Yesterday marked the 43rd anniversary of Earth Day. Former Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-WI) is credited with founding the day in 1970. According to the EPA, Nelson believed that Earth Day was “a way to force this issue onto the national agenda. 20 million Americans demonstrated in different U.S. cities, and it worked!” By the end of 1970, Congress authorized the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the rest is history, as they say.

In the beginning, Earth Day, and the increased focus on man’s impact on the the environment were sound developments. Policies were enacted that cleaned-up our air and water, many of which were initiated by the private sector.

Unfortunately, from the beginning, it was evident that extreme elements within the environmental movement, who would ultimately co-opt the effort, had a very different agenda. Following are some catastrophic predictions made at the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, which foreshadows how environmental zealots would approach the next forty plus years:

• “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.” (Senator Gaylord Nelson)
• “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.” (Denis Hayes, Earth Day’s main organizer)
• “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” (George Wald, Harvard Biologist)
• “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)
• “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 one level, this hyperbole is actually humorous since its absurdity can be fully appreciated with the hindsight of history. As we all know, 80% of the living animals aren’t extinct, we haven’t had mass starvation, and most reassuring of all, our civilization did not end.

What isn’t funny, however, is that this type of over-the-top rhetoric has allowed EPA to justify much of its policies. Like any federal bureaucracy, once created, EPA had to find an ever expanding role to play, despite the fact that much of the initial work that it was created to address was complete. With air and water regulations in place, new “crises” were needed. These included global cooling, then global warming, and now climate change. With the help of environmental extremists and a sympathetic media, EPA uses new environmental “problems” to promulgate extensive regulations that are based increasingly on junk science, political science, and scare tactics. And it’s still going on today.

It seems the only thing missing in EPA’s approach today are proven scientific methodologies that seek to uncover the truth which can then lead to sound public policy based on facts not on a particular ideology or agenda. Maybe we can start a movement to create Sound Science Day.