There’s a patch of wild grass behind my tiny house I’ve never mowed. Something always shows up there — a beetle, a moth, a spider doing its thing. So I made a quiet deal with that patch of ground: I leave it alone, it does its thing.
It’s a small thing. But on Earth Day, small things are what I think about.
Yesterday was Earth Day 2026, and the theme is “Our Power, Our Planet.” I like that. Not “our crisis” — our power. That framing matters. It says the story isn’t over.
And honestly, the news backs that up more than you’d think.
The Wins Worth Talking About
Climate news tends to be doom and gloom, which, fair — there's a lot of doom and gloom to report. But running alongside it is another story that doesn't get nearly enough airtime. So let's talk about that one today.
Energy first. In 2025, wind and solar beat out fossil fuels in EU electricity generation for the first time ever. Clean energy hit 30% of Europe's electricity mix, fossil fuels dropped to 29%. Solar grew more than 20% for the fourth year in a row. In 19 EU countries, coal is now less than 5% of the grid. A decade ago that would've sounded like a fantasy.
Norway is out ahead of everyone else. Nearly 90% of new cars sold there in 2024 were electric, and by September that year, EVs actually outnumbered gas-powered cars on Norwegian roads — a world first. The electric car transition isn't a someday thing in Oslo. It's just what's happening.
Here in the US, federal policy has been rough. But the market didn't get the memo. In 2025, over 90% of new electricity capacity added in the US came from clean sources — nearly 50 gigawatts of solar, wind, and batteries. No new coal plants. Zero. New England's last coal plant shut down for good. States kept building, kept expanding heat pumps and EV charging and solar permitting, even while Washington was doing the opposite. The clean energy transition here is running on momentum now, not permission.
The oceans got some good news too. The High Seas Treaty became international law on January 17, 2026. After almost twenty years of negotiations, 60 countries finally ratified it and it crossed the finish line. For the first time, the parts of the ocean that don't belong to any country — about two-thirds of it — have actual legal protections. Greenpeace called it the biggest conservation win ever. Hard to argue with that.
France banned PFAS — those "forever chemicals" in waterproof jackets, cosmetics, all kinds of everyday stuff — starting January 1, 2026. Drinking water testing is now mandatory. Polluters pay. One country, but the rest of Europe is watching.
And then there's this one that I keep thinking about. Underground, beneath basically every forest and field on the planet, there are fungal networks — mycorrhizal fungi — connecting plant roots together, moving nutrients around, and storing carbon. About 13 billion tons of it a year. The planet has had its own carbon capture system running this whole time and we're only just starting to understand it. Dr. Toby Kiers just won the 2026 Tyler Prize — the Nobel Prize equivalent for the environment — for her work studying and mapping these networks. Nature's been doing the work quietly without any press releases.
Our Power
Earth Day's official 2026 manifesto frames the theme around a specific idea: environmental progress doesn't depend on any one administration or election. It's built by communities, workers, families, and educators who just keep showing up for the places they live.
I think about that from up a holler in Elkhorn City. I live in a tiny house in Appalachia — mountains and creeks in every direction, more sky than most people see in a week. I'm not out there documenting it or doing anything particularly noble. But I do care about it. The unmowed grass out back is about as far as my Earth Day activism goes, honestly — though seeing the butterflies and bumblebees and carpenter bees floating around out there genuinely pleases me. Maybe a sweat bee or two in there as well. They've claimed that patch, and I'm glad they have.
Maybe that's enough. Maybe caring about where you live — even quietly, even imperfectly — is where it starts.
The wins I listed above didn't happen because one person at the top decided to make it happen. They happened because enough people kept pushing long enough for the needle to move. The EU energy transition. Norway's EV numbers. The High Seas Treaty — two decades of work by scientists and small island nations who just wouldn't drop it. US states building clean energy anyway. That's what it looks like when it actually works.
Our power is real. It's just slow and doesn't make for great headlines.
56 Years
The first Earth Day was April 22, 1970. Senator Gaylord Nelson and activist Denis Hayes picked that date on purpose — a weekday between spring break and finals, built to pull students in. Twenty million Americans showed up. Ten percent of the country.
Fifty-six years later, Earth Day has grown into one of the largest civic events on the planet — marked across more than 190 countries. The movement that started as a protest against dirty air and toxic water is still going. Still finding wins.
That's what I want to sit with today. Not the doom — that'll still be there tomorrow. Just the fact that Europe is running on more wind and solar than fossil fuels. That the US kept building clean energy even when the government stopped caring. That the oceans finally have a law. That somewhere under my unmowed grass a fungal network is quietly storing carbon.
A billion people think the planet is worth showing up for.
I'm one of them.
Our power. Our planet. Let's not waste either one.
🌱 Happy Belated Earth Day.