Earth Day hooey

By Tom Quiner

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZVOU5bfHrM&feature=player_embedded]

I still remember the day.

I was a junior in high school when we were introduced to Earth Day some 45 years ago tomorrow.

Students made presentations about how man is polluting the planet. Example after example was presented. Chemicals are ruining our soil we were told. Factories are ruining the air that we breathe. Our beautiful landscape is being desecrated by development run amuck.

We were told that mankind would blow through the world’s supply of oil by the mid 80s. The biggest issue in the world, we were told, was overpopulation. The world had too many people. Population growth was out of control. Mass starvation was coming.

It made sense to impressionable minds, and a movement was born.

The bible of the era was a book written by Paul Erlich called “The Population Bomb.” Here is our fate, said Erlich:

“[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.”

In other words, the only debate was when, not if, disaster would strike. We have too many people, said Erlich, and not enough food. His focus was on getting rid of people. Erhlich was certain of his facts:

“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.”

Of course, it was all a bunch of nonsense, but a lot of impressionable young baby boomers became a liberal that very day. Erlich advanced solutions which included putting birth control in our water supply, forced abortions, coercive sterilization, punitive taxes on people who have children, and other heavy-handed government solutions that violate civil liberties and human dignity.

This idea that “people are bad” fed the notion that human abortion was a legitimate solution to save the planet. Ironically, liberal thinking that had always been defined as “looking out for the little guy” abruptly turned on the little guy, the preborn. Mother Earth became more important to them than the future polluters residing in the womb.

Although some good has come from Earth Day, the belief that viewed humanity as a disease has been toxic. Fifty-five million abortions later, the U.S. is waking up to the realization that we need more taxpayers to pay for the lavish entitlements liberals have voted into law.

Paul Erlich was wrong, monstrously wrong. Yet people still believe his hooey. To this day, liberals breathlessly listen to his latest pronouncements like this one:

“How many you support depends on lifestyles. We came up with 1.5 to 2 billion because you can have big active cities and wilderness. If you want a battery chicken world where everyone has minimum space and food and everyone is kept just about alive you might be able to support in the long term about 4 or 5 billion people. But you already have 7 billion. So we have to humanely and as rapidly as possible move to population shrinkage.”

How do you feel about a guy who talks about “humanely” shrinking the population? You should be scared, because a whole bunch of liberals buy his act. A whole bunch of liberal thinkers, such as the President of the United States, considers unwanted humans as a disease.

For the record, credible demographers suggest that world’s population will peak in thirty years and begin declining without resorting to Dr. Erlich’s draconian measures. Watch the video above to learn more.

Then ponder how a guy who is so consistently wrong has so many followers.