At the Charleston Daily Mail, Don Surber kicks off Earth Day Week in style:

Thursday is Lenin’s Birthday. It will be celebrated around the world as Earth Day, a holiday begun by Democratic Sen. Gaylord Nelson in 1970 to keep anti-capitalist sentiment going after the Vietnam War ended.
Ten years ago, on the 30th anniversary of Earth Day, Ronald Bailey of Reason magazine recycled some quotes from that first Earth Day.
“I’m scared,” Paul Ehrlich wrote in the 1970 Earth Day issue of Look. “I have a 14-year-old daughter whom I love very much. I know a lot of young people, and their world is being destroyed.
“My world is being destroyed. I’m 37 and I’d kind of like to live to be 67 in a reasonably pleasant world, and not die in some kind of holocaust in the next decade.”
Lord willing and the creek doesn’t rise, Ehrlich will turn 78 next month.
“We have about five more years at the outside to do something,” ecologist Kenneth Watt said at Swarthmore College in 1970.
Well, we must have done something right. We’re still here.
Maybe it was the leisure suits that saved us. That makes about as much sense as anything else. [. . .]
The Earth Day trippers have run out of pollution and are now attacking carbon dioxide – the air we exhale.
Which reminds me, the biggest polluters in the world turned out to be the communist states of China, the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc nations.
The Aral Sea is 90 percent smaller than it was before the Soviets came into power.
The concern back in the 1970s was global cooling. We would freeze to death.
To today’s devotees of the notion that evil capitalism is destroying the world and melting glaciers and the polar icecaps, Happy Lenin’s Birthday.
I try to respect all religions.