The grandest gestures for the planet are usually made with speeches. The best one we know of was made with a head of lettuce.
A billion people, one day
On 22 April, more than a billion people around the globe take part in Earth Day — people of every nationality and background voicing their appreciation for the planet and demanding its protection. Held in more than 175 countries, and recognised by the United Nations as International Mother Earth Day, it is one of the largest secular observances on earth. The scale is the point: a coordinated, planet-wide insistence that, as the organisers put it, the Earth won't wait.
Make a Salad, again
For anyone in New York, the place to mark it was the High Line, where the Fluxus artist Alison Knowles restaged one of her iconic works: Make a Salad, first performed in 1962. The piece is exactly what it sounds like, and far stranger than it sounds. Knowles chops lettuce and other vegetables in time to live music, then produces an enormous salad by tossing the ingredients together in one grand, theatrical gesture — and shares it with the crowd. It is performance, meal and communion at once: a work of art you can eat, made from the very thing the day is about.
Fluxus, fifty years on
That a half-century-old Fluxus event felt perfectly at home on the High Line — itself a piece of post-industrial landscape reclaimed as a public garden in the sky — is its own quiet argument. Knowles and the Fluxus movement always insisted that art should dissolve into life, that the everyday act (chopping, eating, sharing) could be the artwork. Staging it on Earth Day, in a garden built on an abandoned railway, closed a loop between art, nature and the city that few official ceremonies ever manage.
Reading it again in 2026
The environmental conversation has only grown louder and more anxious since, which makes the generosity of Knowles's gesture feel more valuable, not less. Make a Salad doesn't lecture; it feeds people, together, from the ground up — a small, joyful model of exactly the collective, hands-in-the-dirt spirit the day calls for. It belongs in our archive with the other moments where culture met conscience, from One Billion Rising to the victory at Green Hill. Mobilise the planet from the ground up, the day says. Knowles did it with a salad bowl.