Earth Day began on April 22, 1970, when some twenty million people across the United States poured into the streets against the poisoning of air, water, and land by industry. In the decades since, corporations and governments have worked to turn it into a day of recycling tips and green branding, while the same system that drives ecological collapse keeps expanding. The environmental justice movement has refused that framing. It was born in struggles like the 1982 protests against a toxic waste dump in the majority-Black community of Warren County, North Carolina, and it insists that the destruction of the earth is inseparable from racism, colonialism, and capitalism.

The climate crisis is not caused by humanity in general. Just one hundred fossil fuel producers have been linked to more than seventy percent of global industrial emissions since 1988, and the US military is the largest institutional consumer of oil on the planet. Those who suffer first and worst are the peoples of the Global South and frontline communities everywhere, who defend their land and water at great cost. In 1995 the Nigerian state hanged Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists for confronting Shell in the Niger Delta. In 2016 Berta Cáceres was assassinated in Honduras for leading her Lenca people against a dam, and that same year Indigenous water protectors at Standing Rock stood against an oil pipeline.

Another world is possible, and it is already being fought for. It lives in Thomas Sankara's campaigns to plant millions of trees against the advancing desert, in the people of Cochabamba driving out a privatized water company, and in peasant movements fighting for food sovereignty. Defending the earth means ending a system that treats land, water, and people as resources to be used up for profit. We need a future built on collective care for the planet and for each other.

• 1 print shipped in a rigid mailer (made from recycled cardstock)
• printed on acid-free, premium matte-photo paper

• paper weight + thickness: 250/m² / 66lbs 

*frame not included*