Happy Earth Day -- "Proletarii vsekh stran, soyedinyaytes!"

April 22, 2010 -- Today environmental activists encourage us all to join them in commemorating Lenin's birthday .... er ... Earth Day.  Eagerly answering the call will be governments, cities, schools, and all manner of NGOs.  Media outlets will fill the six o'clock hour this evening with feel-good stories about school children and service clubs doing things to help clean up their neighbourhoods -- things that ought otherwise to be done by petty felons sentenced to community service.

Don't get me wrong.  I love the earth.  Earth is where I keep my stuff.  But, I was a little bit remiss this year.  I failed to get my Earth Day cards into the mail on time, and I left my Earth Day shopping to the last minute.  As such, the Earth Day fireworks this evening will be a more modest event, but the weather looks like it's going to hold out for the annual Earth Day barbecue.  I still have happy memories of the Earth Day bonfires of my youth.

What's not to love about Earth Day?  Well, how about its origins?  For starters:

The first Earth Day "teach-in" was celebrated on April 22, 1970, to protest the Vietnam War, pollution, and littering -- and to commemorate what would have been the 100th birthday of one of history's most notorious villains.

As the father of communism, the deaths of tens of millions of people can be laid at that Soviet dictator's doorstep. That now forgotten fact about Earth Day's origins should place your child's sudden enthusiasm for recycling, saving the panda bears and energy efficient light bulbs in a new, well, light.

Like the Marxist philosophy that inspired it, today's environmental movement has become, for its most ardent proponents, an ersatz religion. As Joseph Brean recently observed, "in its myths of the Fall and the Apocalypse, its saints and heretics, its iconography and tithing, its reliance on prophecy, even its schisms -- the green movement now exhibits the same psychology of compliance as religion."

The choice of Lenin's birthday was not accidental, nor coincidental. It was deliberate.

At the very first Earth Day celebrations in Philadelphia, one of the (self-described) masters of ceremonies was the local leftist activist and self-promoter Ira Einhorn. Nowadays, it should be acknowledged, the environmental left can't distance itself from this fellow fast enough.

A friend and contemporary of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and acquaintance of authors Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, Timothy Leary, Alvin Toffler, and Isaac Asimov, Einhorn held the floor for a half hour, during the first Earth Day celebration, in Philadelphia, kissing Edmund Muskie on the lips before surrendering the microphone to the Senator from Maine.

(Well, Senator Muskie. Philadelphia is the "city of brotherly love".)

Okay, other than Einhorn's leftist bona fides, his moral exhibitionism, and his unfortunate lapse in judgement in his choice of kissing partners, what's the problem?

There is no evidence that Muskie rejected his advances, or that anyone associated with the event had ever voiced any disagreement with Einhorn's place as a key organizer until after his arrest for the murder of Holly Maddux.

Oh.

But, wait ... it gets worse. After murdering Maddux, Einhorn tried to cover up his crime. He stuffed the body into a steamer trunk and hid it in a closet where it was discovered about two years later. Dude.

Or, as Kathy Shaidle cleverly quips: "Maybe long-time Earth Day advocate Ira Einhorn took the whole “recycling” thing a little too far when he “composted” his girlfriend’s remains in a trunk in his closet."

So, this year marks the 40th celebration of Lenin's birthday rebranded as Earth Day. That's 40 years of environmental alarmism -- from "the population bomb" and the coming of a new ice age in 1970, through the ozone hole and acid rain and "save the whales", to climate change alarmism in the present day. What all of these "alarms" have in common is that they were/are all said to require a huge govenment response, massive wealth redistribution, international cooperation, global activism, ideological puritanism and a voluntary surrender of individual autonomy.  And remember, the science is 'settled' -- it just has to be.

Lenin would be so proud.