Happy Earth Day

Image from flickrer Woodley Wonderworks.

From around the intertubes (in the order I found them):

Michelle Malkin warns of “enviro-nitwit-ism”,

It’s working: One in three children fear green apocalpyse.

Steve Hayward at The Corner says there’s good news we ought to be paying attention to,

Imagine: Environmentalist outrage over potentially good news.

El Presidente says a few words from Iowa (via Politico),

Climate change presents a serious test for humankind, but it also provides an opportunity for great innovation and adaptation. The United States has risen to such challenges before, and Earth Day inspires us to transcend differences among nations so we may lead the world in protecting our planet from this global threat.

Erik Erickson from Red State celebrates the occasion the only way he knows how,

I fired up the charcoal grill to eat some delicious meat and . . . oh . . . I breathed, thereby expelling carbon dioxide into the air to contribute to global warming.

At Huffington Post, Ropbert Redford reflects on the shifting dynamics of affecting change,

Some of us who fought for this country’s first environmental protections make the mistake of assuming that because young people today are less likely to be found marching down the National Mall as the shopping mall, that they must not care as deeply as we did when we were young. But apathy has not replaced idealism. Idealism just looks a little different these days.

This generation uses new tools to express itself and influence political decisions. They connect with one another in more ways than we could have imagined back in 1970: blogs, email petitions, YouTube videos, Twitter and Facebook. They’re finding new ways to express their political views, and they do it every second of every day.

Lately, I’ve come around to their way of thinking. I’m still standing up for environmental protections for the places I hold dear, but like so many of today’s new activists, I’ve hung up my marching boots and taken to the blogosphere: You’ll find me expressing my views at the Huffington Post, NRDC’s Greenlight, and the Sundance Channel.

Still at HuffPost, everyone’s favourite green ogre notes that environmentalism is about loving where you live,

In the end I guess it’s true what they say, you can take the ogre out of the swamp, but you can’t take the swamp out of the ogre. I’m a nature boy and proud of it. The Earth is our home — whether we hole up in a tree stump or a Park Avenue penthouse — and if we don’t take care of it, none of us will have a place to live. There is no land so Far Far Away that it is safe from the destruction of our environment.

Lifehacker offers some suggestions about easy things you can do around the home to better conserve natural resources.

Instapundit pointed out a range of eco-friendly products on Amazon (sarcasm or sincerity? you be the judge).

Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek (I couldn’t resist with a name like that) finds thanks for all the amenities of modern capitalism that give us space to worry about somerhing like climate change,

I am, in short, thankful for private-property markets that are the main driving force behind these (and many other) anti-pollutants — a force so powerful that we today enjoy the incredible luxury of being able to worry, should we so choose, about very distant and very speculative forms of environmental problems such as species loss and global warming.

Andy Sullivan posted a poem.

Treehugger takes a moment to lampoon Rush Limbaugh,

But such short-sighted remarks actually do favors to the green movement—as more and more mainstream Americans recognize the importance of environmental issues, the more embarrassingly off base Mr. Limbaugh’s insults sound. Instead of people nodding or raising their fists and proclaiming “Yeah! Let’s keep buyin’ stuff and polluting!” (an especially absurd sentiment in the midst of this recession) along with Limbaugh, more and more are apt to be put off by his backwards buffoonery.

Granted, there are still millions of Americans that prescribe to his ideas—put the longer he clings to his sinking ship, the faster that number will dwindle.

Happy Earf Day, Rush.

Mother Jones let videos of small, furry animals speak a thousand words.

PopSci gave us a view of Earth Day from space.

Via engadgethd we see that NASA also has some customary cool HD video from a space station for the day.

Michael Silverstein provides some musings via The Moderate Voice,

So here’s what I think this whole human thing on planet earth might just really be all about. Every once in awhile some mechanism has to appear that allows a new order of life to come forth. Sometimes its a visitor from outer space, a meteor-born virus or a big chunk of massively destructive rock. Sometimes its a huge burst of volcanism or the loosing of a gazillion tons of trapped methane gases from under the oceans. And sometimes, perhaps, its the apparently self-serving but actually nature-serving activities of a quirky short-lived species. Like ours.

This notion, of course, presupposes a planetary intelligence, a Gaian intelligence, manipulating us in ways that we can never fully understand, and if we did understand might make us feel rather less important in the scheme of things than we usually suppose. It also suggests quite strongly that once we have fully completed our assigned task we might become fully expendable.

And last, but not least, my yoga instructor,

You know, we like to convince ourselves that we can lay claim to this planet. We go around sticking flags in dirt and drawing lines in the ground. We pick up our deed to some lot of land and we take it down to City Hall. But the fact of the matter is that we’re only momentary visitors here, our time here is incredibly transitory. And the planet, the planet has been around for a long, long time, much longer than we’ve been here and will probably be around long after we’ve left. So really, we’ve just inherited this amazing gift. Maybe, if we can learn to see it that way, it will give us reason to see about making sure that our children and our children’s children and so on down the line get the opportunity to inherit the same gift. Maybe we could see about living together in a different way that makes that possibility more likely.

Update: via Gherald I see that The Big Picture posted some really cool pictures yesterday.