Monday was the 43rd celebration of Earth Day, an event hailed as an effort to promote responsible stewardship of the environment. Fittingly, it is also the birthdate of Communist Party creator Vladimir Lenin, a reality that the radical environmentalists responsible for the creation of Earth Day dismiss as a mere coincidence. Yet there is little question that under the guise of “saving the planet,” the earth-firster crowd would be more than willing to impose the same kind of totalitarian control over the masses envisioned by Lenin.

Like communism, the radical environmentalism that forms the heart of Earth Day celebrations is all about collectivism. In a 2007 column for the Cato Institute, former Czech Republic president Vaclav Klaus called environmentalism one of the main dangers to freedom in the 21st century. “Environmentalism only pretends to deal with environmental protection,” writes Klaus. “Behind their people- and nature-friendly terminology, the adherents of environmentalism make ambitious attempts to radically reorganize and change the world, human society, our behavior, and our values.”

The Earth Day concept was developed by then-Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-WI), Congress’s foremost environmentalist. Nelson also helped to develop college “sit-ins,” where professors surreptitiously abandoned their curriculums to lecture students on the evils of imperialist America and the virtues of communism, a misunderstood system of governance that merely need better implementation to succeed.

Nelson’s efforts were facilitated by Denis Hayes. Hayes was a student at Stanford University, where he was elected student body president and became a high-profile anti-Vietnam War activist who once helped lead a student siege of a campus weapons-research laboratory.

Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich was the third man behind the Earth Day cult. Ehrlich’s claim to fame was The Population Bomb, a book that predicted societal disintegration, and hundreds of millions of deaths from famine – by the 1980s – due to the “cancer” of human population growth. In 1969 Nelson and Ehrlich decided that a nation enthralled by the ethos of Woodstock was ready for a nationwide teach-in on environmentalism. Hayes was brought in to coordinate and implement the operation. The trio decided that the first Earth Day would be held on April 22, 1970 – the centennial celebration of Lenin’s birthday.

The philosophical alignment between Lenin, who issued a decree known as “On Land,” declaring all natural resources the exclusive property of the state, and environmentalists, who believe that private enterprise and private property are impediments to saving the planet, are unmistakeable. To a large extent, those radical impulses have been realized in the United States. The federal government owns nearly 30 percent of all the land in the country, including five states where it owns more than half. Much of it remains federalized via the Endangered Species Act, which allows government to cordon off property from development if an endangered species is living on it. Furthermore, until the Supreme Court stopped the EPA last year, that agency was using the Clean Water Act to mandate what private property owners could or could not do with their own property, while preventing those owners from seeking recourse in the courts. "In a nation that values due process, not to mention private property, such treatment is unthinkable,“ said Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the court’s decision.

The EPA was created by Congress eight months after the first Earth Day celebration.

Another major player promoting Earth Day is the Earth Day Network (EDN), founded in 1994 by the organizers of the first Earth Day celebration. The most insidious plank of EDN’s "core programs” is its “Greening Schools and Promoting Environmental Education” agenda. EDN provides educators with a variety of games, interactive quizzes and other aids, that enable them to teach kids from kindergarten through twelfth grade how to be the best “green” citizens they can be. Much of EDN’s emphasis is centered on making kids feel guilty about the size of their “ecological footprint” in comparison to children from other nations. "If everyone lived like you,“ EDN tells children, "we would need [X-number of] planets” to sustain the lives of all the earth’s people.“ EDN’s message is subtle but clear: capitalism is unjust and, as a result, America is using more than its "fair share” of the world’s resources.

Hayes, who sits on EDN’s Board of Directors, makes this plain. "Under communism prices were not allowed to reflect economic reality,“ Hayes contends. "Under capitalism, prices don’t reflect ecological reality. In the long run, the capitalist flaw – if uncorrected – may prove to be the more catastrophic. …" Moreover, Hayes makes no bones about the fact that he considers human population growth to be the "most worrisome” environmental problem. "If everyone currently in the world aspires to consume at the same level as, say, the average Swede does, the human population already exceeds the planet’s carrying capacity,“ writes Hayes.

