It's that day again -- not exactly the biggest holiday (let's face it, it's a modern, made-up secular "holiday" -- which is obviously favorable to new-age types)

But I think Catholics should be taking better care of the Earth, in whatever small ways they can. We weren't put here to destroy the earth -- we were supposed to be the stewards of it.

If anyone hasn't looked into what's going on out there, you should. The way we grow food (lumber, vegetables, grains) right now is DOWNRIGHT RIDICULOUS. We clear all the natural vegetation, and grow things in MONOCULTURE (one crop) and the soil is DEAD so we spray petroleum/chemical fertilizers. The plants don't have companion plants, sufficient nutrition, or natural insect predators nearby (as God intended) so the plants end up being weaker and prone to diseases and pests. So then we have to bathe our crops in carcinogenic, chemical pesticides. Then we harvest in bulk using MORE petroleum, and then we have to process and ship it to your local supermarket which uses even MORE petroleum.

A bushel of potatoes could be distilled into 1 gallon of fuel. It costs the equivalent of 1,000 gallons of fuel to produce that bushel of potatoes!

It's a scam. The "Green Revolution" is a farce. The EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) is negative.

Man creates the problem, then he creates the solution, and gets all excited and pats himself on the back. Guess what? Growing food with Permaculture methods produces WAY more food per acre than any modern petroleum-based method. You can't beat nature. If man works WITH nature you get awesome results (that's how God intended it).

Look at what Sepp Holzer is doing in the Alps -- growing stuff most men would have thought impossible (citrus at 3000 feet!?) And he doesn't use any fertilizers or pesticides. He uses pigs to till the land. He grows plants to distract predators/wild game so his cultivated crops aren't harmed. He's spent 40+ years observing nature and now he's a genius.

But beyond the health issues, etc. we are also creating COUNTLESS THOUSANDS OF ACRES OF DESERT on this earth. Desert! We are DESTROYING farmland, water supplies, even parts of the ocean! How are we going to eat then?

No one wants to work. No one is mortified enough or humble enough to put in a tad bit of effort and grow their own food (organically). They'd rather spend that hour catching another TV show.

Anyhow, destroying the Earth isn't Catholic, and wasting (food, material things, money, electricity, water) isn't Catholic either.

Show me ONE Catholic culture that allows or promotes such waste. You won't be able to. The only culture I know of that does that is the American middle-class suburbanite culture. (Which is NOT Catholic. In fact, it's not even COMPATIBLE WITH Catholicism!)

Check out John chapter 6:

[12] And when they were filled, he said to his disciples: Gather up the fragments that remain, lest they be lost. [13] They gathered up therefore, and filled twelve baskets with the fragments of the five barley loaves, which remained over and above to them that had eaten.

That's why all the proven, Catholic cultures (Polish, German, Italian, Irish, Mexican, and a hundred others) have all kinds of tricks for being frugal and not wasting. They had common sense and reading comprehension.

Our Lord wouldn't be one of those customers that leaves a plateful of food on the table at the restaurant. He would give it to someone that wanted -- or needed -- it.

Agreed, Matthew.

Media plays this left-right paradigm game with people all the time.  Since they've associated the whole "Green" movement with liberal Pro-Abortionists, most "conservatives" just reject the entire thing out of hand in a knee-jerk reaction.  Your points are all quite valid.

I once read that this date was chosen to also 'celebrate' the birthday of Vladimir Lenin...


http://www.wnd.com/2012/04/do-you-know-why-earth-day-is-april-22/

The Green - Eco movement is another diabolical modern distraction from the true Faith of Christ and is seriously opposed to the First Commandment. Nothing wrong with preserving and taking proper care of the earth God gave us but these people fall into the silliness of actually making earth a real deity. I live amidst these people and frankly, I rather live among Catholics even if they shop in Walmart and are not so earthly conscious, at least they adore the only real God and Christ Lord instead of "Mother Earth".

There is actually a good article on this topic in Tradition in Action:

‘MOTHER EARTH’ DAY  -  By a unanimous vote, the United Nations declared April 23 should be celebrated as International Mother Earth Day. The votes were cast by the 192 nations represented at the UN General Assembly on April 22, 2009.

If it is endorsed by the UN, then we know who is behind it  :rolleyes:
.....
http://www.traditioninaction.org/bev/109bev06-03-2009.htm

"We are witnessing the return of the old Pantheism or Gnosis that led paganism astray and is still present in Buddhism and other false religions. It is contrary to Catholic doctrine and condemned by it".

The enviro MENTAL ists...are idiots...let's look at their Earth Day predictions from 1970...

http://www.ihatethemedia.com/earth-day-predictions-of-1970-the-reason-you-should-not-believe-earth-day-predictions-of-2009

Earth Day predictions of 1970. The reason you shouldn’t believe Earth Day predictions of 2009.

For the next 24 hours, the media will assault us with tales of imminent disaster that always accompany the annual Earth Day Doom & Gloom Extravaganza.
Ignore them. They’ll be wrong. We’re confident in saying that because they’ve always been wrong. And always will be.

Need proof? Here are some of the hilarious, spectacularly wrong predictions made on the occasion of Earth Day 1970.

“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.”
• Kenneth Watt, ecologist

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
• George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.”
• Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
• New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“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.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”
• Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day

“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
• Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University

“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….”
• Life Magazine, January 1970

“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.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist


“Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones.”
• Martin Litton, Sierra Club director

“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.’”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

“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.”
• Sen. gαylord Nelson

“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. 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.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Keep these predictions in mind when you hear the same predictions made today. They’ve been making the same predictions for 39 years. And they’re going to continue making them until…well…forever.

Here we are, 39 years later and the economy sucks, but the ecology’s fine. In fact this planet is doing a lot better than the planet on which those green lunatics live.

