Earth Day 2026 carries the theme Our Power, Our Planet — a rallying cry for people everywhere to reclaim their voice, their rights, and their future. This year’s theme is organized around two pillars that, taken together, define the environmental challenge of this moment. The first is the defense of hard-won environmental protections: across the world, the environmental safeguards that took generations to build are facing significant legal and political pressure. The second is the affirmative vision of a more renewable economic future: economic prosperity and environmental protection need not be competing goals — they can advance together, with renewable energy projects creating new jobs while reducing environmental impact.
For environmental lawyers, these two pillars are not background — they are the substance of what we do every day. The “power” at stake in environmental law is jurisdictional authority, regulatory mandate, and judicial precedent. It is the power of a statute to compel cleanup, the power of an agency to set a standard enforceable in court, and the power of a community to hold a polluter accountable. And the “planet” at the center of this year’s theme — clean air, clean water, stable climate, functional ecosystems — is precisely what those legal powers exist to defend. The question this Earth Week is whether those powers are being exercised, expanded, or dismantled, and what that means for the businesses, municipalities, and communities that depend on a coherent legal framework to navigate their environmental obligations.
This Earth Week, we are once again launching a series of blogs that takes the theme Our Power, Our Planet seriously as a legal proposition — examining where federal and state environmental power is expanding, where it is contracting, and what is at stake for our planet in either case.
Tuesday — Oregon’s Extended Producer Responsibility Law: A Constitutional Challenge with Potential National Implications
On Tuesday, we will publish a blog that examines Oregon’s extended producer responsibility framework — a prime example of states moving boldly into regulatory space that federal law has never entered. The law reshapes the obligations of producers and brand owners in the service of waste reduction and a more circular economy. We will examine the constitutional challenge it is now facing in federal court and what the outcome could mean for EPR programs across the country and beyond.
Wednesday — Two Perspectives on Power and the Clean Energy Economy
OSHA and Climate Change
On Wednesday, our blog will discuss the implications associated with a warming planet and how workers are among the first to bear the consequences of this changing climate. Extreme heat, intensifying storms, and the physical hazards of the energy transition are reshaping what worker safety means in practice, touching both pillars of this year’s theme: protecting workers from the harms a changing climate already inflicts, and ensuring that the green economy being built to address it is itself a safe one. We will explore where OSHA’s power currently stands, what obligations it imposes on employers today, and what a more — or less — assertive federal posture means for the workers most exposed to a changing climate.
Renewable Energy and the NIMBY Problem
If Our Power is to mean anything for our planet’s climate future, it must eventually translate into built infrastructure — wind turbines, solar arrays, transmission lines, battery storage. Yet some of the most determined opposition to those projects comes from neighboring landowners, local governments, and community groups invoking zoning authority, state siting laws, and environmental review processes. We will examine how that tension is playing out in the courts and legislatures, and what legal mechanisms exist to align local power with the broader imperatives of decarbonization.
Thursday — EPA’s Endangerment Finding and other Clean Air Act Issues
There is no cleaner illustration of what it means to defend environmental protections — the first pillar of this year’s theme — than the fate of EPA’s Endangerment Finding. The Endangerment Finding is the legal foundation of federal climate authority: the agency’s determination that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, and the predicate for virtually every Clean Air Act climate regulation that followed. That foundation is now under direct challenge. On Thursday, we will examine its legal architecture, the current efforts to rescind or modify it, and what a world without it looks like for the federal government’s power to protect our planet from its defining long-term threat.
In addition to greenhouse gases, the Clean Air Act’s regulation of criteria pollutants has also been the subject of recent rulemaking and litigation. On Thursday, we will discuss the status of EPA’s review of the NAAQS and the status of various cases challenging EPA’s implementation and review of the existing NAAQS.
Friday — The Endangerment Finding and Climate Nuisance Litigation
In AEP v. Connecticut (2011), the Supreme Court held that the Clean Air Act displaced common law nuisance lcaims against greenhouse gas emitters because EPA had authority to regulate those emissions. Now EPA says it does not. On Friday, we will explore the paradox this creates and ask the question the receissions’authors may not have intended to raise: if federal regulation no longer occupies the field, who fills the void? The answer may be state attorneys general, municipalities, and private plaintiffs wielding common law nuisance and state tort theories. And their targets may extend well beyond the fossil fuel companies that have comminated climate litigation to date.
Saturday — The Clean Water Act and Wetlands in the Wake of Sackett
Wetlands are among the most productive and protective ecosystems on our planet — filtering water, storing carbon, buffering floods, and sustaining biodiversity. They are also, since the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Sackett v. EPA, substantially less protected by federal law. By eliminating the “significant nexus” test, Sackett contracted federal power over millions of acres of wetlands in a single ruling — a stark example of the erosion of environmental protections that Earth Day 2026 was organized to confront. On Saturday, we will close out our blog series by examining what that contraction means in practice for permitting, enforcement, development, and land use, and whether state power is positioned — legally and politically — to restore what federal law no longer covers.
This year’s theme puts civic action, rather than personal lifestyle changes, at the center — pushing back against the idea that environmental progress depends only on who is in federal office. The same is true of environmental law. The statutes, regulations, and judicial decisions that protect clean air, clean water, and a stable climate were built by engaged advocates, informed clients, and skilled counsel — and they will be defended, adapted, or lost the same way. That is what Our Power, Our Planet means to us this Earth Week. We hope you will join us for the conversation.