Earth Day, 2026

My wife and I have been to 50 national parks. Ken Burns is right. These parks are America’s best idea. And it’s a distinctly American invention, starting with Yellowstone National Park in 1872. Since then the world has followed our lead, and you can find thousands of national parks in almost 100 countries.

It was Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican president, who said, “We have got to make up our minds that to squander our natural resources is to tear down our future.”

Look how “conservative” used to be so close to “conservation.”

But now, well, now we’re squandering, and we’re firing park rangers, forestry service workers, and slashing the budget for American’s best idea.

It’s not just National Parks. It’s well worth spending time on this website from the National Resources Defense Council that’s tracking what the White House is doing to the environment and our public health and safety.

We’re squandering and tearing down our future.

We can fix all of this. Congress must use its authority to increase and direct how the money should go to our parks, our resources, and science on the environment. I’m ardent about protecting our public spaces and the people who work in them. I’m also passionate about working to rebuild and replenish our aquifers, which are one of the most important natural resources we have in this area.

Earth Day is a meaningful day to me, not just out of this sense of conservation for the future or protecting the natural beauty that has inspired people from all over the planet. Earth Day is meaningful because it’s built into the very fabric of the people in my community, especially the people who work the land here.

No one knows better about our relationship to the earth than our farmers. They know it’s the soil that drives everything. In our part of the world, which was the epicenter of the Dust Bowl, we know we are the stewards of the environment. Earth Day isn’t just another day here. It’s every day. We take care of the Earth because it takes care of us.

This website is amazing. Every single dot (there are 47 million of them) is a galaxy. Not a solar system. A galaxy.

We all live on one small blue speck on the outskirts of one of these 47 million dots. That’s all we have. There’s no other option (no, not Mars, not today). Squandering what we have is unthinkable.

So let’s celebrate our pale blue dot on this Earth Day, but let’s also embrace our own responsibility and stewardship of the land. So says Carl Sagan:

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.