You’ll see it all over in the media. Tuesday, April 22, 2014, is Earth Day—the 45th annual Earth Day, in fact. And the media will, as usual, trumpet various alarms, some of them with at least a grain of truth, many grossly exaggerated, some simply false.

Various exposés of Earth Day hype have been published through the years, with a good one by Cornwall Alliance friend Alan Caruba just appearing on Sunday.

But at the root of all the false thinking associated with Earth Day—and environmentalism generally—is a fundamental error.

It’s the error of thinking of human beings more as consumers than as producers, more as exploiters than as stewards, more as animals than as the crown of creation, made in the image of God.

With that thinking come fears of overpopulation and of economic growth, both seen as threatening the earth’s health and beauty. Such fears were among the most important motivations for the founder of Earth Day, Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-WI). Just consider two of his statements. The first is about population:

The bigger the population gets, the more serious the problems become…. We have to address the population issue. The United Nations, with the U.S. supporting it, took the position in Cairo in 1994 that every country was responsible for stabilizing its own population. It can be done. But in this country, it’s phony to say “I’m for the environment but not for limiting immigration.”

The second is about the economy: “The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around.”

The truth is precisely the opposite, and it’s by understanding such fundamental truths that we are set free from the falsehoods of Earth Day.