Earth Day for the Masses

What's not to like about Earth Day?

If you're a devout environmentalist, plenty.

Patrick McIlheran writes about the virtures of Earth Day.

I've come to love Earth Day. People argue over Christmas, and Independence Day is rife with glad-handing officeholders, but Earth Day has achieved a universal sanctification as the holiday no teacher need fear decorating for.

It's become a day to tout two pleasant virtues, cleanliness and thrift, and who could object? Every one of us from the frontier of Gen X on down has never known an America without Woodsy Owl hooting about not polluting. It's as familiar as one's childhood home, meaning Earth Day has become, literally, domesticated.

Not that any of these virtues ever were novel. Americans have long formed garden clubs and set aside village greens to make their surroundings pleasant. And they long saw the profit in recycling. I know I did. Even at a single-digit age, I'd help my grandpa pull a red wagon full of bundled newspapers to the scrapyard on National Ave. to earn pocket money. Cub Scouts were recycling paper and aluminum cans long before it became a universal piety, and for the same reason: Material benefit, the one truly effective check against pollution and waste.

As McIlheran explains, choosing to celebrate cleanliness and thrift, encouraging good habits, doesn't sit well with some of the more radical environmentalists.

...The big-name online journal Grist last year promoted a campaign to, as the name went, "screw Earth Day." Their objection was precisely that the holiday had been domesticated - that the day, as one writer put it, "makes millions of otherwise wasteful people feel okay about themselves and maybe do some eco-conscious stuff for twenty-four hours."

The holiday started with a much broader agenda than making everyone recycle. Wisconsin's Sen. Gaylord Nelson, the day's saint, tried defining clean surroundings as a world expunged of poverty, hunger and war by an enlarged government and by a public won over to the 1970s Democratic Party program. That the electorate now can't be persuaded to separate cans and plastic into multiple curbside bins, much less dismantle the Marine Corps, must be a bit of a letdown.

So the hard-green corps disdains your Earth Day, this "kumbaya for your karma," as Grist put it. Rather than cleanliness and thrift, the believers want an utter reordering of everyone's every choice.

Meaning? Your diet: The now discredited head of the United Nations' climate panel was among those urging an end to the eating of meat. Your offspring: Researchers such as Oregon State statistician Paul Murtaugh toted up the carbon footprint of children and suggested, as some dedicated greens chose, skipping reproduction. Or your existence: British scientist James Lovelock, who came up with the idea that we ought to think of the world as a single organism called Gaia, suggested that "we would be wise to aim at a stabilized population of about half to one billion."

That's extreme. Gaia? Lovelock is calling for a MAJOR thinning of the herd.

As McIlheran notes, "most of us already have a religion, and so Earth Day is for us about stewardship, not worship."

That's an important distinction.

For most of us, Earth Day is not a religious holiday. It's simply a reminder to behave responsibly.