Tuesday, April 22, 2008
This Day in the History of Earth Days
On this day in 1970, hundreds of thousands of Americans concerned about the environment observed the first "Earth Day." I gave a regrettable speech at my High School the next Earth Day, where I advocated having only two children. To paraphrase the President, when I was young and stupid, I was young and stupid. Now I wish more good, successful people had big families and irresponsible losers had none. Population growth is not the enemy. We have the cleverness to solve almost all our problems but not always the moxie; and more often we lack inspired political leadership to organize our cleverness into realistic solutions. Sometimes we lack the wisdom to foresee the unintended consequences so that too often our solutions are worse than the problem they were intended to solve.
Labels: Earth Day
Sunday, April 22, 2007
This Day in American History
On this day in 1970, millions of Americans concerned about the environment observed the first "Earth Day." I gave a speech at my high school about the dangers of overpopulation, in which I tried to be funny, and I guess I was, but in an inappropriate, double entendre sort of way, so that the school administration cut me off. I didn't get to do my big rhetorical finish, which remained for decades one of the great regrets of my somewhat cloistered life. I would disavow everything I said now, however, because I've read Mark Steyn's America Alone, and I want all Americans to reproduce at greater than replacement rates, especially my children. I talked about overpopulation because Paul Ehrlich was then predicting world wide famines and wars over necessities in the late 70s. We all remember those, don't we? The same sort of silly, chicken little predictions of an imminent ice age and, more recently, catastrophic global warming were yet to come.
Labels: Earth Day
