The earth itself, however, is worthy of celebration, as Thomas Jefferson often noted. It’s a magnificent blue and green planet, and the only one among the nine in our solar system able to sustain life on its surface.

It houses brightly colored butterflies, graceful hammerhead sharks, and even those strange and wonderful anthropoid organisms we call human beings. Nature deserves respect, as it encompasses all of matter -- all material reality -- including our bodies and brains. In the realms of physics, nature is the highest authority, with scientific fact as the supreme code of laws.

But we can perceive and appreciate all this only because of our consciousness -- the individual human mind. That, too, is a marvel worth beholding. It is the human mind that has allowed to us to interpret nature’s laws and use them to continue existing.

We have followed the logical instructions for living, verbalized by Francis Bacon: “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” This is in stark contrast to radical environmentalism, which says: “Nature must never be commanded; only obeyed.”

It’s through the mind that we’ve built the grand industrial civilization we have today.

What would life be like if not for scientist-entrepreneur Clarence Birdseye, who, by artificially restructuring nature, invented the refrigerator? Environmentalists balk about the older refrigerators made, which emitted CFCs into the atmosphere.

But these machines deserve gratitude.

Even when farmers raised their yields in the Middle Ages, much of their food rotted and went to waste, thus allowing famines to continue. Thanks to machines like refrigerators that preserve our food, we have an easier time remaining well fed.

What about vaccines and antibiotics? Radical environmentalist Tom Regan says, “We have no basic right not to be harmed by those natural diseases we are heir to.”

Thankfully, that’s not the attitude of the numerous medical scientists working to fight diseases. I’m happy about Jonas Salk’s belief that humans did have a basic right not to be harmed by germs, which led him to developing the polio vaccine.

I’m glad that Swiss scientists are now “playing God” with the genes of crops in order to create “golden rice” that fights the Vitamin A deficiency that’s so fatal to children in the Third World.

What about automobiles? Without Henry Ford mass-producing affordable versions of these, we’d be confined to living in small villages.

It’s transportation devices like cars that help bring different peoples from different regions together in a far shorter amount of time than horse-drawn wagons or sailboats.

Finally, we owe some thanks to Thomas Edison, for inventing the electric power generator, and for the power companies today that keep so many of our life-sustaining machines running.

Without electricity -- including that which is provided by coal, oil, and nuclear power -- we’d have no television to warn Hawaii to prepare for impending hurricanes, no air-conditioning to prevent heatstroke in cities located in hotter regions of the globe, and no computers that save scientists time in computing medical statistics, thus allowing them to devote more of their working days and financial resources to studying the diseases more carefully.

Considering all this, why is there a holiday celebrating a distrust for technology and the market forces driving its innovation, but no holiday to acknowledge how much they’ve maintained and improved our lives?

As social commentator Robert W. Tracinski said two Earth Days ago, “Let the greens have their day to honor John Muir and Rachel Carson -- so long as we also have a day to honor Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. Let us have a day when all of us take a moment to acknowledge the enormous contribution made to human life by the inventors and businessmen of the Industrial Revolution.”

That’s true. Every time we hear of how hazardous and complicated our technology and infrastructure make our existence, we could take a moment to recall how dangerous, drab, and short our lives would be without them.

In the past 30 years, the earth has already received a just amount of appreciation. It’s about time we extend this appreciation to machines, entrepreneurship and the human mind.

Since the 1970s, April 22 of every year has been celebrated as Earth Day. Nowadays, environmental activists meet on this date to give speeches about how they disapprove of capitalism and industrialization.

Stuart K. Hayashi is the president of the Reason Club of Honolulu and an undergraduate in Entrepreneurial Studies at Hawaii Pacific University, though his opinions do not necessarily reflect that of either institution. He can be reached at radical_individualist@hotmail.com (If you would like to continue seeing Stuart Hayashi's editorials on this site, please let Hawaii Reporter know at info@hawaiireporter.com)

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