Pictured above is the late environmental activist and counterculture leader Ira Einhorn presiding over the very first Earth Day 50 years ago this month in Philadelphia. In addition to being the Earth Day guru and  a leader of the environmental movement, Einhorn was also a conman who lived off and abused gullible women. One of these was his long-suffering girlfriend Holly Maddux, a graduate of Bryn Mawr College. After five years of degradation and abuse, Holly finally found the courage to end her relationship with him. On September 9, 1977, she went to retrieve her belongings from the apartment they had previously shared and was never again seen alive.

When questioned by the Philadelphia Police, Einhorn claimed that Holly had left the apartment to buy “tofu and sprouts” and never came back. But then neighbors began complaining about a foul odor coming from Einhorn’s apartment. And the downstairs tenants noticed an oily brown stain on the ceiling of their closet. Although they painted it over, the stain reappeared.

Holly’s parents hired a retired FBI agent to investigate her disappearance. This led to the Philadelphia Police searching Einhorn’s apartment on March 28, 1979. When Philadelphia Police Detective Michael Chitwood found a decomposed corpse in a trunk in Einhorn’s closet, he said, “It looks like we found Holly.” To this, Einhorn replied curtly, “You found what you found.”

Einhorn had been living with Holly’s rotting corpse for 18 months.

Although Einhorn was charged with murder, the influential environmentalist and counterculture hero was released on bail with the financial assistance of a wealthy woman who had been supporting him and the skilled advocacy of his lawyer, future United States Senator Arlen Specter. In 1981, just before he was to go on trial, Einhorn fled to Europe where he was a fugitive for the next 16 years. In 1996, he was convicted in absentia of Holly’s murder.

The entire time that Einhorn was on the run, Assistant District Attorney Rich di Benedetto, head of the Philadelphia District Attorney’s  Extradition Unit, ran down every rumor, tip and lead until he was able to have Einhorn arrested in France in 1997. But before France would agree to extradite him, the Pennsylvania legislature had to pass the “Einhorn Law” which would allow him to request a new trial.

Einhorn appealed France’s decision to the European Court of Human Rights. When that appeal failed, he dramatically but unsuccessfully slit his throat in order to escape imprisonment.

Finally, on July 20, 2001, he was extradited to Pennsylvania where he was retried for Holly’s murder. The great environmentalist took the stand and testified that Holly had been murdered by the CIA which was trying to frame him for his investigations into the Cold War and something called “psychotronics”. That defense probably would have had some serious traction with a jury of Bryn Mawr graduates and other super-educated progressive free thinkers. Fortunately, the actual  jury was comprised of ordinary, everyday common sense working and middle class people who took less than two hours of deliberations to convict him again of murder.

Einhorn died of natural causes in prison on April 3, 2020 just days short of the 50th anniversary of Earth Day.

While the thoroughly dishonest Ira Einhorn was one of the founders of Earth Day, he was not alone in peddling the Dooms Day scenarios which are the main rhetorical underpinnings of the environmental movement. Consider, for example, Paul Ehrlich, a leading ecologist and best-selling author.

Rather than slogging through the entire catalog of Ehrlich’s fatuous predictions, just take a look at this newspaper article which was published six months after the first Earth Day.

As you can see, according to Ehrlich, the oceans died sometime before 1980. Check. And America was rationing water by 1974 and food by 1980. Check and double check.

The environmental movement has spawned other seers who have made similarly ridiculous claims. While in the 1970s environmentalists predicted that Earth would be plunged into a new Ice Age, by the 1980s the predictions shifted to Earth becoming a man-made inferno. In the 1980s we were assured that global warming would melt the ice caps causing the oceans to rise such that New York City and New Jersey would disappear underwater before the end of the century. It seemed that by the 1990s we could expect to be boiling lobsters in our toilets.

But when neither global freezing nor global warming seemed to be in the offing, the environmental movement shifted gears again and simply predicted “climate change”. Just so. If we have a warm spell, that means we are doomed. If the weather turns cold, we are doomed. They seem to have all the bases covered.

So, as we observe the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, let us recall Ira Einhorn, the criminal mastermind and bloviating conman who was instrumental in organizing it. Given the environmental movement’s unbroken record of ever-shifting and failed predictions, it seems fitting that this Founding Father of Earth Day died in prison.