OPINION:
Tomorrow is Good Friday, the day on which Jesus Christ was crucified. More important to many is that it’s also Earth Day, the annual gala that’s taken on the trappings of a pagan religious holiday. At some level, it’s good to celebrate Earth, the source of life and home of humanity. After all, we have to live somewhere. Environmentalists, however, seem divided between those who venerate the planet as a deity and those who think it’s so fragile that it must be saved from everyone but themselves.
Newsweek magazine dismissed the first Earth Day in 1970 as “a bizarre nationwide rain dance.” The only difference between then and now is that the rain dancers moved into the government and pushed their views on impressionable school children around the world. The Environmental Protection Agency website encourages kids to “Join with other teens to green your energy scene,” because nothing says “cool” quite like earning the EPA’s coveted title of “Climate Ambassador.” Instead of a “rain dance,” kids can help save the planet by downloading a rap tune by bureaucrats with inspiring lyrics like:
The USA is where we are to kick a new trend and to raise the bar.
The climate is changing and that’s a fact,
Bears don’t know when to take a nap,
On top of that it won’t be cool when the flood waters rise and mosquitoes rule.
It’s time to get off the couch and start to move.
Honestly, the lame song keeps going like that for five minutes.
Earth Day has become inextricably linked with global-warming mania. Al Gore - a man with one of the largest carbon footprints in the world - recently likened the struggle to reduce emissions to the civil-rights movement. This is in keeping with the sanctimonious tone that usually accompanies Earth Day proclamations. To the radical greens, it’s a day for humanity to engage in self-abasement, bow before the altar of Gaia and apologize for the offense against nature of simply being alive. It’s a day to conjure fears, preach limits and condemn the capitalist system that created a country wealthy enough to indulge these shiftless hippies in the first place.
Earth Day founder Sen. Gaylord Nelson, Wisconsin Democrat, said in 1970 that the holiday was the “birth date of a new American ethic that rejects the frontier philosophy that the continent was put here for our plunder.” Modernist propaganda aside, the notion that man is master of the Earth and not its supplicant is much older than the United States, and originates with a higher authority. As God instructed Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground. … I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.”
The Bible says, “God saw all that He had made, and it was very good.” Despite the cries of the doomsayers, alarmists and pessimists, it still is.
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