Ace reminds readers that conservatives love the environment too. I keep meaning to write a post on this exact manner. I hear liberals talking about the environment all the time, yet it's my conservative friends who go to parks and forests. It's also not a liberal value to take pleasure in simple things, in fact for people who like all that change, they are awfully nostalgic set of people.
Anyway, a lot of this crap -- like conserving electricity once a week -- is not actually a terrible idea, and can lead to the rediscovery of forgotten pleasures. Like -- with the tv off, who knows what you might do. Wives might actually agree to sex, if only to mitigate the tedium.
But obviously the "movement" is not about the celebrating the earth per se, or conserving energy, or anything like that. It is a joyless affair, not about celebrating anything, but rather castigating the heretics and bullying the meek; and calculated to exclude anyone who doesn't buy into the envirosocialist/enviroluddite manifesto.
Forgive me for sounding Crunchy Con here, but there are worse things one could do than light candles one night and simply read by them (reading having been largely given up on my many of us, including me), or make merry without the distractions of the tv or internet. Even for futurists, there is something that just feels right and wholesome about the "Old Ways," and returning to them, even superficially and briefly, for a few hours at a time.
The fact that this reduces the electricity bill and also reduces some of our demand for foreign oil is almost just a bonus.
But of course that's not what earth day or earth hour is, and it never will be. But there is room for an Alternative Earth Day, one that genuinely celebrates what a splendid planet we've been given either by luck or fate or God Himself.
You know the father of the American conservation movement is Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican.
