Earth Day came and went with more dire warnings about the future. It should have been one bang of a celebration.

The world is becoming cleaner and healthier and yet the environmentalists are still wailing. With so many recent advances that should satisfy the greens – methane digesters, wind power, genetically modified foods with medicinal properties to prevent blindness — they continue trying to scare us to death. Like ham and eggs or pancakes and maple syrup, an environmental activist comes with the horsemen of the apocalypse.

"Try this experiment," writes columnist Mark Steyn. "Go up to an environmental activist and say. ‘Hey, how about that ozone hole closing up?’ Or ‘Wow! Global warming peaked in 1998 and it’s been getting cooler for almost a decade. Isn’t that great?’ And then look at their faces. As with all doomsday cults, good news is a bummer."

It is a tragedy that an environmental activist thrives on misery. Like the poor religious zealot standing at a street corner announcing: "The end is near," they seem compelled to moan about how bad life is, how contaminated our food is and how dangerous the world is but the facts don’t bear that out.

We live better today than kings of the middle ages and we live longer and enjoy much better health. Life expectancy doubled over the last century. In the mid-1860s life expectancy in Upper Canada was only 36. Our level of comfort was not imagined by our grandparents. Grocery stores have incredible abundance unimagined 50 years ago: Kiwis, giant strawberries, peaches without fuzz. We are healthier because of it. Our stores are stocked with cellphones with video screens. We have internet, access to affordable airline tickets, toilets just down the hall — not out by the barn — and disposable diapers. Gotta love those disposable diapers.

Scientific development has done wonders for the world. Even environmental activists are embracing such ideas as genetic engineering. They rail against it but actions speak louder than words. I’ve seen them eat. Says physician and former head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Henry Miller: "With the sole exception of wild berries and wild mushrooms, all the fruits, vegetables and grains in North America and European diets have been genetically modified or engineered by one technique or another."

A duplicitous lot, the activists wail about one thing but mean another. Founder of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, bailed out back in the mid-1980s when he saw his baby became unhinged from science. Problems compounded when the cause became the new religion of the urban atheist. As is taught in anthropology 101, you cannot eliminate man’s need for religion. If it is not God we worship, we erect new gods because we all need something to give meaning to our lives. I suspect that atheism is the depressing impetus for the consistently negative view of the world.

As for the utopian goal of back-to-nature wonderland, it’s unachievable and deep down most environmentalists likely know it. The wonderland they seek never existed and never will, argues physician and author Michael Crichton, who has made his arguments before several United States government committees and the U.S. senate. A trek in nature and you will see that nature is not romantic. It is full of disease, deadly animals and insects that will make you cry out for Deep Woods Off or something stronger.

"The truth is, almost nobody wants to experience real nature," says Crichton, in one of his many speeches. "What people want is to spend a week or two in a cabin in the woods, with screens on the windows. They want a simplified life for a while, without all their stuff. Or a nice river rafting trip for a few days, with somebody else doing the cooking. Nobody wants to go back to nature in any real way, and nobody does. It’s all talk – and as the years go on, and the world population grows increasingly urban, it’s uninformed talk. Farmers know what they’re talking about. City people don’t. It’s all fantasy."

He adds: "One way to measure the prevalence of fantasy is to note the number of people who die because they haven’t the least knowledge of how nature really is. They stand beside wild animals, like buffalo, for a picture and get trampled to death; they climb a mountain in dicey weather without proper gear, and freeze to death. They drown in the surf on holiday because they can’t conceive the real power of what we blithely call ‘the force of nature.’ They have seen the ocean, but they haven’t been in it. The television generation expects nature to act the way they want it to be."

The only way to stop that environmental propaganda is to question everything. Who did the research? Was it an independent study? How do you know? Does the researcher have a stake in the outcome? Zero-tolerance to risk is impossible. Is the risk an acceptable one? Has the research been peer reviewed? What does the other side in the debate have to say? In the battle for ideas, a rigorous appeal to science is the only answer.