Earth Day should be a party.

Bob Casper, a representative from the environmental group Earth First, said Earth Day should be a time to have fun while becoming environmentally conscious.

“Get excited about this, it’s a party, so treat it that way. Then treat every day afterwards as an Earth Day,” Casper said.

Casper spoke to a crowd of about 80 people in the Holmes Student Center Capital Room as part of Earth Week, which the NIU Student Environmental Awareness Coalition is sponsoring.

He said people need to view Earth Day as a model from which they can learn to take action against problems such as over-population.

“Stop the rhetoric and start doing things,” Casper said.

He said over-population is at the root of all human problems today including crime, war, starvation and environmental problems.

“There are just too damn many people on this planet. We need to get our population under control, because if we don’t there isn’t much of a future in store for us,” Casper said.

He said the idea of “progress” being the expansion of technology, industry and the growth of the human population is a lie.

Progress “spells death and destruction” if we allow our world to be “eaten up” by human consumption, Casper said.

We’ve got to stop the bulldozer of progress before it crushes the entire world beneath it,” he said.

People should demand that lawmakers raise the price of gasoline to “ten dollars a gallon” and demand that the revenue be spent on mass transportation, Casper said.

He said birth control and recycling need to be “shoved down the throats” of lawmakers.

Everyone needs to say “planned parenthood is the future you pin-headed, right-wing, right-to-lifers,” Casper said.

He said the human population has increased by 1.6 billion since the last Earth Day in 1970. There are 30 to 40 percent more people on the earth today, Casper said.

He said the increase in human population has diminished the amount of natural forest left on earth.

Natural forests are home to many species that have co-existed with man for thousands of years, Casper said.

“The wilderness is much more than an empty space to go backpacking in,” he said.

No compromise can be made in the attempt to preserve forest areas because “Without the trees we’re going to die,” Casper said.

“Humans and trees have a truly symbiotic relationship. We get our oxygen from them and we provide them with carbon dioxide,” he said.