Dakota Beacon

Just as the manmade global warming hoax has morphed into the less sinister moniker climate change, so too, has Earth Day embarrassingly atrophied into a metaphor for liberal silliness.

 A few years ago environmentalists celebrated Earth Day as a measure of progress they had achieved in “saving the planet.” Earth Day was the rallying point in assaulting capitalism by attacking freedom and liberty.

As part of its early roots, Earth Day was taken as seriously as any religion. Environmentalists invoked Gaia, the Greek goddess of Nature.

April 22, 2016 marks the 46^th anniversary of Earth Day founded by Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson and flower power liberal Ira Einhorn. In a weird twist, Einhorn was later arrested for composting his dead girlfriend. In his pre-Senate days, attorney Arlen Specter defended Einhorn until Einhorn skipped bail and fled the country to organized Earth Day overseas.

Earth Day qualifies as an urban legend through its mystical twists and grasping for facts. The biggest fallacy of radical environmentalism is the distorted view of the relation between humans and nature as if humans were excluded from nature. As often happens, a projection of human values and sentimental environmentalism onto an amoral and neutral material world creates a strange romantic view of nature. Nature-love, reinforced with selective scientific citing, creates a potent body of false knowledge.

A drumbeat of fear mongering drives climate change hysteria. The war on fossil fuels and energy consumption can only result in less prosperity and more poverty. The driving sentiment is the irrational fear that carbon dioxide, the product of human and animal respiration and the basis of all plant life, is dangerous. Mankind is portrayed as the scourge of the goddess Gaia. We have more to fear from rising food and fuel prices than we do from rising seas and temperatures.

Advances in science, technology and communication have not banished ignorance, false knowledge and institutionalized lies. Amassing facts and data does not automatically translate into knowledge. Accumulated facts and data by themselves become information without context. In return, the glut of information without meaning becomes garbage. This is the danger faced from environmental activists pushing Earth Day. They are long on theatrics and short on wisdom.

Long, long ago when the earth was young and undisturbed by the hand of man – in ages past when our pristine planet was at one with the universe and all living things dwelt in harmony – Enough!

In his book “State of Fear” (later made into the movie “Jurassic Park”) Michael Crichton (MD, anthropologist, author and screen writer) could not have been more eloquent testifying to the earth’s might, majesty and magnificence. His words bear repeating on Earth Day to all those who would “save the planet.”

“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 multi-cellular 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.

   “….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.”

Let the school kids go out and pick up trash (everyone should be doing this regularly) but don’t pollute kids’ minds by indoctrinating them with false knowledge under the pretext of “science.” They don’t need the baggage of urban legends.

Dennis M. Patrick can be contacted at P. O. Box 337, Stanley, ND 58784 or (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).