Ira Einhorn who hosted the first Earth Day event at the Fairmount Park in Philadelphia on April 22, 1970, made his own personal contribution to population reduction. Seven years after the event, police raided his apartment and found the remains of his girlfriend, after one of his neighbors complained about a reddish-brown, foul-smelling liquid leaking into the ceiling directly below Einhorn’s closet. After 23 years on the run, he was extradited from France, convicted of murder and is serving a life sentence.

Another major player in the radical environmentalist movement is a Canadian named Maurice Strong. After starting his career in the oil business in the 1950s, Strong cultivated contacts in the Canadian government. By 1966, he became head of the Canadian International Development Agency. His success there impressed UN Secretary General U Thant, who asked him to organize the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in 1972, better known as the first "Earth Summit.” The "Declaration of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment" created there offered a number of socialist/Marxist ideas, including the transfer of wealth from developed countries to under-developed ones, the need for population control, and “extensive cooperation among nations and action by international organizations in the common interest,” aka world governance. It offered 26 principles to advance this agenda.

In 1992, another Earth Summit was held in Rio, out of which the “Rio Declaration on Environment and Development” emerged. Another 27 principles, similar to the pie-in-the-sky, wealth transferring eco-socialist/Marxist agenda that emerged 20 years earlier, was added to the mix. That summit was also led by Strong.

One world government is the primary impetus behind a UN project known as Agenda 21 – originated by Maurice Strong. In 1993, the UN explained its mission. “Agenda 21 proposes an array of actions which are intended to be implemented by every person on earth…it calls for specific changes in the activities of all people…Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all humans, unlike anything the world has ever experienced." 178 countries have currently adopted Agenda 21. Strong himself, who currently resides in the People’s Republic of China, expressed his personal view on what must happen for Agenda 21 to succeed. "Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” he asked.

There is little question that such people will try. That is why the term “climate change,” which replaced “global warming” when a decade of steady temperatures threatened the credibility of the environmentalists’ “irrefutable data” – along with the movement itself – has itself been replaced by the newest catchword, “sustainability.” The United Nations Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development held in June 2012 issued a report that reiterated the totalitarian ambitions of both Earth Summits and the Agenda 21 project. "Working Towards a Balanced and Inclusive Green Economy: A United Nations System-wide Perspective,“ detailed the trillions of dollars that must be spent moving the entire world towards a "green” economy, where every aspect of human behavior would be regulated by a top-down, command-and-control bureaucracy.

Havel foresaw exactly such a development. “There is no doubt that it is our duty to rationally protect nature for future generations,” he writes. “The followers of the environmentalist ideology, however, keep presenting us with various catastrophic scenarios with the intention of persuading us to implement their ideas. That is not only unfair but also extremely dangerous.”

That is a far more elegant way of describing how those who celebrate Earth Day envision implementing their agenda. Less elegant, but far more familiar, is the phrase that both communists and radical environmentalists thoroughly embrace, as in, “by any means necessary.”

Earth Day was the impetus behind this mushrooming desire for global power, hidden by an environmental facade. Villainous mankind, whose expressions of waywardness have changed over the decades – from the polluter, to the deforester, to the animal species eliminator, and finally to climate fouler of the entire planet – must be brought to heel. Toward that end there has been a remarkable consistency. Earth Day remains a celebration of anti-capitalism, anti-humanism, population control and ill-disguised totalitarianism.

Two of Earth Day’s founders make these assertions clear. Denis Hayes: "America has a mechanism to deal with things that are not well-served by the market. It’s called government. Government is the way that we assert the fundamental values of the majority, constrained by the rights of the minority. Government is the realm in which we decide what is dispensable and what is – literally – priceless.“ Paul Ehrlich: "A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people…We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer.  The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.”

Arnold Ahlert is a columnist for FrontPage Magazine.