Dakota Beacon

Yes! The first day of spring arrives March 20. One month later, and just two months from now, comes Earth Day, USA! Hooray! 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. But, don’t laugh too quickly. The libs are playing the long game.

A few years ago environmentalists invoked Gaia, the Greek goddess of Nature. They created Earth Day to rally against our forward-looking way of life. April 22, 2021 marks the 51^st anniversary of Earth Day founded by Wisconsin (there’s that state again) Senator Gaylord Nelson and flower power liberal Ira Einhorn. 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 organize Earth Day overseas. This tale reads like Greek mythology – with about the same credibility.

A projection of human values and sentimental environmentalism onto a neutral material world creates a strange romantic view of nature. Nature-love, coupled with a selective “follow-the-science” mantra create a potent body of false knowledge. It went something like this. 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 already!

Fear mongering drives climate change hysteria. The irrational anxiety that carbon dioxide, the product of human and animal respiration and the basis of all plant life, heightens that dread. 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 to all 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 breathes on a much larger scale. We can’t imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven’t got the humility to try.”

Advances in science, technology, and communication have not banished ignorance, false knowledge, and institutionalized lies. Even as our technology advances, radical environmentalist beliefs became more childish. Amassing facts and data does not automatically translate into knowledge. By themselves they merely become information without context. In turn, the glut of information without meaning becomes garbage. Garbage in; garbage out – GIGO. Environmental activists pose this type of menace. They are long on theatrics and short on wisdom.

Two revealing tidbits show the true motives of radical environmentalists. Vaclav Klaus, former president of the Czech Republic, spoke at the National Press Club, May 27, 2008. He warned America that we were being hoaxed with global warming. “I spent most of my life under the communist regime…which brutally violated human freedom….[I]t was in the name of the Marxist or the proletariat, this time in the name of the planet. Structurally, it is very similar….[I]t is environmental alarmism.

“We are now at the stage where the facts, reason, truth are powerless in the face of the global warming propaganda.

“The green movement is trying to dictate, control, regulate, mastermind our lives. They want to discuss how many children we can have…what kind of cars we can use, how big the refrigerators we can have. I speak as someone who knows what it means to eliminate freedom,…what it means to regulate, to command, to mastermind the economy from above…Environmentalism is an ideology that wants to control the world.”

In May 2019, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Chief of Staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, made a startling admission about the “Green New Deal” when meeting with Democrat Washington Governor Jay Inslee’s climate director, Sam Ricketts. The story appeared in the Washington Post July 10. “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal, is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all. Do you guys think of it as a climate thing? Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing,” said Chakrabarti. Besides getting the US off fossil fuels in 10 years, the proposal also calls for “social, economic, racial, regional, and gender-based justice and equality and cooperative and public ownership.” And the cost? $93 trillion – just to “save the planet.”

Let the school kids go out and pick up trash in the spring (everyone should be doing this anyway) but don’t pollute their 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 (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).