Earth Day Scam

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I ignored all the well wishers today on earth day. I like the earth. I like digging in it, hiking over it, driving across it, and harvesting crops from it. It keeps me alive, and I do the same in return. I'm not a green freak. I don't shop at Whole Foods. I recycle, but I don't freak out about it. I hate waste. I also hate all that lovely oil, uranium, and other stuff going to waste beneath hectares of vacant wilderness seen by narry a man.

I drove a few extra places today to make sure I did my part to keep plants alive. I was glad I had a car since it was 94F outside and it would have been a long walk and a torturous bike ride at 13:00. Speaking of cars, I love my Saturn and thank God regularly for the untold amounts of money this car has saved me (monthly payments, maintenance, dating costs, fuel, taxes, etc.). No offense to Saturn and many thanks to them, but their hybrid aura gets the same MPG as the XR model according to their own website (22/33mpg compared to 26/34mpg). Do you know what else the two cars have in common? They're both 4 cylinder engines. The hybrid costs $1400 more just in MSRP, not to mention higher taxes, registration, and repair, all to save a few pennies at the pump. What then, I ask, is the use of having a hybrid engine if it doesn't boost fuel economy? This is your government at work- you get shafted.

My gripe with Earth day isn't over the earth, it's over the people who advance it. The Founders of this movement were terrorists. The rest are gypsies, tramps and thieves, who are making a killing getting us to "go green" at great personal expense while the government writes legislation endorsing and ensconcing their misguided agenda. Carbon dioxide is not the original pollutant. Before there were humans and animals at all, plants belched their waste product into the atmosphere, and it was oxygen. Besides, the "natural state" of things is disarray and entropy, not pristine beauty.

If you haven't taken the opportunity to read it, I'm going to give you the opening paragraphs of Jurassic Park.

You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There's been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away -- all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears the earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It's powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. Do you think this is the first time that's happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive glass, like fluorine. When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago we didn't have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.

It would be hubris to assume that something as insignificant as man can destroy the environment.