On April 22, 1970, a trio of radical dreamers established the first Earth Day, an annual event designed to assault capitalism, free-markets and mankind.
The initial concept was conceived by Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-WS). Nelson was Congress’ leading environmentalist activist and the mastermind behind those ridiculous teach-ins which were vogue in the Sixties and early Seventies. For those of you who weren’t around back then, during the teach-ins mutinous school instructors would scrap the day’s assigned curriculum, pressure their students to sit cross-legged on the floor, and “rap” about how America was an imperialist nation and discuss why communism wasn’t such a bad idea; it just needed to be implemented properly.
Nelson’s teach-in efforts were aided by a young man named Denis Hayes. Hayes was student body president while at Stanford, and well known for organizing anti-Vietnam war protests.
Rounding out the troika was Professor Paul Ehrlich of Stanford. In 1968 Ehrlich authored the Malthusian missive, The Population Bomb, in which he infamously spouted wild allegations like, “A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people…We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions,” he wrote.
In 1969, following the drug-induced vibes cast across the nation via the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, Senator Nelson met with Ehrlich and reportedly said, “My God—why not a national teach-in on the environment?” Hayes was brought in to play a pivotal role with organization and implementation. After careful consideration a name and date for the event were chosen: the inaugural “Earth Day” would be celebrated April 22, 1970—Russian dictator Vladimir Lenin’s Centennial.
In a New York Times article published the morning after the first Earth Day headlined, “Angry Coordinator of Earth Day,” young Hayes bragged that five years earlier he fled overseas because “I had to get away from America.” Hayes was so committed to his anti-capitalist cause that he made sure his organization did not even produce Earth Day bumper stickers, “You want to know why?” he explained to The Times, because “they go on automobiles.”
Environmentalists have always admired Lenin. He was the first disciple of Karl Marx to gain control of a country, and the opening act of his seven-year reign commenced with the abolition of all private property—a Marxist priority. Despite overseeing a bloody civil war, a devastated economy and a citizenry without hope, Lenin made it a top priority to implement his signature decree, “On Land.” In it he declared that all forests, waters, and minerals to be the exclusive property of the state, and he demanded these resources be protected from use by the public and private enterprise. Selling timber or firewood, mining minerals, or diverting water for farming was strictly prohibited.
Earth Day has never been a celebration of the beauty and bounty of this awesome terrestrial ball. Instead it’s always been an assault on man. During the first decade of Earth Day observances people were proclaimed a polluter. By the Eighties the event’s organizers cast mankind as the tree killer, and, with the Nineties, humans evolved into the animal species annihilator. The global warming scare never really became popular until the late Nineties, and when it did, it provided compatriots at the Earth Day headquarters with the ultimate hook to hang their red berets: humans, particularly Americans, were now screwing up the entire planet’s climate.
Now we have an administration in Washington made up of fellow travelers who were in school for that first Earth Day. They lapped up every word them, and (for now) control the levers of power.
I have two podcasts available that provide you with more details that fly in the face of the human-induced climate change narrative; episodes 137 and 138 of the Brian Sussman Show. Hope you’ll take a listen and share.