As we celebrate the resurrection of our Lord this weekend, I thought I'd pause for a moment and examine how we give honor (ahem) to Mother Earth. After all, in the eyes of some people, Earth Day (April 22) supersedes Easter (April 20) in importance, significance and even worship.
I mean no disrespect, of course. But many readers are already familiar with our Christian faith. What they may be less familiar is how we (cough) honor Gaia.
You see, green living has come to be associated with Gaia worship. To the annoyance of the enviro-nuts, my family lives a remarkably green lifestyle – but we most assuredly don't promote a green agenda (much less worship Gaia). Somehow it's become unacceptable to live green without having a suitably militant green attitude.
Let me give an example. Lately our daughter has been making a breakfast of what she calls "Hobbity food" – toast, diced potatoes and an omelet. I was idly watching her one day when it dawned on me that she was using exclusively homemade or home-grown ingredients, to wit: bread, butter, eggs, garlic, milk, potatoes, cheese, and onions.
We'd grown the wheat, milked the cow, made the cheese, churned the butter, grown the potatoes, onions, and garlic, and raised the chickens.
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I mention this because eating "locally grown food" is one of the benchmark requirements for "green living," according to many ecological footprint calculators, including the one on EarthDay.org. We also recycle, compost, garden organically, work at home (no commute), buy our clothing and household goods secondhand, avoid disposables, have no central heating or air and line-dry our clothes. (The full list of our green-living activities can be found here.) Gosh, by those standards our ecological footprint should be virtually zero, right?
Wrong. Despite our green lifestyle, we scored a rather dismal 3.1 "planets" on the ecological footprint calculator found at EarthDay.org (meaning, it would take 3.1 planets to support the earth's population if everyone lived as we do). We also use a horrifying 13.8 "global acres" of the Earth's productive area.
So my husband and I retook the quiz numerous times, deliberately choosing the variables that would minimize our ecological footprint (vegan diet, zero transportation except by bicycle, no electricity or running water, etc.). Yet no matter how many times we re-took the quiz, we could not reduce our "planetary" score below 2.8 planets. Why?
The culprit, it turns out, is that we reside in America. No matter how green we live, the simple fact that we're Americans dooms us. (This must distress those living in Seattle.) The sins of my country are my sins. So I moved our mythical location to Ecuador, and voilà – our planetary score dropped precipitously even though our parameters were the same.
My guess is that the Earth Day folks won't be satisfied until we reduce the planet's population to half a billion and live naked in caves surviving on roots and berries. I exist, therefore I'm bad. No doubt the Earth Day folks would prefer that I didn't exist at all.
Now compare us to Al Gore, that paragon of ecological virtue, whose mansion, jets and SUVs dwarf the carbon footprint of entire neighborhoods. His utility bills alone are 20 times the national average and 50 times our average.
You see, green living isn't evil. What's evil is the green agenda, a socialist Utopian dictatorship enforced by towering hypocrites with guns.
The use of the term "Utopia" is deliberate. A book by that name was published by Sir Thomas More in 1516 describing the social structure of a mythical island. A friend recently read the book and summarized it as follows:
- No private property ... of virtually any kind, except perhaps your clothes. (see No. 3)
- Discussion of matters of state (politics) outside government council meetings carried the death penalty.
- Everyone wore the same style of clothes with only minor differences denoting gender and marital status.
- Government regulated family sizes. Children were moved about by the state to level populations.
- Work, leisure, eating and sleeping schedules mandated and enforced by the state (magistrate).
- State-mandated housing and yard designs – everything was the same (zoning in the extreme).
- Trade / craftsmanship / career followed families, i.e. father to son. If someone's "genius" was outside the family trade, they were adopted into another family.
- Housing accommodations rotated every 10 years.
- Farm-work details lasted two years and were rotated by mandate; everyone worked on the farm at some point.
- Since there's no private property, there were no locks on any of the house doors, and anyone could enter at any time.
- Personal travel outside your city district required approval papers from the town council, and the "prince" of the city (ruler for life). First offense received severe punishment. Second offense resulted in a sentence of slavery.
- Adultery and fornication were punishable by enslavement and denial of any opportunity to remarry.
My friend concluded, "Essentially all personal liberties are subservient to the 'public good,' defined of course by the state. Any individuality was severely constrained. In a culture that values individual expression and liberty (i.e. the human spirit), a 'Utopian Government' would be hell on earth and could only be maintained by the severest use of force and oppression. Yes, Thomas More thought it was a wonderful paradise. The way the term 'Utopia' is bandied about, it means paradise ... when it should mean hell."
Does this sound like Utopia to you? Yet that's what the green agenda would impose on us.
I'll tell you what Utopia is for us. Utopia is the freedom to raise our children according to our values; to attend the house of worship of our choice; to keep or redistribute the money we earn according to our own decisions; to watch our business grow without the heavy hand of government regulating it; to work our farm according to our own desires.
In short, Utopia is being left alone by meddlesome bureaucrats and do-gooder greenies. Utopia is freedom and independence, not shackles and dependence.
So we won't be doing anything out of the ordinary to celebrate Earth Day. We'll just go about our ordinary lives. And above all, we will continue to worship the Creator, not the created.
It's so much more rewarding in the end.
Media wishing to interview Patrice Lewis, please contact [email protected].
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