Earth Day 2015 – 45th Anniversary… Looking Back

Earth Day is celebrated around the world on April 22nd. Some cities start celebrating a week in advance, ending the recognition of Earth Week on April 22nd. Others host month long events to stress the importance of teaching about our environment. The United Nations celebrates Earth Day each year on the March equinox, which is often March 20th, a tradition which was founded by peace activist John McConnell in 1969.

Everyone I know would like our water, food, and environment to be cleaner and would like to preserve our natural resources, the beauty of nature and all the species of plants and animals throughout the world… true conservation. And there has been some innovative progress in many of those arenas. Therefore, on the surface Earth Day seems like a holiday and concept that we all should get behind. But there are some interesting realities about both Earth Day and its proponents that few realize but that everyone should know about.

By Marion Algier – Ask Marion

Some Earth Day Reality:

40th (Now 45th) Anniversary of 1st Earth Day – A Grim Reminder of Immigration and Devastation of a Vision

2015 is the 45th Anniversary of the 1st Earth Day and re-posting this article from 2010 has become my Earth Day Anniversary Tradition. So when some indoctrinated college student or old hippie corners you with their Earth Day spiel, presentation, or product… get their email and send them the link to this post. Ask Marion~

This is also a great article to use when contacting your Senator and Congressman: 40th (now 45th) Anniversary of 1st Earth Day a Grim Reminder of Immigration’s Devastation of a Vision – We can solve two problems at once. If we stop illegal immigration and cut immigration in general… We will have no need for Cap and Trade and we will solve our illegal alien (Hispanic and Muslim) problems, both groups that do not assimilate and reproduce in large numbers. Just by doing this one thing we will improve the quality of life of all Americans and legal aliens.

By Roy Beck, Sunday, April 18, 2010, 7:41 PM EDT – Originally Cross-Posted: by Ask Marion on 4.23.2010 – Updated 2.22.2012

THURSDAY IS THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FIRST EARTH DAY — AND A GRIM REMINDER OF HOW IMMIGRATION HAS UNDERCUT VIRTUALLY ALL ENVIRONMENTAL PROGRESS.

President Clinton’s Task Force understood it. The Father of Earth Day understood it. You and I understand it. Why does Congress not understand that U.S. environmental sustainability is not possible unless we greatly reduce immigration numbers?

What does sustainability mean? It means that the way we live today will not prevent our grandchildren from enjoying the same things we enjoy. The Golden Rule is at the heart of it.

Sustainability was the big idea 40 45 years ago when much of the nation’s attention was drawn to the events and news of the first Earth Day. I was a cub newspaper reporter covering the events. And I remember well that an important theme in 1970 was that sustainability required the U.S. to begin to stabilize its population after having added the SECOND 100 million in just 55 years.

Well, now we’ve added the THIRD 100 million in less than the 40 years since that first Earth Day and we’re on pace to add the FOURTH 100 million even faster!

Because of this massive population explosion, progress on environmental quality in recent years has stalled. The Chesapeake Bay, for example, is just about as near death today as it was in 1970.

And around 1 MILLION acres of natural habitat and farmland are cleared, scraped and developed each year just to accommodate this rapid population growth.

Nearly all of the population growth is caused by the increases in immigration that Congress ordered or allowed since 1970. For every restriction and cost that the government has put on us since then to improve environmental quality, it has negated part or all of the benefits by forcing high population growth through radically increased immigration numbers.

That is why the Father of Earth Day, Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-Wis.), made U.S. population stabilization such an important part of the teaching back in 1970 and why he spent much of the last 20 years warning of the environmental dangers of continuing our high-immigration policies.

Even President Clinton’s Population and Consumption Task Force concluded in 1996 that the immigration increases since the first Earth Day had to be rolled back.

The Task Force was a bit nervous about taking on the immigration issues (just like most environmentalists are):

As a matter of public debate, immigration is a sensitive and explosive issue, and both legal and illegal immigration must be addressed with great sensitivity and care in order to advance the debate. We acknowledge these impediments to easy and informal dialogue, and we urge that participants take appropriate care so that a reasoned discussion of immigration and the American future can begin.

But then Pres. Clinton’s Task Force stated forcefully:

We believe that reducing current immigration levels is a necessary part of working toward sustainability in the United States.

President Clinton had established the Task Force in 1993 to find ways “to bring people together to meet the needs of the present without jeopardizing the future.”

Have you noticed that I have been quoting only Democrats?

If you are represented by Democrats in Congress, this is an especially good time to call on them to be true to their Party’s long-standing “stated” commitment to environmental sustainability.

Of course, most of them don’t want to deal with the inconvenient truth that the Democratic Party’s insistence on high immigration to drive massive U.S. population growth is at odds with decades of acknowledgments that these policies simply cannot continue if we hope to leave any kind of natural environmental legacy to our grandchildren.

President Carter in 1977 commissioned a Global 2000 Report <– (the original seems to have been scrubbed) which eventually concluded that the “United States should: Develop a U.S. national population policy that includes attention to issues such as population stabilization … just, consistent and workable immigration laws.”

Without all the increases in immigration, our communities would have around 250 million inhabitants right now, with little likelihood of ever going over 265 million.

