USA Today Special Calls for More Government Action on the Environment

USA Today featured a special article to help celebrate Earth Day by Mark Thoreau, an indirect descendant of author Henry David Thoreau. In “Thoreau Descendant Reflects on Walden Pond, Earth Day [1],” Thoreau, however, took the opportunity to call for more government involvement on environmental issues and even praised the Sierra Club, the left-wing environmental group.

Thoreau, an Englishman, explained how he has visited the scenic Walden Pond, the site where Henry David Thoreau lived for a little over two years, and was pleased with the condition of it. The site is now considered a Massachusetts state landmark and receives many visitors.

While reflecting on his famous ancestor is certainly fitting, Thoreau, couldn’t resist cheerleading for more government environmental regulation. Although he noted that Henry David Thoreau thought that, “government is best which governs least,” the younger Thoreau suggested that Henry David would have changed his opinion.

He declared, “But today, I think he’d feel that government is doing too many things when it comes to what is non-essential – like the war in Iraq – and not doing enough when it comes to global warming, recycling, and other efforts to help the environment.”

Yes, the government should be tackling the big things, like sorting our garbage. And he also failed to mention that so-called global warming is losing credibility [2].

He gushed that Henry David Thoreau would be, “impressed with large-scale efforts in the U.S. and the rest of the world, like Earth Day, and those taken on by groups like the Sierra Club [3]. They call attention to the fact that we all have to help in the fight to save the planet.”

Perhaps Thoreau forgot that one of the Sierra Club’s [4] “fight to save the planet” included calling DDT one of “the world’s deadliest poisons,” representative of the thinking that got the pesticide banned and led to millions of malaria deaths in the Third World. The organization has also complained that, “Nuclear power is considered to be the least safe alternative to fossil fuels as well as the most expensive alternative.”

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