When I was a kid Arbor Day was something wonderful. Instead of sitting around kvetching about the environment we’d go out and actually plant a tree, something lasting. And I mean literally lasting. Recently I went by the house in Augusta, Ga., where I lived as an elementary school student and saw the tiny pine sprout I planted when I was 7 years old. It’s about 60 feet tall now.
Even as a newspaper editor back in the ’80s I’d get news releases from the Arbor Day Foundation, valiantly trying to remain in the public’s conscious amid the onslaught of Earth Day enviro guilt-tripping that overshadowed it.
As Meghan Cox Gurdon put it in the Washington Examiner today:
The main problem with Earth Day is that there’s no fun in it. There’s no romance. And there’s absolutely no sense that by participating in its recycling sacraments and unplugging rituals that anything can come of it but a burgeoning sense of futility.
That feeling may be very useful to Earth Day proponents, feeding as it does an apparent need to intensify efforts to get more people to celebrate Earth Day and worry about the environment even more intensively, but for the rest of us it just gives April 22 a depressing dullness.
Such was not the case with the rather dear holiday that Earth Day devoured. Arbor Day, inaugurated in flat, treeless Kansas in 1872 (until paling into insignificance under the Earthy onslaught), involved the lovely, human-scale practice of planting saplings.
I have studiously eschewed Earth Day since that first hippie-fest 40 years ago that inaugurated this lefty brainchild. I will continue to do so. Gurdon put a cap on her column with this ending:
There’s really nothing like an Icelandic volcano to put Earth Day into comical perspective.
Long live Arbor Day.
UPDATE: Check out these ridiculous predictions from the first Earth Day. Man, these guys are getting a bigger pass than Paul Ehrlich, that Population Bomb guy who was so wrong only bloggers are unembarrassed to point it out.
