It’s not just Rome who sees a short-sightedness in the way we mark Earth Day today. For Elizabeth Yeampierre, a Puerto Rican attorney and the executive director of Brooklyn-based community organization UPROSE, Earth Day is merely one marker in a long global history of environmental injustice.

“When you talk about Earth Day, for us, it’s not 50 years, it’s 500 years of extraction, it’s 500 years since slavery, since colonialism,” she says. “And in those 500 years, our communities have managed to survive all of it. Now we are faced with the consequences of those 500 years.”