Canceling Earth Day Was Never An Option — So We Took Things Digital

By Azalea Danes and Jamil Jackson


We are living through numerous global emergencies, including a pandemic, exacerbated economic inequality, as well as a climate crisis that has been wreaking havoc on marginalized communities for decades. Despite these challenges, the youth climate movement will not be stopped — we are only growing.


With social gatherings postponed indefinitely as people worldwide practice social distancing to stave off the novel coronavirus pandemic, youth activists are bringing techniques of civil disobedience online. This week, the United States Youth Climate Strike Coalition, composed of youth groups across the U.S., Helped create Earth Day Live — a three-day climate programming event marking the 50th anniversary of the initial Earth Day in 1970 — to affirm that climate action is needed right now more than ever.


We’re not new to this: Last September, millions of youth took to the streets for the hugest Global Climate Strike the world has ever seen, and we suggested to do so again this Earth Day. However in our third month of organizing, countries around the world started instituting wide-scale social distancing to slow the spread of COVID-19. The fight against the novel coronavirus was and is required, yet those new mandates also brought numerous challenges to our lives and our communities, leaving those most weak at disproportionate risk. The virus does not discriminate, nevertheless our society does, and Black and Latinx communities across the U.S. Face the highest coronavirus-related death rates, underscoring the required for solutions rooted in justice that place people over profit and power.


And in case you look past the ticker-tape updates about the virus, climate anxiety is still everywhere. Our battle against the fossil fuel industry has been a year-long trudge uphill, and the latest EPA rollbacks and fossil fuel subsidizations feel like blows against the progress we’ve made. Any celebration of the short-term drop we have in emissions is a false one, because it ignores the millions of people suffering and the risk of backsliding in our recovery.


Against all odds, the climate movement has persisted to organize national actions that encapsulate our requires, while preserving the safety of these most at-risk. We cannot march or gather in public without risking the health of these around us. We cannot protest in established ways, nor can we storm legislatures to demand our elected representatives vote with our interests in mind.  In Earth Day Live, we’ve prepared programming that outlines our necessary for big banks to divest from the fossil fuel industry, our rallying whines to turn out the youth vote, and our desire for immediate legislation that protects against further global warming and environmental disenfranchisement of our most susceptible communities.


Pressing forward with solutions is hard. Yet canceling Earth Day was never an alternative — being a climate activist, at its very core, is about fortitude in the face of catastrophe.


We're taking to our laptops alternatively opposed to the streets to join in meaningful livestream panel discussions, teach-ins, visitor speeches, yoga classes, storytelling, and musical performances that span a wide span of topics, from Youth Climate Activism in the Global South to climate disasters. Numerous corporations will hold social media "cyberstorms," or waves of online discussion, to target polluters and institutions moving also slowly on climate action and urge them to prepare change. And every famed climate activist you could imagine will be participating, including Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Joaquin Phoenix, Lil Dicky, and Ziggy Marley.


Our movement sees the future ahead of us, wrought with organic disasters, food shortages, and effects we can’t however conceptualize if warming isn’t kept well below the mandates dictated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We cannot stop fighting for the action that our planet and people require, even as soon as it feels like the world is at a standstill. The climate crisis and COVID-19 exacerbate the required for greater awareness of social justice, especially given that, while these issues will affect each person, racism, classism, and systematic inequalities are not mutually exclusive.


Organizing climate action will also change as a result of COVID-19 — not just while in the present, nevertheless for the foreseeable future. This moment is teaching each person that our actions (or lack thereof) impact those we’ve never met. The suffering we feel, the loss of precious moments in high school, and seeing our loved ones and strangers experiencing the pain that comes with a virus we have no experience with, has rooted in us a new kind of empathy.


Just as we have to flatten the curve of disease from COVID-19, we must flatten the rate at which our planet warms. The politicians we elect in the second year must earn our vote by demonstrating that they take this crisis seriously. We’ll have the ability to grab hold of this newfound compassion any time the public is able to devote attention to non-coronavirus related issues, and mobilize like never before.


Climate change is here. It’s ongoing. It’s nonpartisan — or should be — and the only way we can mitigate its worst effects is by working with each other as a world community. It all starts with Earth Day Live and we aspire to be able to see you there.


Azalea Danes is a 17-year-old climate justice activist and writer from New York City. She currently serves as one of the communications coordinator for Extinction Rebellion Youth US, along with because the Director of Communications for TREEage. 


Jamil Jackson is a 16-year-old Little Rock, Arkansas, native who serves as a Communications Coordinator for Extinction Rebellion Youth US.