On April 22, millions of people all over the world will come together, hold hands and celebrate Earth Day. This is the day that is meant to agree and show support for environmental protection initiatives. It’s an admirable concept, but it’s still a day with feigned and hypocritcal outrage.
Let’s face it: Earth Day is to apologize for our technological development over the last 100 to 200 years.
The likes of Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio and David Suzuki will claim how horrible humans are and how we should feel ashamed for consuming fossil fuels and living a higher standard of living than our predecessors from centuries ago. Meanwhile, they’ll fly on their private planes and shout from the heavens that we’re stupid.
If there is one thing that Earth Hour and Earth Day teach us it’s this: we should be grateful, thankful and appreciative that capitalists, free markets and the free-thinking, idea-generating entrepreneur have helped us ascend from the caves of the stone age into the 21st century where we can turn on our lights at anytime we wish, allow machines to clean our dishes and clothes and go for a drive to the local grocery store.
Yes, the Earth has been munificent as it has given us plenty of resources to consume and improve our lives. We shouldn’t feel as if we’re an atrocious species for taking stuff out of the ground and using it to fuel airplanes and trains, lawnmowers and air conditioners.
Throughout Friday, the politicians, the academics, the activists and the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) will pontificate their didacticisms on doom and gloom about the planet. It’s as if we haven’t heard it before. But we have, though.
Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute did an incredible job this week outlining 18 wrong predictions made when Earth Day was first started. Here are a few of them:
1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.
3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
Predictions like these still transpire, and the people eat it up. Remember when Al Gore said the Arctic would be ice free by 2013 or 2014 (it’s actually expanded)? Remember when politicians worldwide said there were only hours or days left to stop global warming from destroying civilization? Remember when the UN said in 2007 that there were only four years left to save the world?
It can be oftentimes ridiculous, and downright comical, to witness the phalanx of green proponents who condemn us commoners for flipping on a light switch while others maintain immense properties.
The Earth is a beautiful and wonderful blue pearl in an astronomical universe. This has been the place that has seen much bloodshed and destruction. However, it’s also been the destination where we’ve developed technologies that provide instant communication or technologies that save human lives.
The amount of progress that has unfolded on this divine planet in the last century alone is astounding. Just imagine what will take place in the next 100 years! No. We shouldn’t feel apologetic or remorseful for what we all have accomplished on Earth.
If you do feel repentant then the best thing to do is turn off your computer right now, throw your smartphone into the trash, turn off all of your lights and move into the forest. We’re looking at you Leonardo DiCaprio!
On Earth Day, perhaps you need a dose of some George Carlin, who quipped:
“I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists; these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is there aren’t enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for their Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don’t give a shit about the planet. They don’t care about the planet. Not in the abstract they don’t. Not in the abstract they don’t. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that some day in the future, they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn’t impress me.”
In the end, we’re better off listening to someone like George Carlin than Al Gore.
Ask the Earth Day Environuts if they want to go back 100 years to outhouses, outside wells with a hand pump for water and horses or walking for transportation? I am so tired of the chicken little attitudes of so many people.