The Green Tsunami: A Tidal Wave of Eco-Babble Drowning Us All (2 page)

In the late 60s, the man in the above photograph was the Program
Director of an “underground” radio station in Los Angeles, California
known as “the Mighty Met”, KMET-FM. That man was me. I headed
a small group of committed hippies who all loved music; cutting edge,
hard rock, underground music. The Who, Traffic, Led Zeppelin, Pink
Floyd, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Dr. John the Night Tripper,
Joe Cocker, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Janis
Joplin and Jim Morrison were all included on our daily play list.

In those heady days, part of being an underground radio station
was to be a very active component in the “counter culture” movement, a younger group devoted to a new way of living that was the
antithesis of our parent’s materialistic, post-World War II generation.
The goal in life wasn’t a house in the suburbs with two cars in the
driveway and a TV in the living room. Our generation wanted “Peace,
Love, Flowers and Beads”. We created alternative lifestyles and gathered together in small communities in out of the way places like the
Haight-Ashbury District in San Francisco or the East Village in New
York City.

We had an “underground” system of communication to help organize demonstrations against the Viet Nam War, “love-ins” and music
festivals (Woodstock on the East Coast or the Altamont Rolling Stones
concert on the West coast), while we “got high with a little help from
our friends”. Our clothing was somewhat mismatched and we went
barefoot most of the time.

At the beach, we sprinted across the sand to the beautiful Pacific
Ocean invariably stepping on discarded pieces of metal from soda and
beer cans known as “pop tops”. Jimmy Buffett summed up our mutual
predicament of those days in his “Margaritaville” classic, “Took off
my flip flop, stepped on a pop top—cut my foot had to hobble back
home….”

