COMMENTARY | Today is Earth Day, the annual bacchanalia of self abuse invented by the environmental movement to remind everyone that the human race is a pestilence upon this planet. It is a celebration by the self righteous for the hysterical.
Robert Zubrin, writing for the Washington Times, points out the inconvenient truth of the carnage wrought in the name of the environment, the better to contain that cancer known as humanity. The death toll is in the hundreds of millions, including infanticide conducted on behalf of population control in China and preventable deaths from malaria in the Third World thanks to the banning of DDT.
The desire for clean air and water is being used by professional agitators to stop projects that would provide energy and natural resources, as Brian McGraw points out in the Daily Caller. President Barack Obama's resistance to the Keystone XL pipeline is just one battle in this constant war of environmental hysterics against human progress.
The Endangered Species Act has been used to stop development and, in the case of California's Central Valley, to create a desert where once was fertile farmland because of something called the delta smelt. Former Alaska Gov Sarah Palin sarcastically suggested that human lives were being destroyed for the sake of bait.
Here is a modest proposal. Let's cancel Earth Day. Environmentalism has been used to commit too many atrocities to be a cause to be celebrated. If anything, Earth Day should be a day of mourning and reflection for all the lives that hugging the planet has taken and snuffed out.
Zubrin has an interesting idea. How about a day that celebrates the accomplishments by human beings to make human life more bearable? He calls it Civilization Day, but it could also be Technology Day or Human Achievement Day.
Let us celebrate those achievements, from fire and the wheel, down to the latest computer gadget and medical procedure that has improved the lot of human beings. Instead of worshiping flowers and trees, let us honor men and women who have created beneficial things. Let us no longer think of humanity as a disease, but rather as the crowning achievement of evolution, who has progressed from the caves to the stars in just a few thousand years.
By all means be good stewards of the planet. But without human beings, who would there be to appreciate the Earth?
