Yesterday was Earth Day. It was promoted by some truly awful people. Science 2.0 explains:
In 1970, Denis Hayes, former student body president at Stanford and an avowed communist, was the driving force behind the first Earth Day, to help students protest what he called a collapsing environment. One that could only be saved by more centralized government control…he chose April 22nd of 1970 because it was the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s birthday. Everyone knew that. The New York Times called Hayes the “Angry Coordinator of Earth Day” and included his communist beliefs in their article. The L.A. City Council was concerned about participating at all because of the link to Lenin and asked them to change the date. Promoters refused, it had to be April 22nd of 1970. The resolution to allow it barely passed 8-6, even in a city dominated by Democrats.
Many of the green leaders who promoted Earth Day in the 1970s supported letting hundreds of millions of people die of starvation or disease to “save the Earth.” Instapundit explains:
Tens or hundreds of millions of the world’s poor have died from malaria as a direct result of the multination ban on the use of DDT, driven by false assertions about its harmful effects on various bird species, promulgated from the very first Earth Day in 1970. Then there was the observation made in 1971 by Michael McCloskey, the former executive director of the Sierra Club, during an Ethiopian famine:
“The worst thing we could do is give aid…. the best thing would be to just let nature seek its own balance and to let the people there just starve.”
In 1990, the late Alexander King, cofounder of the Club of Rome in 1968, argued in the context of the use of DDT to control malaria:
“My own doubts came when DDT was introduced for civilian use. In Guyana, within two years it had almost eliminated malaria, but at the same time, the birth rate had doubled. … My chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it has greatly added to the population problem.”
For left-wing environmental ideologues, humans are nothing more than environmentally destructive mouths to feed without moral standing. (The Nazi term was “useless eaters.”) Nor, implicitly, do humans have the intelligence, inventiveness, and ingenuity to solve problems. Au contraire: Simply because of the laws of large numbers, some substantial numbers of people are and will be geniuses.
I return, as I have so many times, to the wisdom of Dogbert: “You can’t save the earth unless you’re willing to make other people sacrifice.” That is the true theme of all Earth Days, yesterday, today, tomorrow, and forever.
