When I first started reading Julie Spadoni’s April 23 letter to the editor (“Let’s consume nothing at all”), I assumed it was a clever satire and it made me chuckle.

But when I realized she was serious, I abruptly stopped laughing and started praying young Miss Spadoni isn’t representative of all 14-year-olds,. Because if she is, the future of the human race isn’t very promising.

Not that it would bother her, apparently — not so long as the trees and pretty flowers remain undisturbed.

“Let’s make Earth Day a legal holiday,” she urges, during which no one would go to work and everyone would spend the day skipping along the beach picking up trash.

Except the people who were breaking into your house while you were gone, knowing all the law enforcement officials had taken the day off to be better stewards of the environment.

And oh by the way, be careful with those candles Little Miss Tree-Hugger wants you to use in lieu of actual electricity, because all the emergency room staff who’d normally be there to treat your burns, or the firefighters who’d save your house, will be out holding hands and singing “Kumbaya.”

I could go on, but you get the idea.

Look, I have teen-aged children, too, and I understand you can’t always expect flawless logic from them. And sometimes their outlook can be clouded by youthful exhuberance.

So I guess it isn’t the naivete of a 14-year-old that concerns me so much as my fear that she’s the product of the sort of environmental extremist indoctrination that passes for education in our schools these days.

Hopefully, Julie Spadoni is just an isolated case and not what happens when we force our kids to sit through scare-mongering propoganda like “An Inconvenient Truth” when we ought to be giving them facts.

If so, we’d better ask the granola factories to start working overtime. Except on Earth Day, that is.

Roger Ulrich is an Olalla resident.