Maine, my adopted state, is the first to catch the sunrise.  The Pine Tree State is noted for its "downeast" twang, Civil War hero Joshua Chamberlain, horror mogul Stephen King, shipbuilding, forestry, lobster, and much more.  Artists and photographers show the sea splashing upon defiant gray rock, against a postcard-blue sky, birds rising above pine-tufted slopes and crystal ponds, Appalachian outposts punctuated by Mount Katahdin, foaming rapids, streams and rivers, countless species of game, fish, and other wildlife...

I should think that with such a rich environmental endowment, often used as backdrop for media commentary and news stories, common narratives about the environment would be informative and provocative.  What do we get instead?

Green, green, I want you green

We get grade-school clichés like saving the planet, having a future, keeping Maine green – stimulating as spitballs.  It may be expecting too much of schoolchildren to understand the mismatch between what they hear about the environment and what they actually see and experience, but is it asking too much of the authors of these "green" mes­sages for answers to questions like: save the planet from what, exactly? – and why green? What about the blue of the sky, the brown of the earth, the great variety of colors in wildflowers, birds, and other creatures?  Why the greenwash over everything?

It takes the innocence and trust of a child to rally behind "the environment," used as a code word for Green Politics.  This is a rogue jump-off from the environmentalism of the past century.  It stimulates the emotions instead of the mind, using vacuous language and a veneer of science to make its case.  As a result, "the environment" has come to mean almost nothing while sounding as though it means a lot.  With good press and promotion, however, even adults may go to bed at night believing that "the planet is safer," as a result of growing "awareness" and a growing bureaucracy.

Why the politically green view of the environment should be exempt from skepticism and scrutiny, given the known tendency of political activists to stretch the truth and color it their way, is a mystery only to those duped by the corrupt mainstream media.

Nature gets the last laugh

Until recently, I lived in a town in Maine, about forty miles west of Portland and ninety miles north of Boston.  Unless my family and neighbors were in a bubble that sealed us off from the rest of the planet, conditions there – and in my present location in Maine – indicate a healthy environment.  It is an environment shared by moose, deer, bear, fox, raccoons, and other creatures too numerous to list.  I have seen species of insects not listed in my field guide.  Entomologists may yet find species that have not been identified.

There is never a bare spot of earth around, unless it has just been dug.  Only active sand and gravel pits have no vegetation.  If one didn't keep mowing around the typical one-family house in rural Maine, trees would grow up through it.  It could be said that where mowing stops, the forest returns.

The fact that the environment in southwest Maine is fundamentally sound, more than two centuries beyond the onset of the industrial revolution, is direct evidence that human activity and the environment are compatible.  The aims and policies of clear-minded conservationists and ecologists have always been to cooperate with the natural forces, not seek to control them.  "Taking charge of the environment" by imposing draconian measures, based on flimsy science, is foolish and wasteful, to be polite about it.

The environment is an exceedingly complex topic with numerous overlapping margins.  Containing the whole of it and molding it into an "issue" for political purposes is not only foolhardy, but dishonest in light of the socialist ideology animating such activism.  Policy and legislation stemming from green politics are, to say the least, unjustified.  The fraudulent use of science for political action has been abundantly cited, as with the concocted issue of global warming, AKA "climate change," exposed most tellingly by Senator James Inhofe in a speech he delivered when he was chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in 2006.  Congressional and media reaction to Senator Inhofe's comprehensive exposé was conspicuous silence. 

Those who have followed the devolution of environmentalism into political gaming know that pseudo-environmentalism, as it should be called, is a cult.  Its doctrines have more to do with a suppressive "new world order" than with a world order that is free and humane.  The followers of this cult must believe that it is smart to restrict human activity instead of encouraging it.  Given the vast possibilities inherent in the natural forces, I'd say that the  one thing pseudo-­environmentalists got right is calling themselves green.

Green cultists follow the old tradition of peddling whatever one can get away with as solutions to problems.  In the past, those who peddled elixirs and quack remedies were responding to actual needs.  Today's green peddlers respond to "needs" that are as phony as the remedies.  Yesterday's charlatans had to make a living on their own.  Today's hustlers earn a living with corporate, state, and federal money.  In time, the scientific facts that blew the game of the earlier quacks will blow theirs, too.

 [1] A line from Federico García-Lorca's "Somnambulistic Ballad."