In 1970 Earth Day was born as a spontaneous student movement in the USA ,” www.earthday.de romanticizes, and claims elsewhere, but on the same page: “ 1970 – U. S. Senator Gaylord Nelson had the idea: a day of action for the earth at universities and schools. His colleague Denis Hayes turned the idea into a world event: On 22 April 1970, more than 20 million people celebrated the first Earth Day with activities.” Eh? Are they talking about “spontaneous people's anger” again, which rarely gets off the ground without help from the outside and above? And the precise number of “20 million people” – were they recorded by a notary or only felt manually? Anyway, the number is nevertheless parroted everywhere.

Like so much in this field, the official German Earth Day website is not only unintentionally funny, but also completely off the mark. For the idea of celebrating an Earth Day was conceived by someone else, the former Pentecostal preacher John McConell (1915-2012). The fact that he presented this idea as early as 1969 is not a conspiracy theory, but rather well documented. This happened in full public view during a UNESCO conference in San Francisco. While the idealist McConell demanded only to humbly think about the miracle of creation on one day of the year and to pause for a moment, the leftist senator Nelson (1916-2005) turned “Earth Day” into a day of action and struggle against capitalism. Since then, instead of using equinox at the beginning of spring around March 20, Lenin’s birthday on April 22 was chosen for the celebration: “They stole my Earth Day and used it for April 22,” a very disappointed John McConell lamented even in 2009.

Meanwhile, “Earth Day” has mutated into a day of penance and sacrifice for green social engineers – with neopagan tendencies, sometimes more, sometimes less. This is not least shown by the fact that the “first local Earth Day” was organized in Stuttgart in 1997. And isn't it again unintentionally funny when the Maoist president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, who understands as much about ecology as a blackbird does about canoeing, “proposes” to the UN in 2009 to rededicate April 22nd to be “International Mother Earth Day,” and the UN agrees? Since then, the whole world has on Lenin's birthday, without knowing it, paid homage to an Indian Earth goddess. And this ominous “Mother Earth” naturally has “rights” too, which purely by chance have to be aimed precisely against those freedoms that really matter. In return, the UN General Assembly declared Morales “World Hero of Mother Earth” – hilarious!

But that's not all: despite all this, many Protestant church leaders maintain that what is celebrated on April 22nd is the “Day of Creation”, and the flock follows them willingly. The new Pope Francis also wants to go down in history as an ecological Pope and has to turn his business around 180 degrees and join forces with people like Morales, who called the Catholic Church the “enemy of peace” and still fights it with his specially founded “Renewed Catholic-Apostolic Church of the multi-national state.” The punchlines resulting from the necessary ideological leaps are so numerous that they cannot be dealt with within the framework of this column.

By the way, “Day of the Grandstanders” or “Day of the Gurus” would also be a fitting term for Earth Day. Although the prophets of doom have not only missed the mark regularly, but also “spectacularly so,” as Ronald Bailey once correctly pointed out. Harvard professor George Wald lamented thus around 1970, saying that if something was not “done” immediately, the “end of civilization” would arrive by the year 2000 at the latest, if not earlier. The infamous Paul Ehrlich expected death by starvation of 100 to 200 million people a year until 1980. For the 1980s he predicted that four billion lives would fall victim to widespread dying.

The above-mentioned Earth Day organizer Denis Hayes took the same line and claimed in 1970 that it was already “too late to avoid famine.” In that same year, “Life” magazine declared that around 1980 no one would leave the house without a gas mask. In 1985, only half the sunlight would reach the earth’s surface. Barry Commoner, the then prominent “ecologist,” “knew” that decaying organic substances would remove all oxygen from the water. The death of all fish was inevitable. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich said about rainforest that by about 2005 almost all of them would have disappeared. One could bet the farm that warnings of an unprecedented extinction of species were always going to be part of the repertoire at Earth Days. Occasionally, ice ages and droughts were also predicted. This kind of opinion-forming then formed the ground for the emergence of modern climate hysteria at the end of the 1980s, which, as we all know, cannot do without absurd predictions and half-mad gurus either.

Finally, one last piece of advice: Don't confuse the “Earth Day” (22nd April, Lenin’s birthday) with “Environment Day” (5th June, birthday of Josef Neckermann and Mark “Marky Mark” Wahlberg, among others)! This was also decided by the UN (in 1972) so that the show rehearsed for 22nd April can be repeated again. Therefore, on June 5th, not only are completely crazy “activities” like the infamous collective switching off of lights threatened to happen again (but unfortunately not during Femen campaigns!). No, there could also be a re-enactment of the extremely stupid speech by the now legendary development aid minister Gerd Müller at this year’s Global Citizen Earth Day celebrations in Washington ("What a party" - "Let’s change the world" - "I love you all"), which has become a Youtube hit and of which a rap-version is also available. Terrible! And is a (supposedly conservative Catholic) CSU minister, who in poor English pays homage in Washington to an Indian Earth goddess without knowing it, still funny or already tragic? And what, by the way, does the Pope say to that?

Translated from eigentümlich frei, where the original article was published on 26th February 2017.