Earth Day people

By Llewellyn Rockwell Jr.

Earth Day is passe this year, with neither voters (according to Gallup) nor
college students caring a flip for this secular Holy Day of Obligation.
That leaves the air-head media and the power-hungry government, and their
agents in public-school classrooms, to torment us with their hysterical,
pietistic, statist prattle about the environment. The only tack any truly
free and independent person should take is implacable opposition.

My favorite anti-Earth Day protest from 1990–when Earth Day first became
big news-came from students at a mid-Atlantic state university who held a
21-aerosol can salute to technology in the main courtyard of the school.
The greens went nuts! This year, it might be enough to eat a steak while
sipping Coke from a Styrofoam cup. The greens are increasingly testy and
sensitive to the slightest deviation from their revolting code of Earth
ethics.

What do the Earth Day people want? To control our lives and property via
government coercion with the aim of reducing our standards of living. That’s for starters. Look no further than the Kyoto Treaty to understand this.
All Earth Day people want the Senate to pass it. It would require draconian
changes in our lives and impose a central plan the likes of which we’ve not
seen since World War II. Yet there is no scientific evidence that the
global warming exists, or that if it does exist, it would be a problem, or
if it is a problem, that it is due to fossil-fuel emissions, or if it is
due to such emissions, that reducing them with global mandates would do
anything to stem the tide.

Government can’t plan one year in advance, and weather forecasters can’t
predict ten days in advance, but we are supposed to believe that working
together they can perfectly adjust the temperature of the earth 100 years
down the line. It’s a racket. And this much we know for certain: the people
behind the conspiracy do not have the best interests of people in mind.
They are focused on the welfare of the “environment,” which means
everything imaginable except actual people, and serves as a proxy for their
own power.

Among the regular people who bother to take notice of Earth Day, they will
pledge to clean up litter or recycle grocery bags, or some such other
innocuous bourgeois concern. In fact, these pieties have nothing to do with
the real spirit of Earth Day, which is nicely summed up in the grandiose
and dangerous Earth Charter, a
document heralded by top organizers and promoters of this event.

Here we have the most succinct, and politically correct, statement of
updated socialist thinking available. The pledge: “We must join together to
bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature,
universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace.” The
politically aware know what this translates to: a world economy managed by
a global regulatory regime (“the emerging world community”), with high
taxes on the developed world.

If you doubt it, consider the evils that this malevolent document
attributes to capitalism, a system coded as “the dominant patterns of
production and consumption.” Capitalist patterns “are causing environmental
devastation, the depletion of resources, and a massive extinction of
species. Communities are being undermined. The benefits of development are
not shared equitably and the gap between rich and poor is widening.
Injustice, poverty, ignorance, and violent conflict are widespread and the
cause of great suffering. An unprecedented rise in human population has
overburdened ecological and social systems. The foundations of global
security are threatened. These trends are perilous-but not inevitable.”

Forget that not a word of this left-wing cant is true. Commodity prices are
falling and have been for years, a sure sign that resources are more
abundant than ever. The exceptions are goods that politicians have
deliberately kept off the market with supply restrictions, such as oil. The
“gap” between rich and poor is not growing wider, and who would care if it
were so long as overall standards of living were increasing?

As for human population, judging from experience, there’s no level of
population density that free economies can’t support, as witness the Upper
East Side of Manhattan. Mountains of trash, far from being a grim sign, are
an indicator of prosperity and a market opportunity for collectors and
landfill entrepreneurs (provided the crazies aren’t closing market
opportunities for them). As for human conflicts, those are mostly caused by
government, which these Earth Day people want to further empower.

There is no limit to the political ambitions of these people. Hunters, for
example, won’t appreciate the Charter’s desire to protect all “wild
animals” from “avoidable suffering.” Will excess rabbits and deer face a
lethal injection after these people take control? More likely, meat eating
will be strictly against the law, since these people despise the cow as an
evil source of environmental degradation and methane gas.

The real targets of the Charter, and the whole godforsaken movement, are
economic freedom and private property rights, which are the source of
prosperity and the actual means of managing resources efficiently. But to
the Earth Day people, capitalism must go, to be replaced by an unnamed
system that leads to the “equitable distribution of wealth within nations
and among nations,” ensures “that all trade supports sustainable resource
use, environmental protection, and progressive labor standards,” and
requires “multinational corporations and international financial
organizations to act transparently in the public good,” with the public
good meaning what their government-funded organization says it means.

Just in case you missed the message that these modern-day Rousseau groupies are
serious, consider the final flourish: “In order to build a sustainable
global community, the nations of the world must renew their commitment to
the United Nations, fulfill their obligations under existing international
agreements, and support the implementation of Earth Charter principles with
an international legally binding instrument on environment and
development.”

We can see, then, these Earth Day people are not a friendly bunch,
benevolently devoted to protecting our living space. No, they are as much
a threat to liberty as the socialists of old. Actually, they are worse. At
least the old-time socialists claimed to want the best for the workers and
peasants. The Earth Day people care not a whit for the welfare of regular
people. They are out for their own power, at the expense of the liberty of
the rest of us.

What’s more, there’s not an environmental claim made by the Earth Day
people which has not been debunked, refuted, or exposed in many books and
articles over the last decade by groups like the Competitive Enterprise Institute. You may not have heard the other side, because air-head reporters are too enthralled with
the mythology and religion of Mother Earth to bother looking at the facts.

What political victories the environmentalists have had have reduced our
standards of living. The hundreds of billions of dollars, even trillions,
in lost productivity are just one sign. They are also responsible for the
flaming hot paper cups at Starbucks (bring back Styrofoam!), cold
hamburgers at McDonalds (bring back the Styrofoam hamburger shell!),
showerheads that dribble water, and toilets that don’t flush properly. With
just these example, isn’t it clear that these people are the enemy?

Interesting, too, that a secular age such as ours would spawn one of the
largest and most dangerous cults in human history-the environmentalist
cult-based on lies from top to bottom. Interesting and revealing. Yet, it’s
not a bad idea to celebrate institutions and ideas that are making us
better off. How about Private Property Day? Bio-Technology Day? Or, better
yet, Microsoft Day (just to make a point)?

In any case, if you love liberty, don’t participate in Earth Day. Don’t let
your child be taught in school that capitalism is evil. Don’t let your
minister get away with mixing religion and green politics. And don’t let
anyone foist an agenda for world planning on us in the name of loving the
planet. Their vision is monstrous, and it must be opposed.

Llewellyn Rockwell Jr.

Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. is president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. He also edits a daily news site, LewRockwell.com. Read more of Llewellyn Rockwell Jr.'s articles here.