Dakota Beacon

Just as global warming morphed into a hoax, so too has Earth Day embarrassingly atrophied into a laughing stock, a joke, a metaphor for liberal silliness.
Only a few years ago environmentalists celebrated Earth Day as the progress they had achieved in “saving the planet.” In fact, Earth Day became the measure of liberal success in assaulting capitalism by attacking freedom and liberty.

Earth Day used to be taken as seriously as any religion. Environmentalists invoked Gaia the Greek goddess of Nature. School kids were taught to care for Mother Earth. Come spring, classes were dismissed and kids celebrated Earth Day by picking up winter’s litter put there by friends, neighbors and fellow classmates.
Goofy is as goofy does. As a point of interest, one of the principle founders of Earth Day was flower power liberal Ira Einhorn. On stage at Fairmount Park in Philadelphia April 22, 1970, Einhorn wowed his crowd of fellow students advocating peace and free love and Earth Day.

Seven years later on a tip from neighbors, police raided his apartment and discovered he had been composting his dead girlfriend. In a weird twist, the waffling moderate Arlen Specter in his earlier lawyer days defended Einhorn -- that is until Einhorn skipped bail and Specter dropped his case. Einhorn went on to organize Earth Day overseas.
In the movie “Jurassic Park,” based on the book “State of Fear” by Michael Crichton, more eloquent words have never been spoken testifying to the earth’s might, majesty and magnificence. His words bare repeating at length on the occasion of Earth Day.

“You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There’s been life on it for nearly that long,3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away -- all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval.

“Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, bucking to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died...life would survive somewhere....Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again.

“...Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive gas, like fluorine....When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas....Nevertheless life on earth took care of itself....A million years ago is nothing. This planet lives and breaths on a much larger scale. We can’t imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven’t got the humility to try.”

Without a doubt, a drumbeat of fearmongering drives climate change hysteria. The war on fossil fuels and energy consumption can only result in less economic growth and more poverty. The driving sentiment is the irrational fear that carbon dioxide, the product of human respiration and the basis for all life, is dangerous. Thus, mankind is portrayed as the scourge of the earth goddess Gaia. We have more to fear from rising food and gas prices than we do from rising seas and temperatures.

Thankfully, this year Earth Day received little more than a passing mention. Maybe Earth Day is now properly dismissed as a jest and an afterthought. To believe that mankind can alter the progress of earth’s ages is the height of arrogance and folly.
Fare thee well, Cruel Impostor.