For those of us who keep an eye on such matters, it is becoming increasingly clear that there is a growing sense of desperation among the Greens who have devoted themselves to scaring the daylights out of everyone since the 1970's when the movement began to pick up momentum.

While Europe continues to succumb to every scare conjured up by the Greens, in the US the awareness of the failure of every prediction made on the first Earth Day in 1970 or the lies of the current Administration simply fail the truth test.

Last month, David Brower, described by that most Green of all newspapers, The New York Times, as "one of the most respected leaders of the environmental movement", resigned from the board of the Sierra Club, possibly one of the most subversive organizations other than Greenpeace International. "The world is burning and all I hear from them is the music of violins," said Brower. "The planet is being trashed, but the board has no real sense of urgency. We need to try to save the earth at least as fast as it's being destroyed."

This ignores the fact that the earth is now sustaining some six billion people in addition to all the other animals, insects, fungi, and vegetation that share it. Brower is now 87 years old and he has battled with the Sierra Club for years since joining it in 1933 and serving as its first executive director in the 1950's and l960's. He was removed from the leadership in 1969 when the board grew weary of his endless wailing over the fate of the earth. He then founded Friends of the Earth and the League of Conservation Voters, both of which have become major organizations in their own right. He returned to the board of the Sierra Club in 1983. As might be expected, his big complaint is "overpopulation" and he threw in "immigration" as part of the problem.

The fact of human life, particularly now that there are more people, drives Greens crazy. They hate humankind with a passion and those who formulate policy for the movement have been as intent as possible to find ways to "reduce" it. This is why they oppose the introduction of genetically modified seeds, seek to ban more pesticides, and want to put vast areas of the US and the rest of the earth off limits to human habitation and use.

A more shadowy, but equally powerful figure in the Green movement is Maurice Strong, the United Nations Secretary General's right-hand man. He has written a book, Where on Earth are We Going? In a commentary published in Canada's Globe and Mail, a leading daily newspaper, he wailed away last month about?guess what?the fact that humans are "now the dominant species" as if this was a problem. "Dire predictions are never popular, but they are not always wrong," said Strong, but dire predictions are all we ever hear from the Greens. And they have proven to be wrong over and over again.

In his book, Strong offers a fictional scenario for the end of the year 2030, a mere thirty years from now, in which the world "has degenerated into chaos, conflict and societal breakdown of a colossal scale." The book envisages "a world in which extremes of weather and natural disasters have taken more lives and caused more damage than both World Wars of the 20th century. It may be fiction, but it is not far-fetched. I am convinced that it is the kind of world that we will have in, or around, the year 2030 if we continue on our present course."

End of the world, doomsday scenarios have been around a very long time and what we are hearing more lately is a heavy barrage of these scenarios coming from the Greens. I have a theory that the reason for this is the increasing worldwide recognition that, yes, there are environmental problems that need addressing, but that the endless cries of the Greens are beginning to fall on deaf ears as people sense that modern technology and science is proving capable of providing more food, better health services, and improved ways of dealing with that most powerful of entities, the earth's capacity for conjuring up hurricanes, droughts, floods, earthquakes, and other totally natural calamities.

The Greens are rapidly becoming "the little boy who cried wolf" to the point where people are weary of their idiotic "solutions" to their fictional doomsday scenarios. The result is a reasonable, rational response that is more confident of man's ability to cope with nature than to worry that the earth, a planet that's been around for more than five billion years, is now suddenly going to cease being a very successful sustaining factor in our lives and those for countless generations to come.