On April 22, President Obama announced the celebration of the 41st Earth Day. Unappeased, the Earth immediately spawned a tornado that ripped away half of the St. Louis airport, an earthquake in Indonesia, and a rainstorm that kept Michelle Obama from making her scheduled Earth Day event. It's the Earth's party, and it can fuss if it wants to.
While Christians across the world marked Easter and Jews marked Passover, liberals marked their annual ode to neo-paganism with hippy-dippy exercises in green self-righteousness. Of course, they neglected to mention that Gaia herself was a Greek hussy who mythologically created the oceans and the depths by an incestuous relationship with her son, Uranus. They also neglected to mention that one original co-founder of Earth Day was a murderer, that its first backers were tie-dyed socialists who hated capitalism, and that Earth Day itself was timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Lenin.
There are several people who claim credit for the birth of Earth Day. The most prominent was Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-Wis.), an extreme liberal who labeled every problem an environmental one. "Environment is all of America and its problems," he told a crowd of students on that first Earth Day in 1970. "It's the rats in the ghetto, it's a hungry child in a land of affluence, it is housing that is not worthy of the name and neighborhoods not fit to inhabit."
And the biggest environmental problem, Nelson proclaimed, was military spending on the Vietnam War. This was a call for socialist redistributionism, not for conservation of resources.
That extreme position was validated by another original participant in the Earth Day festivities, professor Barry Commoner. "This planet is threatened with destruction and we who live in it with death," said Commoner. "We are in a crisis of survival." Later, Commoner would prescribe a very specific solution to this vague but threatening problem: "Nothing less than a change in the political and social system, including revision of the Constitution, is necessary to save the country from destroying the natural environment. ... Capitalism is the earth's number one enemy."