Instead, because of a quadrupling in legal immigration numbers, we have more than 310 million inhabitants and are on a trajectory to cross 600 million well before the end of this century!

Obviously, the first Earth Day vision was for an America greatly different than the one we occupy today. And congressional immigration policies are the main reason that bright vision is now so murky.

This 40th anniversary is not a time of celebration but of deep sadness for the promise that was lost.

As Senator Nelson said on the 32nd anniversary just a few years before his death:

We are preparing to celebrate the 32nd Earth Day just after the Census Bureau has announced that far from winding down in the 1990s, U.S. population growth boomed at its highest level in the nation’s history! Not even the peak of the Baby Boom in the 1950s added as many people!

“This new population boom represents a PROFOUND FAILURE in our nation’s pursuit of environmental quality. Since 1970, another 80 million people have been added to the country.

“Every environmental goal has been delayed because of this failure.

And Senator Nelson never flinched from naming who had caused the failure: Congress, because of its immigration policies.

I know from past experiences that many NumbersUSA members, especially in the West, do not think so kindly toward Sen. Nelson because he was the father of the Wilderness Act which they believe unfairly took huge swaths of land out of private control and use.

Our membership is divided about a lot of environmental matters. NumbersUSA does not take a position on any environmental issue other than immigration’s role. Whatever your stance on various governmental efforts to combat environmental problems, we all can be united in the understanding that immigration is creating the double whammy of creating great pressures for more and more regulation to control environmental consequences while negating any positive effects.

Let’s require our Members of Congress to promise not to force the FOURTH 100 million on us and our children and grandchildren.

ROY BECK is Founder & CEO of NumbersUSA

NumbersUSA’s blogs are copyrighted and may be republished or reposted only if they are copied in their entirety, including this paragraph, and provide proper credit to NumbersUSA. NumbersUSA bears no responsibility for where our blogs may be republished or reposted. Views and opinions expressed in blogs on this website are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect official policies of NumbersUSA. Source: Washington Examiner (link no longer active) – http://www.washingtonexaminer.com

Most of us do believe that it is the right thing to do to be better stewards of our Earth and to be kinder to the animals we share it with. We need to do a better job of protecting our supplies of clean water, stop massive deforestation which includes the saving of species of plants that may hold huge medicinal secrets, and to move toward a cleaner and bigger tool box of energy sources. But especially after Climategate most of us do believe that turning these matters over to the government or worse yet global control is ‘not’ the way to do it and that doing so will devastate us financially as well as ultimately turn over huge control over our country to the UN.

A lot of what George says makes sense!!

2013’s Earth Day announcement was that Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, based on very questionable science is going to be shown to our children in all public schools without the opposite point of view being offered, propagandizing them.

These kids, your kids, are being programmed daily that they are smarter than you are and that it is their job to teach their parents. Can’t get to the adults… get to the kids. Do you remember the last time these methods were used??

Please stand up, as individuals, and in your parent groups… get-involved if you haven’t already and stop this concept as well as the pushing of the theory of Global Warming !

Some Additional Earth Day Realities:

Earth Day: Left Celebrates Murderer’s Idea

RUSH/EIB 2013: This is Earth Day today, too, by the way, folks. Earth Day is April 22nd. Does the name Ira Einhorn mean anything to you? Ira Einhorn is the founder of Earth Day. Yeah, he did, Snerdley. Way to go. Good memory. Ira Einhorn actually murdered his girlfriend, I believe, and sliced her up. An American convicted murderer and former environmentalist wacko, Ira Einhorn, “beat his ex-girlfriend, Holly Maddux, to death and then stored her body in a locked trunk in his apartment for more than a year — about 18 months — before she was discovered by the police. He fled to Europe and was convicted 25 years later for her murder in 2002 and is serving a life sentence.” He is the co-founder of Earth Day and he supports a carbon tax, just as does Thomas L. Friedman.

So another great hero of the left, Ira Einhorn is being celebrated today by environmentalist wackos because this is Earth Day. As is another highly respected, honored leftist icon, Bill Ayers, former domestic terrorist; homemade bombs were his weapon of choice, Ira Einhorn, co-founder of Earth Day, is a convicted murderer. By the way, again, Ira Einhorn supports a carbon tax. You add the carbon tax to the 70% income tax, it is hard to imagine what life in this country would be like 10 years from now if Obama and the Democrats win in 2014. (And luckily they didn’t!)

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Earth Day. Forty-three years ago, Earth Day, 1970. I have here from our friends at FreedomWorks, they went back and did the research: The “13 Worst Predictions Made on Earth Day, 1970.” Now, this is important, folks. These are the environmentalist wackos who are alive and thriving today. Forty-three years agoand we have survived. These people are still hysterical. They’re still completely wrong about everything.

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” That was Harvard biologist George Wald. Earth Day April 22, 1970, we got 15 or 30 years, take your pick.

Number two: “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” Washington University biologist Barry Commoner.

