Confessions of an Earth Day Slacker

-Rex Murphy, National Post
Editor: We are placing this article here because it is a great source for aspiring journalists or even just readers to learn a style of writing for educational/entertainment purposes. No profit is made by placing this article that was not written by us. 

This is one of the best, if not the best article written with tongue firmly implanted in both cheeks, of course one at a time and taking care of the social distance from one cheek to the other, just in case! An ounce of protection (or metric equivalent) is worth a pound (or metric equivalent) of cure!  

And now back to the article by Rex Murphy

Like so many others who are consumed by the threat of global warming, the imminent extinction of all life on the planet, a fate pursued with such fury by the oil cartels, I fear I have been a little slack, even lapsed, in my Greenitude this year. Stalwart warmist that I am, I believe all must play their part to put a stay to that dread event. Alas — this is confessional — I haven’t lived up to my own sultry beliefs.

Take Earth Hour almost a month ago.

Naturally I followed the available protocols for that precious 60 minutes. I turned the toaster down to the dim “5” setting (I like a bit of toast in the evening, usually much darker). For recreation I watched a “rerun” instead of a new TV show, thus reducing my “carbon eyeprint.” And, more seriously (lights off in the living room as per usual) I tried a new trick with the candles, lighting them, after the first one, off each other rather than, as in more abandoned years, with one match for each taper.

I turned the toaster down to the dim “5” setting

 

Now doubters may think this was a precious little effort, and maybe so. But by my calculation my regimen may have added another 20 whole seconds to the life of this Earth, before it inevitably perspires into oblivion from global warming. Holding off on the matches alone probably added 15 seconds. I had a lot of candles.

Still, I know I should have done better; maybe told the boat builders in the basement to lay down their electric tools, and turned off the second generator I use to warm the backyard pool. And, truth to tell, I still feel a little sheepish — if that’s the word here — about streaking off to New Zealand on a monstrous 767 airplane the very next morning.

It was the same three weeks later with the even more solemn observances of Earth Day, for us believers the most precious 24 hours in our planet’s 365-day orbit around Father Sun.

Members of the Asian Citizen’s Center for Environment and Health perform during an Earth Day event in Seoul on April 22, 2020. Jung Yeon-je/AFP via Getty Images

Most times I try my best to Live the Liturgy. This year in the morning I went out and had coffee and a chat with a couple of weeping willows. Tried to cheer ’em up. No go. Genuflected every time a Tesla swished by. Went by the vegan market and picked up some dried kelp. Mixed with a little grass (not that grass, from the lawn) it makes a great incense for meditation sessions, and offers an aromatherapeutic remedy for my many allergies and the onset of what I fear may be Climate PTSD. I did my yoga routine in front of a privately sculpted icon of the blessed David Attenborough, to the calming moans of a CD of whale music.

I paced around the apartment, solitary as all are during this terrible plague (thought by some to be a punishment for Mother Earth), muttering invocations to Father Nye, Bishop Suzuki, Cardinal Monbiot and Pope Gore, and in between chanting versicles from the latest psalter of the Viridian Church — Cows and Flatulence: their Expulsions, our Extinction. One of the great tracts of our time. Spiritually I was in tune with the day, but in my heart I knew it was less than I should be doing.

I contemplated the long, deep and mysterious traditions of Earth Day, how it was first celebrated. Not by the girlfriend-murdering Ira Einhorn in Philadelphia in 1970. A modern heresy. But long ago in the mists of time.

Most times I try my best to Live the Liturgy

 

It was hooded priests in the order of the Druids at the temple we know as Stonehenge on the great plain of Salisbury who put this marker on the calendar. It was the Druids who drew up the first carbon tax. It was they who gave us Earth Day’s Green Scriptures. They were the prophets who entered upon the parchment scrolls the first 100 Tips for Greener Living for the busy Hunter-Gather.

“Does your family need two bison this winter?” “That sheep pen out back? Is it just ‘status seeking’ because you heard the London crowd had them?” Just two of their clever notions.

Other great innovations emerged from the circle of giant stones and the priestly class who worshipped within its sacred circumference. Was Stonehenge a megalithic climate model? Certainly it was Stonehenge, with the co-operation of The Viking Long Boat Tour Agency (Oar and Sail, not Oil), that convened the first ever Conference of the Parties to Save our Warming Earth. Over 5,000 delegates (population was low in those days, but the gathering would swell) and half as many scribes attended, coming away with pledges from all tribes to cut their carbon emissions by 30 per cent by the year 1150 BC.

The ancient neolithic monument of Stonehenge is viewed from a hot air balloon on Sept. 7, 2016, in Wiltshire, England. Matt Cardy/Getty Images

It was also, and this is important, the very first set of carbon-emissions targets that everybody knew were never to be met, setting the pattern for centuries of IPCC conferences yet to come.

Only one note of controversy. The delegation from the famous Thunberg clan all travelled haughtily, each one by his or her own private ox. One youngling, yclept Greta, was even said to have a spare ox. How dare they, said the head Druid.

The Druids as warrior warmists faced two great challenges: fire and the wheel.

The first came from the early industrialists, ravening capitalists the horde of them. They invented the stone grate. The planet was on the threshold of the age when people started thinking it was a good thing, maybe lord forbid a right, to keep warm, and a right (gasp) to cook.

Druids, pagans and revellers gather in the centre of Stonehenge as they take part in a winter solstice ceremony at the neolithic monument on Dec. 21, 2016. Matt Cardy/Getty Images

And who would supply the fuel? Why the exploiters and deniers, the peat cartels and the bogland syndicates, Earth-haters and denialists the pack of them.

Then came the wheel. It would take people off their feet. Opponents determined to stop the menace in its not-yet-formed tracks. The anti-wheel movement, championed by paleolithic activists, made a big thing of it.

Stop the Wheel was very big in its day. A proleptic version of the great Ban the Pipeline debate of our times. Raised a lot of chickens too, for the environmental cause.

But this is another story. If I can rev up my slacker’s commitment to the cause of causes, maybe it can be told next Earth Day.