Artist Michael Gresalfi explores the history of protest posters and their use for International Mother Earth Day (22nd April) through his own protest painting, “Replenish The Earth”. Michael invites fellow ClimateCultures members to share their Earth Month creations.
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While Earth Month (and Earth Day) originated in the United States, it has become a massive global phenomenon. Today, it is recognized in over 193 countries, with approximately one billion people participating in environmental actions each April. In 2009, the UN officially designated April 22nd as ‘International Mother Earth Day.’ This solidified the April date as the primary global standard.
Earth Month needs artists like you
Artists of all mediums have engaged in this annual event through many different ways, including designing and then displaying ‘protest posters.’ From the broadsheets of the Reformation to the neon-soaked digital projections of today, protest posters have been used as a visual megaphone, and to get the message out in public forums to the people.
Legend says Martin Luther kicked things off by nailing his Ninety-Five Theses to a church door. Whether he used nails or glue, he effectively used the first ‘protest poster’ to challenge the most powerful institution in Europe, the Catholic Church and its Pope.
The Suffragettes were the first to master protest branding. They realized that for a movement to be taken seriously, it needed a cohesive look. They used purple (dignity), white (purity), and green (hope) on banners and sashes.
A golden age of protest posters
Perhaps the 1960s and 1970s might be considered the golden age of protest posters. Both the civil rights movement, and the anti-Vietnam war movement maximized the use of bold, artistic, and visceral protest posters and other forms of imagery for mass media consumption.
Here is a sample of those vintage environmental protest posters:
The advent of the so called ‘digital revolution’ had a major impact on the universal growth of protest posters. This phenomenon was kick-started by the accessibility of personal computers, affordable color printers, and the Internet.
“Replenish The Earth” – a call to creative action
So, my fellow ClimateCultures members, what are you creating to share during Earth Month? For me, I enjoy creating environmental protest paintings. They tend to look more like posters and typically each one reflects upon a single environmental issue, although I have presented up to a dozen such paintings within a solo gallery show, under the title “Our Changing Planet.” If interested, you can view one of my science-subtitled slide shows on my website.
So, here we are, only a month away from April, and the start of Earth Month. I am busy creating new environmental protest paintings (my painted posters) and looking for opportunities to both share my work and hopefully stimulate others to draw on their own creative muse and engage in this fight for the very survival of our Blue Jewel, planet Earth!
Will you join me and others around the world and create and share your personal protest against one or more of the environmental wounds we humans have caused to our home in the stars?
Here is an Earth Day protest poster that I just completed, entitled “Replenish The Earth.”
This climate-focused protest painting frames the push by Elon Musk to populate Mars as an invasive distraction, arguing that our true mission is not to escape to a dead planet, but to honor and restore the interconnected, breathing cycle of life that flourishes on our home world.
Find more
From 2026, ClimateCultures is inviting members to say a sentence or two about how they use AI in their work and in their posts for us. We will be exploring this here and at our ClimateCultures & more Substack. For this post, Michael did not use AI. See The Wood Wide Web – Fruitful Collaboration for his use of AI in earlier post, and Eternal Forest Sanctuary: Vision to Living Commitment by Evgenia Emets for insights into her use of AI.
Earth Month runs throughout April. You can read about International Mother Earth Day, 22nd April 2026 at earthday.org, which includes an Earth Hub of resources. The site also covers previous years’ themes and campaigns, including Artists for the Earth last year. The 2025 theme continues this year: “Our Power, Our Planet”.
In Pictures: The Defiant Art of the Protest Poster by Figgy Guyver (Frieze, 2019) reviews Joanne Ripon’s book, The Art of Protest (Gemini Books, 2019), published with Amnesty International, and showing how protest posters have changed throughout history. The article is illustrated with several examples. And Orion Magazine’s Posters for the Planet piece (October 2022) features examples from the Princeton Architectural Press book, Posters for the Planet – Tear, Paste, Protest: 50 Reusable and Recyclable Posters.
ClimateCultures featured Michael’s science-subtitled video of “Our Changing Planet”, his exhibition of protest paintings, in our Creative Showcase.
