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Today is "Earth Day," the Green Holy Day.
President Obama told America and the world in his comments last Friday that climate change is the number one threat to our national security.
The president says, "There's no greater threat" than climate change and it "poses immediate risks to our national security."
He told us and the world, "This is an issue that's bigger and longer-lasting than my presidency," predicting stronger storms, deeper droughts and longer wildfire seasons "if we don't take immediate action" with apparent disregard to how these "immediate actions" will negatively and needlessly impact America's economy and our quality of life.
In times of crises, when the world is on fire, we all must sacrifice. Right?
Let's take a look at the predictions from the Prophets of Green going back to the first Earth Day in 1970 and review the handbook---order of worship service for some---that is being taught and distributed among the 90% of American children who are sitting in a public classroom today, April 22, 2015, in the year of our Lord---Earth Day.
President Obama said Friday, "The world's top climate scientists are warning us that a changing climate already effects the air our kids breathe."
He said, "Last week, the Surgeon General and I spoke with public experts about how climate change is already effecting patients across the country."
"The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security," he explained.
The president and others who heed the call of the Green Movement attach a great deal of urgency to taking drastic and immediate action. A kind of religious fervor.
Earth Day, born in 1970, has become a useful vehicle for the World Pantheism Movement. I am not suggesting everyone who celebrates Earth Day practices the ancient religion of pantheism, but make no mistake the advocates have infiltrated the Earth Day movement and have considerable influence on the thinking of world leaders and educators in regard to the pantheism and the green movement.
Mikhail Gorbachev, yes Reagan's Gorbachev, was a long time member of the World Pantheism Movement. He said, "I believe in the cosmos. So nature is my god. To me, nature is sacred. Trees are my temples and forests my cathedrals."
The World Pantheist website says, "This beautiful Planet Earth is our mother and our home." They believe life and the planet "co-evolve."
Earth Day was birthed from a need for a cause by hippies and the apocalyptic utterances of some of the "top climate scientists" of the time.
I remember it well as I was immersed in youth ministry, holding Bible studies and long discussions---sometime very long discussions--- on many high school, college and university campuses.
I also remember the prophets, who like Al Gore in more recent times, were asking for huge grants because of the urgency, while personally investing in start up companies that benefited directly from the results of the studies funded by the grants.
In 2000, Ronald Bailey, a former award winning science correspondent for Forbes Magazine and best selling science author wrote an article titled, "Earth Day, Then and Now."
It merits review today, 15 years after it was written and 45 years after the birth of Earth Day.
This is an overview of some of the prophecies made in 1970 as noted by Bailey:
Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.
The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
“Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”
“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.
In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.
Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued, this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out.
Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.'”
Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.
Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
Today, teachers and educational leaders are distributing literature to our children and grandchildren in public classrooms across America that reflect the prophecies stated above.---the urgency and the misinformation.
The premise of their Leadership Guide echo's the same urgency and misinformation of 1970, telling instructors of kids in the introduction, "Populations world wide are in immediate danger, making it more urgent to act than ever before..."
Climate Change, the gospel of green that we have come to know, is changing, evolving. But it is still "urgent."
William Briggs wrote this week, "The problem with global warming is that eventually it must meet reality. Either the globe is warming at horrific rates as promised or it isn't. If it isn't then those still calling themselves 'scientists', and meaning it, must admit failure and move on."
They have. "Global warming" became "climate change." Now these urgencies are being merged into the new gospel of "Sustainability," equally as urgent.
Sustainability never has to meet reality. It's relative because there is no real definition as to what sustainability actually is. It means what someone claiming to be more eco-holy than thou wants it to mean.
Sustainability is a goal ever disappearing into the distance, one which can never be reached, but must be pursued at any cost, with ever increasing vigor---and funded by ever burgeoning taxes.
And it embodies a religious component, much like that addressed by Paul in Romans 1:25. He said those whom have forgotten or dismissed God are now worshiping or serving "the creation rather than the Creator..."
Rachelle Peterson and Peter Woods have written a report describing this as a new form of ancient paganism.
Which brings us back to the beginning. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth...So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. Then God blessed them and God said to them ' Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth'" (Genesis 1:1-28).
It isn't complicated. Don't worship the earth and creation. Manage it. Exercise stewardship, not devotion.
Worship the Creator. Manage the Creation.
David got it. He wrote, "The earth is the Lord's, and all its fullness" (Psalm 24:1).
Be Blessed.