New York Times editorial on that day: “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”

Number four: Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich, who has yet to be right about anything. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”

Number five, again, from Paul Ehrlich: “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born… [By 1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”

Denis Hayes, Chief organizer for Earth Day, “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”

All these things were said on Earth Day in 1970. North Texas State University professor Peter Gunter said, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions. … By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”

Life magazine on Earth Day 1970: “In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution… by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.”

All of this stuff was said back in 1970, and a bunch of leftists believed it and began making policy based on it, folks. This stuff is absurd, it’s asinine, it’s lunatic, insane, but they get action on it. This is why there are attacks on your cars. This is why the snail darter takes precedence over you. Ditto the kangaroo rat. This is why the spotted owl, because of these literal lunatics in 1970.

Ecologist Kenneth Watt said on the original Earth Day, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.” Only a matter of time. Paul Ehrlich: Air pollution is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone. Ecologist Kenneth Watt. “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate… that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’” Well, then why would he be open? So in 1970, there wasn’t gonna be any gas because there wasn’t gonna be any oil by the year 2000.

Newsweek magazine on Earth Day 1970: “[One] theory assumes that the earth’s cloud cover will continue to thicken as more dust, fumes, and water vapor are belched into the atmosphere by industrial smokestacks and jet planes. Screened from the sun’s heat, the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.”
Can you imagine people reading all this stuff back in 1970, pulling their hair out, being confused? I was alive. I was 20 years old. And I thought all this stuff was bogus then. But, man, everybody that I knew my age is just eating it up, couldn’t get enough of it. I’m telling you, these people ended up making policy, folks. This is why Algore’s out there with his insane movies and books, becoming a multimillionaire scaring kids with polar bear disaster stories and so forth.

Not one of these people were anywhere near being right. They were all part of a leftist political agenda. Here is the 13th worst prediction made on Earth Day 1970 by Kenneth Watt, once again the ecologist. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”

These quotes actually come from Earth Day then and now by Ronald Bailey. Reason.com May 1st, 2000. Kenneth Watt, ecologist: an ice age by the year 2000. Others, famine, no oil, starvation everywhere but the United States, Canada, Western Europe, and Australia. None of it right. And yet to this day these people and their descendants have total credibility with the Democrat Party and the mainstream media.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, about food production, I just want to give you one statistic on corn. In 1970, you heard all these guys predicting famine. We’re gonna run out of food. We’re gonna run out of sunlight. We’re gonna run out of arid soil, all of these things. US corn yield in 1970, 72 bushels per acre. That’s how much corn we got per acre in 1970. This year, 2013, you know what the yield is going to be? Between 150 and 160 bushels of corn per acre. We’ve more than doubled our corn yield or production in 43 years. We figure out how to make life better. We figure out how to feed the world. We figure out how to improve things. We figure out how to do things better.

45 years of predicting the planet’s imminent demise

Actual Earth Day Predictions, from the first one in 1970….

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” – George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” – New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” – Paul R. Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist and author of the The Population Bomb

“By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” – Paul R. Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist and author of Humanity on a Tightrope: Thoughts on Empathy, Family, and Big Changes for a Viable Future

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.” Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day

“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.” – Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University

“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….” – Life Magazine, January 1970

“At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.” -Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

“Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” – Paul R. Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist and author of Hope on Earth: A Conversation

“We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones.” – Martin Litton, Sierra Club director

“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’” – Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

“Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” -Sen. Gaylord Nelson

“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” – Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

It was also announced that Congress is in the process of taking over control of all water in the US. – from Rivers, Lakes, Ponds down to Puddles… our drinking water and irrigation supplies. The existing law gives then control of all navigable water ways… they are now seeking to take out the word ‘navigable’. Ask the citizens of the San Joaquin Valley in CA, who used to be the bread basket of America, how that can work out. They now live in a Federally created Dust Bowl. This is a bad thing America!!

In 1980, the iconoclastic economist Julian Simon challenged celebrity biologist Paul Ehrlich to a bet. Their wager on the future prices of five metals captured the public’s imagination as a test of coming prosperity or doom. Ehrlich, author of the landmark book The Population Bomb, predicted that rising populations would cause overconsumption, resource scarcity and famine – with apocalyptic consequences for humanity. Simon optimistically countered that human welfare would flourish thanks to flexible markets, technological change, and our collective ingenuity. Simon and Ehrlich’s debate reflected a deepening national conflict over the future of the planet. The Bet weaves the two men’s lives and ideas together with the era’s partisan political clashes over the environment and the role of government. In a lively narrative leading from the dawning environmentalism of the 1960s through the pivotal presidential contest between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan and on into the 1990s, Paul Sabin shows how the fight between Ehrlich and Simon – between environmental fears and free-market confidence – helped create the gulf separating environmentalists and their critics today. Drawing insights from both sides, Sabin argues for using social values, rather than economic or biological absolutes, to guide society’s crucial choices relating to climate change, the planet’s health, and our own. Read more in Julian Simon’s 2014 best seller: The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth’s Future.

First they Shut off Water to CA Farmers, Now the Feds Attempting to Annex ALL Water in the U.S.

Please educate yourself… Pick up a copy of: Power Grab

And for some An Earth Day Tradition Is… George Carlin on Saving the Planet

George Carlin on the intellectual bankruptcy of “saving the planet”