Earth Day On Lenin's Birthday

Posted: 4/25/2015

Trigger

Just read “Is Earth Day on Lenin's Birthday a Coincidence?”. This is an excellent article and should be recommended reading for high school students.

This article explains why it is most likely no coincidence that the first Earth Day was celebrated 45 years ago exactly on Vladimir Lenin’s 100th birthday (4/22/1870). I fully agree.

Salient Excerpts

I have added emphasis.

1. “... given that most of the modern environmentalist movement grew out of the far left student movement of the 1960s. In that milieu, it wasn’t rare to see people brandishing and citing Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book as a source of wisdom. And many in the anti-war movement accused the capitalist chemical companies of growing rich by producing napalm and Agent Orange to drop on the people and forests of Viet Nam.”
   [Yes, I witnessed this too!]
2. “Most environmental economists of the time believed that only socialist countries would ably protect the environment, because the governments there were acting for the good of all mankind, while capitalists in the West cared only about profit maximization and not a whit about the environment. Thus it was no surprise that the conventional wisdom would turn a generation of young people towards socialism as the only way to protect the Earth.”
3. [I fully agree. This still holds true today. Many, often prominent and influential, economists are closet socialists.]
4. “Lenin and the early communists did believe that environmental degradation would disappear under communism. And in fact, pollution and environmental degradation were “outlawed” in the constitutions of most communist countries. Thus it was little surprise that the youth of the nascent environmental movement would view Lenin and socialism as the path to preserving the planet.
5. But throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as more and more cracks opened in the Iron Curtain, economists and journalists were able to visit the communist countries and reported discovering a degree of environmental degradation far beyond that present in the West—from the gold dome of Sigismund Chapel of Wawel Cathedral in Cracow dissolving from acid rain to the drying up of the Aral Sea. Yet, the socialist environmental paradigm endured.”
   [I fully agree. The author even understates how the socialists poisoned their own population and he does not mention Chernobyl.]
6. “So on the 45th anniversary of the first Earth Day, we sadly see the continuing belief in command-and-control economic systems. Government ownership of the land, water, and natural resources continues to grow with each passing year. The mass of governmental regulatory agencies, bureaucrats, and the sheer staggering number of new environmental regulations passed every year take us further away from any solution.”
   [Yes, we continue on the Road to Serfdom. Earth Day is only a pretext for bigger government.]
7. “Over time the theory of free market environmentalism and private conservation has been developed and continued to grow, demonstrating that the root cause of environmental degradation had been the absence of clearly defined and enforceable property rights in land, water, air, natural resources, and wildlife, and that the expansion of the use of the institutions of a free society—property rights, markets, and prices—would have largely prevented or greatly reduced the levels of environmental degradation.”
8. “Had the first Earth Day been celebrated on Adam Smith's birthday, June 16, instead of Vladimir Lenin’s, the Earth would be a freer, more prosperous and greener place. ...”
   [This is a great ending of this article!]

I may add, I believe, the story has not yet been really told how much the KGB or other communist intelligence services were behind the environmentalism movements in the West.