sustainability

It is time for a new modern book to tell Ayn Rand’s story from Atlas Shrugged and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in modern terms. There is no question that todays environmental zealotry which is the theme of a new novel Mountains Whispers, Days Without Sun fills the bill. While Rand told a potentially true story this book updates it into our own future with the built in horrors of Agenda 21.

Common Core at the K -12 level in education is shifting and distorting education in many liberal ways, but what about the education being taught to our college age students? We should be even more concerned about that group, as they will soon be part of society and influencing it very soon. The obvious concern is whether they too are part of the Liberal’s attempt to insert their socialist agenda into the curriculum and thus minds of America’s youth.

The once rarely used word, “sustainability”, has become rather common today, arguably overused by those who want to make changes in our World. Dictionary.com provides two meanings for the word: “1. The ability to be sustained, supported, upheld, or confirmed. 2. Environmental Science: the quality of not being harmful to the environment or depleting natural resources, and thereby supporting long-term ecological balance.”

On the occasion of the Vatican’s workshop on global warming, sustainable development and human trafficking, it may be appropriate to remember Pope Benedict XVI’s message of January 1, 2010 celebrating the “World Day of Peace,”

In Today’s Heartland Daily Podcast, Managing Editor of Environment and Climate News H. Sterling Burnett speaks with Rachelle Peterson and Peter Wood of the National Association of scholars. After sharing the history and mission of the NAS, Peter and Rachelle discuss their new report: “Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism.”

This has been a week of eco-propaganda on a global scale. On Sunday there were “Climate Marches.” On Tuesday there will be a UN “Climate Summit”, and there will likely be an avalanche of nonsense in the media intended to make us believe we have control, influence, or impact on the climate when it is obvious to the rest of us that we—the human race—have none.

Try to ignore Earth Day, April 22. It won’t be easy. The print and broadcast media will engage in an orgy of environmental tall tales and the usual end-of-the-world predictions. It will scare the heck out of youngsters and bore the heck out of anyone old enough to know that we have had to endure the lies that hide the agendas that have driven the Greens since 1970 when the event was first proclaimed.

I was fortunate to have wrestled under Bill Koll for three years at Penn State. I say fortunate not because of the beating I took on the mats with my 1-4 career record – we weren’t as good as we are now under Cael Sanderson, but we always were a top 10 dual meet team and dominated the east, in spite of fierce opposition from the likes of Lehigh and Navy – but because wrestling under Coach Koll and assistant Andy Matter re-enforced the values I learned from my parents. The child of strict Italian parents, my first year or two at Penn State was like a kid being released into a candy shop whose never had a sweet before. I almost flunked out of school, but once I went out for wrestling, my grades shot up as the discipline returned. I quickly understood that if you want something you have to work for it. It also showed me why athletics can be a huge aid in education if done right. A big lesson for me: If you want something and someone is smarter or stronger than you, you have to outwork them to even have a chance.

Although many people, spurred by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, think “going green” means using less carbon dioxide, plants prefer just the opposite.

We all know plants need carbon dioxide to breathe, but many don’t know plants turn that carbon dioxide into carbon in the form of the roots, stems, trunks, branches, leaves, and fruit with which we are more familiar. And according to a new study by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, the more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the greener the planet gets.

Al Gore is back in the headlines, this time telling a Kansas audience their 1930s Dust Bowl conditions will soon return unless we stop using fossil fuels. We hope the Kansans will not be too alarmed, because Gore’s recipe for environmental salvation is actually the only sure way to bring the Dust Bowls back.

“[T]he GM debate is over. It is finished. We no longer need to discuss whether or not it is safe. … You are more likely to get hit by an asteroid than to get hurt by GM food.” So said Mark Lynas, the British environmentalist, who helped launch the anti-GMO movement in the 1990s.

Our schools need to end the “green” indoctrination and ensure that students are presented with and taught to ponder and debate all sides of important and complex questions. Parents need to make sure they do so.