This 40th annual Earth Day — April 22, 2010 — follows last month’s 4th annual Earth Hour and 12th annual World Water Day. Forgive me, but this blitz of environmental days is leaving me dazed. It’s not that I don’t concur with Earth Day’s high-minded objective “to advance climate policy, energy efficiency, renewable energy and green jobs,” or Earth Hour’s “call for action on climate change,” or World Water Day’s efforts to “raise awareness about sustaining healthy ecosystems and human well-being through . . . proactively addressing water quality.” It’s just that all the hours and days and years of committee meetings, marches, holding hands, ceremonies, speeches, press releases, etc. have not been able to stop our civilization from befouling and warming the atmosphere, and polluting and depleting fresh water sources, and overfishing and poisoning the oceans, and exhausting oil, gas, mineral, and other non-renewable natural resources, and wreaking the greatest mass extinction of species in 65 million years on the planet.

As Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Yes, even those right-minded people who organize and participate in Earth Day and other such events. The population of Homo sapiens has tripled, from a little over 2 billion to 6.7 billion, in just the average lifespan of one human, about 65 years worldwide. Our fast-growing population has resulted in consumption overshooting resources. And when that happens in any environment, from petri dishes to planets, all life is threatened. To think that Earth Day or any other “day” can change the reality of Earth’s limited carrying capacity is daydreaming. To think that we can stop our civilization’s pillaging and destruction of the environment without addressing the underlying cause — overpopulation — is daydreaming. Yet politically correct environmentalists on Earth Day, or any day, dare not even utter the word overpopulation. So the world’s population continues to daydream its way toward disaster.