All of those elements, simplistic, though they may have been, contributed to the fertile soil for the first “Earth Day”.
During this same time period, an agile L.A. newspaper reporter
observing the poor condition of L.A. air combined two elements
clouding the skies, “smoke” and “fog”, to create the word “smog”.
That expression soon became a favorite joke among late night television comedians, “Los Angeles, the city where you can see the air you
breathe”.
As a side note; do you know how “smog” was cured in the City of
Angels? In the 1970s, someone invented the Catalytic Converter. It
was a relatively simple car repair that cost little to install and fixed the
problem of fumes leaking into the L.A. skies. In 1977, L.A. reported
one hundred and twenty-one Stage One Smog Alerts. Since then,
there have been none, zero—zip—nada—not one, Stage One Smog
Alert.
In the late 60’s, Los Angeles was not the only city in America dealing with foul air. Sadly, industrial pollution was also a serious problem
for municipalities across the country. As giant steel mills belched
smoke and cinders on Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, it became yet another
American town experiencing serious air pollution problems.
There were other environmental problems back then as well. In
Southern California, a massive Santa Barbara Oil Spill of 1969 fouled
our beaches, our fish, and our birds with slime and goo. Admittedly,
though it was not as bad as the oil spill of 2009 off the Louisiana Gulf
Coast or the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, it was, nonetheless, a significant event. The new “Surf Culture” was taking hold in Southern
California and oil was washing onto the golden sands of its beaches.
In Ohio, the Cuyahoga River was so polluted with industrial waste
it actually caught fire and burned for two days. Among the television
pictures of 1969 was a river burning in Ohio, soot darkening the skies
of Pittsburgh, smog blanketing the L.A. Basin, and the beaches of
California polluted with oil. America was ripe for a more thoughtful
approach of caring for the environment.
The youthful generation of “under-30-somethings” was ready to
pledge ourselves to a new way of thinking about pollution. It was time
to start leaving the camp site in better shape than we found it. No
longer would we tolerate cigarette butts or litter being thrown out of
car windows. We were committed to no smog, no water pollution and
above all, no pop tops discarded on the beaches.
We resurrected an old biological word, “ecology” and branded our
new crusade “The Ecology Movement”, a word most people over 30
didn’t even know how to pronounce.
Then an unlikely champion for our cause appeared in Washington,
D.C. His name was Senator Gaylord Nelson from Wisconsin who
organized a nationwide ecology “teach in” day that fit perfectly with
the counter-culture crusade of the 60s. Senator Nelson named the big
event “Earth Day”; in part because it sounded like ‘birthday’ that, in
turn, sounded like a nationwide party. As news about the big event
spread, the Senator encouraged local celebrations. Our counter culture radio station took the bait and organized Southern California’s
celebration of the first “Earth Day” on April 22, 1970.
As the much-anticipated day dawned, our listeners dutifully took
their trash bags to tidy up the beach, giving extra attention to those
irritating “pop tops” buried in the sand. We wagged our fingers at
drivers who tossed litter from their car, cleaned up trash along the
waterline and went to parks removing litter from parking lots and
walking paths.
At the end of the day, we returned home feeling wonderful about
our day long event. After inhaling suitable refreshments, we turned
on the television news to watch the national news coverage of the big
“Earth Day” celebration. Our collective jaws dropped as we saw and
heard the network news from Chet Huntley and David Brinkley and
the beloved CBS anchor, Walter Cronkite.
First, from Washington, D.C. our super-hero Senator Nelson
appeared in a blazer, shirt and tie and spoke passionately to the crowd
in our nation’s capitol. Imagine my bewilderment when the Senator
began his speech with a warning that mass extinctions on the planet
were about to happen because of a coming environmental catastrophe. The Senator announced, “Doctor S. Dillon Ripley, Secretary of
the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years 75% to 80% of all
the species of living animals will be extinct.”
Really? Smog was going to cause massive extinctions? The fate of
our planet would be decided by people who tossed cigarette butts out
of their car windows or “pop tops” in the sand at the beach? I was a
shocked and surprised counter-culturist!
The news coverage then moved to a huge Earth Day event on Fifth
Avenue in New York City. Here, a well-known biologist, Paul Ehrlich,
author of the best selling book “The Population Bomb”, was addressing the crowd. Ehrlich made no mention of “pop tops”, nothing
about cleaning up trash or keeping rivers and streams clean.
Instead he passionately expressed, “Populations will inevitably and
completely outstrip whatever small increase in food supplies we make.
The death rate will increase until at least 100 to 200 million people
per year will be starving to death in the next ten years.”
Many years
later, Ehrlich wrote the foreword to Al Gore’s scary, environmental, blockbuster book, “Earth in the Balance”.
In 1970, Ken Watt was perhaps the best known and most respected
environmental activist of the era. Shortly after the first “Earth Day,
he made his “global environmental” claim that I think you will find
humorous. “The world has been chilling sharply for about 20 years. If
present trends continue the world will be about 4 degrees cooler for
global mean temperatures in 1990, but 11 degrees colder in the year
2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us in an Ice Age.”
It turns out all those gloomy predictions at the 1970 “Earth Day”
were the genesis of the doomsday prophesies that continue today.
From Watt’s “Ice Age” to the latest prediction that “Global Warming”
caused by greenhouse gases trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere are
resulting in “Climate Change”, the list of imaginary disasters is continually perpetuated and yet to date,
not one,
has ever happened.
The television news coverage of America’s first “Earth Day” ended
and the networks returned to reporting about the ongoing Vietnam
War, the trial of the demonstrators who disrupted the Chicago
Democratic National Convention and the incredible news about
America’s brave Apollo 13 astronauts. The following day we arrived
at the radio studio to compare notes and agreed; the organizers of
“Earth Day” were obviously pursuing an agenda for this “new environmental movement” with national and international implications
most of us never imagined.
Enter the United Nations (U.N.). In 1971, within a year of the
first Earth Day, this organization picked up the environmental flag
and organized the first “International Earth Day”. “Pollution is an
international problem that requires an international solution”, they
