not identify as “environmentalists” or “activists.” However, people’s perspectives change rapidly when they can’t drink their water.
One of the most contentious talking points from the current administration is the idea that the environmental movement is a product of rich elites and that regulations hurt working-class people.
I speak with these same people every day, and I can tell you that they are not suffering because of regulations. Instead, they have been harmed by neglected infrastructure updates, corporate misdeeds, and bureaucratic hurdles.
The environmental movement’s most powerful voices have long come from frontline communities bearing the heaviest burden of environmental harm. The environmental justice movement emerged in 1982 in Warren County, North Carolina, when a predominantly Black community rose up against a hazardous waste landfill being built in their neighborhood.
Myth 3: Environmentalists want to drag us back in time.
This concept may be the most backward myth of all. Environmentalists aren’t trying to reverse progress. We are working to accelerate it beyond the limitations of outdated and polluting infrastructure.
Consider water treatment: modern filtration systems, green infrastructure like wetlands restoration, and smart monitoring technologies can deliver cleaner water more efficiently than aging industrial-era systems that leak, corrode, and contaminate.
The movement champions innovation. Solar panels, wind turbines, and advanced water purification aren’t a retreat from modern life.
They are modern life, upgraded.
Myth 4: Environmental protection kills economic growth.
I’ve never understood the idea that we must choose between a healthy planet and a healthy economy. Clean water itself is an economic engine. Tourism, fishing, agriculture, and real estate all depend on healthy waterways.
In 2025, global renewable energy generation surpassed coal for the first time, with roughly 91 percent of new renewable projects now cheaper than fossil fuel alternatives.
Bill Mckibben has been writing about it in his Substack.
“…solar last year supplied more power to the Texas grid than coal for the first time, and that new plans have been announced for a 21-gigawatt solar and battery project in California, much of it on land that’s been ruined by over-irrigation, and that coal generation has now fallen in India and China for the first time in a half-century.”
Clean energy jobs in the U.S. now outnumber oil, gas, and coal jobs by more than three to one. The cost of inaction is becoming impossible to ignore: weather-related disasters caused $55 billion in damages in 2025 alone.
The real economic risk isn’t going green. It’s waiting too long to start.
Myth 5: Going green means giving up.
Environmental action is too often framed as sacrifice. But in most cases, greener choices are simply smarter ones.
On water alone, the math is striking. The bottled water industry record $29.9 billion in sales in 2025. We spend billions each year on bottled water to avoid tap water we don’t trust, while generating mountains of plastic waste that end up back in our waterways.
Investing in clean, reliable public water systems and carrying a reusable bottle isn’t deprivation. It's a better deal. The assumption that our current way of doing things is optimal mistakes the familiar for the ideal.
Reusable water bottles, food containers, and shopping bags aren’t just for reducing waste; they also help us avoid microplastics that harm our health.
Myth 6: One person can’t make a difference.
It’s easy to feel small in the face of a crisis this large. But individual action is not just symbolic, it’s structural.
The Clean Water Act was born from public outrage. Ordinary citizens showed up to city halls, wrote letters, and marched through the streets until their government acted. Research published in Science suggests that when a committed minority reaches roughly 25 percent of a population, it can shift majority behavior.
Every conversation about water quality, every vote cast for infrastructure investment, every demand for corporate accountability over a polluted river or aquifer moves the needle.
Progress, however imperfect, compounds. Inaction, however comfortable, also compounds.
The Truth These Myths Are Hiding
These myths don’t circulate by accident. They serve the interests of industries resisting change and politicians avoiding hard choices. For everyone else, they simply delay solutions we already have.
The environmental movement has never been about going backward. From the burning of the Cuyahoga River to the crisis in Flint to the clean energy and clean water innovations underway right now, it has always been about building something better—a future where people and planet can thrive together.
The only thing standing in the way is what we’re willing to believe.
The Environmental Movement Is For Everyone
Since the first Earth Day in 1970, people from every walk of life from farmers and ranchers to faith leaders and scientists to students, families, and communities on the frontlines of environmental disasters, have driven action that prevented countless illnesses and saved millions of lives worldwide.
Economic prosperity and environmental protections are not competing goals. They are part of the same path forward.
Clean energy and sustainability have already created millions of jobs, lowered costs, and delivered healthier air and water. Governments will delay, corporate interests may distract, but they cannot ignore an organized, determined public.
Losing Our Right to Protest
We’re now facing a new and serious threat. Fossil fuel companies and their political allies have spent the last decade quietly working to make protest itself illegal.
Eighteen states have passed laws making it a crime to demonstrate near oil and gas pipelines and other “critical infrastructure.” Five states have approved legislation that can define an active protest as a “riot.”
Congress is now considering proposals that could criminalize protestors who wear masks, block traffic, and impede pipeline construction. Offenders who aren’t citizens could be deported. Nonprofit groups supporting protests could lose their tax-exempt status.
This wave of legislation traces directly back to the Standing Rock protests of 2016, when Indigenous-led resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline drew national and international attention, cost its developer billions, and briefly succeeded in halting construction.
The industry’s response was to buy influence in state legislatures, using groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to spread model “critical infrastructure” laws across the country.
Most recently, a North Dakota jury handed down a $660 million verdict against Greenpeace, later reduced to $345 million, for its role in supporting those protests. If Greenpeace is forced to pay, it could end 55 years of environmental advocacy. The message being sent is unmistakable: speak up, and we will bankrupt you.
The right to protest has always been one of the most powerful tools in the environmental movement. Earth Day itself was born from it. Protecting that right is now inseparable from protecting the water, land, and climate we march for.
Earth Day’s enduring legacy is people working together to shape a livable future and to never doubt that a dedicated group of people can change the world. That legacy depends on those people still being allowed to show up.
To learn more, check out the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL), a Washington-based research group that tracks legislation in the U.S. that criminalizes public dissent.
This essay was inspired by this one from earthday.org and this piece from Circle of Blue.
Which myth about environmentalism did you once believe, and what changed your mind? Keep the conversation going in the comments below.