The world will celebrate Earth Day on Wednesday. It will be, as it always has been, a festival of nonsense that has more downside than it does benefits.

The first Earth Day was held on April 22, 1970, the 100th birthday of communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin. Probably just a coincidence, but “given that most of the modern environmentalist movement grew out of the far left student movement of the 1960s,” it is, as a Competitive Enterprise Institute scholar once said, “all too fitting.”

“Most environmental economists of the time believed that only socialist countries would ably protect the environment, because the governments there were acting for the good of all mankind, while capitalists in the West cared only about profit maximization and not a whit about the environment,” the late R.J. Smith wrote for CEI’s blog in 2015.

“Thus it was no surprise that the conventional wisdom would turn a generation of young people toward socialism as the only way to protect the Earth.”

Whatever the intentions were then, Earth Day has become far less about the environment and ecological stewardship than a vehicle to further the Democratic Party agenda, which at its base is an effort to rule citizens rather than represent them, to overtax, overregulate and overstep constitutional boundaries.

In its present form, Earth Day is an occasion for eco-zealots to lecture the rest of us about our green shortcomings, launch into maddening tirades, chant like lunatics, indoctrinate children and in general ignore the science the Democratic Party purports to believe in, as well as the achievements of man that they want to limit — lighting, heating, air conditioning, air travel and the freedom that automobiles have advanced.

Rather than take the day to rue our progress, we should, as economist Mark Perry has long suggested, use it to take a moment to be thankful for the “bountiful natural resources” found on our planet. Had man not capitalized on these gifts, we would be living not in harmony with nature but in constant fear of it because nature is a beast. We would also be mired in poverty.

Yet the fanatics want us to turn off the lights on Earth Hour, a separate event created by the World Wildlife Fund that’s held on the last Saturday in March from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. locally. They want 60 minutes of the darkness the North Koreans go through every night. Perry suggests we instead celebrate Human Achievement Hour.

There’s no way around the fact that Earth Day has become polluted by political correctness and ignorance.

“Earth Day has devolved into an occasion for environmental activists to prophesy apocalypse, dish anti-technology dirt, and proselytize for a ‘woke,’ liberal agenda. Passion and zeal routinely trump science, and provability takes a back seat to plausibility,” Henry I. Miller and Jeff Stier wrote for I&I in 2022.

That first Earth Day was largely fueled by Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” the 1962 book that “touched off a national debate on the use of chemical pesticides, the responsibility of science, and the limits of technological progress” and “stirred an awakening of public environmental consciousness.”

But as Miller and Stier point out, it was “replete with gross misrepresentations and atrocious scholarship.” According to late entomologist J. Gordon Edwards, Carson was “loose with the facts” and deliberately worded “many sentences in such a way as to make them imply certain things without actually saying them.” She also carefully left out “everything that failed to support her thesis” and filled her book “with references from very unscientific sources.”

“It slowly dawned on me,” the Sierra Club and Audubon Society member wrote in a 1992 essay, “that Rachel Carson was not interested in the truth about those topics, and that I really was being duped, along with millions of other Americans.”

That’s a sentence that could be used to describe the entire environmental movement. 

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board