claimed. After all, smoke from an industrial smoke stack in Mexico
doesn’t stop at the U.S. border. Once that smoke gets caught in the
jet-stream, it is capable of depositing pollution anywhere in the world.
The U.N. stressed that the nations of the world must join together
in the new global environmental movement to clean up the debris
of modern-day industrial pollution. And to accomplish that task, no
matter what the cost, everyone on this planet must cooperate.
So, we have collected a few of the first dots in our quest to discern how the simple celebration of the first “Earth Day” by America’s
counter culture evolved into the environmental agenda of today. Over
the past 40 plus years, there has been quite a metamorphosis.
Up until 2009, the United Nations had become the biggest promoter of the “Global Environmental Movement”. It was then they
decided to very quietly change the name of their International Earth
Day celebration to “International Mother Earth Day”. Any old counter-culturist will tell you, Mother Earth is a code name for the worship
of the goddess Gaia, a strange subterranean cult that reverences the
mythical goddess of creation. Today, at this annual U.N. celebration,
they begin by honoring the goddess Gaia with the beating of Native
American drums, the chants of Buddhist holy men, the pipe playing
of Asian musicians and the dances of African tribes. All of that would
strike a happy chord for us counter-culturists of the 60s and 70s. We
loved Buddhist meditation, embraced African folk dancing and beautiful Asian pipe music. And though we liked Ravi Shankar’s sitar music,
Mother Earth and the goddess Gaia were a bit much for our crowd.
In the early 70s, we gave up life in the crowded and polluted cities
of America and became “back to the earthers”. We formed communes
throughout America, with some very large ones in Tennessee and
Kentucky. Voluntarily, we wanted to live close to nature and unplug
from the constant drone of advanced civilization. But today, the new
environmental movement does not embrace those desires in the same
way.
Today’s global environmentalists are
demanding
the global population (especially the voracious American consumers) to leave the rural
lands, return to the cities, walk, ride bikes or use public transportation
to lower our dependency on fossil fuel. We must depend on windmills
and solar panels to keep our complex civilization moving forward.
We must all learn to live like the Amish and return to a much simpler
lifestyle.
The global elitists proclaim none of us need live in a power-gobbling, 2500 square foot private home. If we are truly environmentally
conscious, we can pare down to an 800 square foot apartment, one
stacked on top of the other, and all located within walking distance
of a nearby public transportation stop. By doing all of this, (we are
assured by the smirking new environmentalists), life will be good.
In fact, as this environmental movement has advanced into the new
century, the economy, especially in California where my wife and I
live, has turned very badly.
“Environmentally sensitive” politicians and venture capitalists learned there were huge profits to be made in a wide variety of
California’s “green energy” schemes. Windmills were among the first
to be introduced, but these mammoth, garish skeletons of steel, fiberglass, and cast iron have not only tainted the pristine beauty of the
land, but are found to be massive bird killers that includes hundreds
of the Gold and Bald eagle species.
Today, the California deserts, once off limits to any kind of development and patrolled by armed agents of the federal Bureau of Land
Management, are home to massive solar power plants. When seen
close up, the size and scope of these gargantuan solar plant operations
boggle the mind.
As aggressively and environmentally sensitive was the government’s
search for ways to replace fossil fuels and reduce air pollution, there
began bio-fuel experiments of adding ethanol to gasoline. However
like so many government programs, the “law of unintended consequences” soon raised its nasty head. The new ethanol was made from
corn, corn that could have otherwise been used in the food supply.
Perhaps, the most under-reported news story of the 1990s was the
“tortilla riot” in Mexico. Here folks took to the streets protesting the
high price of corn tortillas; still the basic food staple for the majority
of Mexicans.
After investing billions of government dollars, corn ethanol was
quietly abandoned in California to create new ethanol made from
the stalks of sugar beets. Unfortunately, California doesn’t produce
enough beet sugar for the 27 million vehicles registered in the state,
but the state government had a solution. They can
purchase and
import
beet sugar stalks directly from Brazil! Did you get that?
In order to produce the “new” ethanol for their new grade of gasoline, California will redistribute our wealth to our neighbors in Brazil
so we can buy beet sugar stalks and clean up those pesky greenhouse
gases and solve the problem of “Global Warming”. It is indeed interesting that as state and federal bureaucrats dried up California’s lush
farmlands by diverting water to save a tiny fish, the “Delta smelt”(that,
according to radical environmentalists, was near extinction), they have
taken away the livelihood of local farmers and workers who could have
provided the very beet sugar our state is now outsourcing to Brazil.
As our dots connect, you must admit, they make perfect
nonsense
.
Consider President Barack Obama’s Economic Stimulus package
introduced almost 40 years after the first Earth Day. It underwrote
dozens of those pipe-dream, green-energy and supposedly greenjob-producing projects that many, after a few short years, have gone
bankrupt.
We are now left to wonder, in a world supposedly so sophisticated
and well informed by the incredible advances in information technology, how could all of this happen? How could the world fall for
a litany of nonsensical, environmental about-to-happen catastrophes?
How could we be convinced that some nifty computer projections
could somehow accurately forecast the weather for the next hundred
years? How could we be convinced to dramatically change the way we
live, all in the name of saving the planet? How could a seemingly gullible international media simply ignore scientific analysis that says any
theory must be reproduced in a laboratory under controlled conditions before we can accept it as being true?
Like me, you probably watch the local weather forecast on the
nightly news. Often, the weather personality is the comic relief
between the news and sports as he or she explains, in front of their
“green board”, those confusing high and low pressure systems that
will dominate our local weather patterns for the next 5 or 7 days. We
are warned of a coming storm, put on “Storm Alert” and told to fill
the sand bags, stock up on water and buy extra batteries. Then the
storm limps through, nothing much happens and the embarrassed
weather forecaster tries to explain the storm simply did not materialize
as predicted.