You’ll also enjoy (or hate) our article, 25 Global Warming Debunking Videos Al Gore Doesn’t Want You To See.

Update: Earth Day 2010 version.

Source: Reason.com

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I was just going to post this here but I'll put another copy on the Firestorm breaks out against scientific movie thread.



Here's a blog going on and on about Earth Day factoids, and couldn't pass up the chance to make a few obligatory albeit unsupported digs as the opportunity arises.

Link at end of OP

Bad Astronomy author Phil Plait owns up to being a science evangelizer dork, whom you have his permission to quote (but why would you want to....  oh, wait:  I'm quoting him.  Right).

It's good he's saying "Happy Earth Day," because if he were saying "Happy Easter" it wouldn't make any sense:  

The Universe is big and we are not.  Happy Easter!    --------- say WHAT??

In any case, saying that "the Universe is big and we are not," and thereby implying that since we are relatively small, the universe is much more important than we are, is like saying that Mount Pinatubo is big and DNA is not, therefore DNA, upon which all life depends, is much less important than a mere volcano in the South Pacific, upon which no life depends.






The Earth as seen from Saturn is a reminder:  The Universe is big, and we are not. Happy Earth Day!

Photo by NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI

Today is Earth Day, a worldwide celebration of our home planet. I know you’ll be hearing a lot of talk about the environment today, humanity’s global impact, and more … which is great, and I wholly support that conversation (obviously).
Phil Plait Phil Plait

Phil Plait writes Slate’s Bad Astronomy blog and is an astronomer, public speaker, science evangelizer, and author of Death from the Skies! Follow him on Twitter.

    Follow

But as an astronomer and science dork, I do love me some fun factoids. So I gathered together/calculated a few to give you a better appreciation of our planet’s place in the Universe. You might want to check out the ones I posted last year, too. You can’t know too much about Earth.

1) Earth Day is April 22 every year. On average (jumping over leap years and such), between subsequent Earth Days our planet moves about 940 million kilometers (580 million miles), the circuмference of its orbit around the Sun. That means it’s faster—way faster—than a speeding bullet: about 30 km/sec (18 miles/sec)! Typical rifle bullets travel 1-2 km/sec, so the Earth outpaces them handily.

[UPDATE (Apr. 22 at 18:00 UTC): I'm getting some comments about this, mostly referring to how I measure that speed. Implicit in my words is that I meant relative to the Sun, so that's how quickly the Earth would move around the Sun. In general, the speed of the Earth (or anything) depends on what you're measuring its speed against. Since I'm on Earth, it's not moving at all relative to me, and if you're in a distant galaxy we're moving away at a large fraction (or even faster than) the speed of light. All motion is relative... you can quote me on that!]

2) It’s not a small world after all. The surface area of the Earth is about 510 million square kilometers, or 197 million square miles. It’s not a perfect sphere (see listing No. 4 here), but if it were, using the surface area to find the Earth’s diameter would give you a ball 12,742 km (7,900 miles) across.
Venus with goatee In hindsight this should've been obvious.

Photo by NASA & Tatiana Yurchenko/Shutterstock & Phil Plait

3) The Earth is the biggest of the terrestrial (rocky, as opposed to Jupiter-like gas giant) planets in our solar system.

4) Venus, the closest planet in the solar system to Earth’s size, has a diameter of 12,104 km (7,504 miles), 95 percent the width of Earth. It has about 82 percent the mass of Earth, too, making it our twin. However, its thick atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, it rains sulfuric acid, the air pressure on its surface is 90 times Earth’s, and the average temperature is a lead-melting 460 C (860 F). So it’s more like our evil twin.

5) Nearly 2,000 confirmed exoplanets (worlds orbiting other stars) have been found so far. The smallest, Kepler-37b, is barely bigger than our own Moon! Another, KOI-314c, has the same mass as Earth but is so hot it’s puffy, with a huge atmosphere. The planet that has the best chance of being most like Earth is Kepler-186f, which has 1.1 times the Earth’s diameter and is the right distance from its star to have liquid water. We really don’t know what it’s like beyond that, though. It might be more like Venus, or Mars.

6) We’ve only just started looking for other planets, though. There may be billions of Earth-size planets in our galaxy alone.
The vast majority of the Southern Hemisphere is water. This is more obvious when you look down from over the South Pole.



Photo by Google Earth

7) Coming back home again, Earth has something no other planet we know of has: a lot of water on the surface. It’s about 71 percent water by area, dominated by the Pacific Ocean, which covers a staggering 155.6 million square km (60 million square miles) of the surface. That’s nearly a third of the planet.

8) Most of the Southern Hemisphere (by a long shot) is covered in water: About 80 percent of the planet’s area south of the equator is water. North of the equator it’s about 60 percent.

9) Water exists naturally in all three physical states on Earth’s surface: solid (ice), liquid, and gas (water vapor). Due to a peculiar property of water—called its triple point—it can even exist in all three states at the same location and time. So now when things go wrong, you can say, “Well it could be worse: It could be raining and snowing and steaming!”

10) The more we look, both in our neighborhood and in deep space, the more we find that our Earth is one-of-a-kind. Even if we do eventually spot those billions of other planets similar in size to Earth, it’s unlikely they will be just like ours, with our exact balance of chemistry, temperature, and life. Heck, in the distant past the Earth didn’t look like it does now, and it’s the same planet.

What this tells us is that what we have now is precious, unique, and vital to us and ours. We don’t have an emergency backup, a summer home, a spot we can retreat to. The Earth is all we’ve got. We need to treat it that way.

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It would really make more sense if he were to say,

The Universe is big and we are not;  UNhappy Earth Day!  

But then, to a liberal -- happiness and unhappiness are indistinguishable.


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