On this Earth Day, the March for Science brought out tens of thousands of fans of the scientific method and scientific pursuits. You know; the stuff that teaches us about the world we live in. The stuff of every invention, ever. The reason we have everything from beer to Twitter. The reason nobody you know has polio.
On this Earth Day, Right Wing Watch reminds us that it’s not just Scott Pruitt and the rest of the cabinet o’ White House deplorables who have long histories of dismissing scientific research contrary to their ideology or pocketbooks. The Vice President himself
is a denial co-captain.
In 2002, Pence delivered an entire speech in the House of Representatives on the subject. “I believe that God created the known universe, the earth and everything in it, including man,” Pence told his colleagues. “And I also believe that someday scientists will come to see that only the theory of intelligent design provides even a remotely rational explanation for the known universe.”
Pence went to the floor to discuss the discovery of a skull from Sahelanthropus tchadensis, “one of the oldest known species in the human family tree.” He attempted to use this discovery to cast doubt on the entire theory of evolution.
If you seem to recall a scene strikingly similar to this farce parodied on Futurama, you wouldn’t be wrong. The most famous line of that episode is now a common Internet meme; I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.
Unfortunately there aren’t any others we can move to. This is it. And it doesn’t matter whether Mike Pence fancies himself personally smarter than the most devoted experts working, collectively, for generations, to suss out more substantive details on the origins of man than he, personally, is interested in; he’s not, and it doesn’t work that way.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2014—Earth Day is one day of 365. What about polar ice cap day, rainforest day, corporate plunder day?
While Earth Day organizers refused checks from Standard Oil, Monsanto and Procter and Gamble, among others, many political activists on the Left viewed the whole affair with suspicion. They saw environmental advocacy in general as a diversion from "real issues," such as poverty, racism, the Vietnam War and the imperialism that engendered it. Indeed, just a week after that first Earth Day, on April 29, the U.S. sent troops into Cambodia and, within three weeks, six students had been killed during protests at Kent State and Jackson State Universities. Environmental matters were for many protesters a low priority.
But Nelson, an avid opponent of the war, didn't see it that way. After the Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969, he had come up with the idea for Earth Day based on the anti-war college campus teach-ins he had witnessed. He got Denis Hayes—who eight years later would be my boss at the Solar Energy Research Institute—to coordinate Earth Day doings, Instead of putting out a national agenda for Earth Day, Nelson argued that it should be a grassroots affair with activities set in motion in local communities, not by professional organizers based in Washington, D.C.
And that was exactly how it played out.