Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Earth Day

Two heretical posts for Earth Day - one mildly so over at Fair Trade Certified
...I would officially like to nominate "going green" as the front runner for the prestigious Most Overexposed Phrase of 2008 prize. For the love of all that as good and holy, not every single action that's not a gratuitous waste of resources is "going green". I don't care how new Al Gore tells you this is, sometimes reusing something is just that....reusing something.


A bit of take-no-prisoners from Justin over at Classical Values, who brings back some of the predictions from earlier Earth Days - the sort of moonbat nonsense you suspected was there but never tracked down on your own.
"We have about five more years at the outside to do something," ecologist Kenneth Watt declared to a Swarthmore College audience on April 19, 1970.

In January 1970, Life reported, "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....

Harvard biologist George Wald estimated [in 1970] that "civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind."
Thanks for making it easy for us, Justin.

3 comments:

cold pizza said...

We're all doomoed. Death by asteroid, death by Yellowstone, death by ozone depleation (SPF 5000, anyone?), death by iceage, death by Waterworld, death, death, death. Doom, I tell you. Did I mention superbugs? Cosmic radiation? Flouridation poisening? Aspartamine? Carpool Tunnel?

I'm really having a hard time keeping up with all the crisi-de-jour.

"I'll believe in the crisis when the people who claim its a crisis start to ACT like its a crisis."

In the meantime, I'll be content to let the greatest motivation force on the planet, the free market system, continue to invent, innovate, improvise, and improve the environment. For every terrestrial problem, there is a capitalist solution. -cp

Dubbahdee said...

It's kind of like when the Selectmen bring up the same bond issue every year for 10 years running. Eventually, it's going to pass, and finally the Selectmen will, in voices full of self-congratulatory hubris, declare that the voice of the people has now been heard.

In the case of environmental cry-wolfism, eventually the world will come to an end. It will coincide with some doomsday prediction by some "moon-bat" activist/scholar. Then all the other "moon-bats" are going to be on CNN saying, "SEE! We told you so."

Anonymous said...

You guys' responses are awesome (or "rad" or "sweet" as my teen puts it, in case eithor of yuz closer to that lingo ;)
So true on the last point - reminds me of the story of the stock mail scam where they sent out thousands of different market predictions to millions of households - and sure enough some of them came true (imagine that!) - fooling some to say "wow, these folk have the secret predictive formula" and plunked their bucks down (to be instantly sucked up and sent to an island most far away)