When I was growing up in the fifties, the future looked like a coming paradise, where everything was just going to get better and better and better. We were all going to scoot around in our private helicopters and sit around the pool while robots did all the work. The future began to look a bit iffy when the Cold War started in earnest and every year you scanned maps in the newspaper showing your chances of surviving a direct nuclear strike on your city.
Then in 1962
Rachel Carson dropped a mind-boggling bomb of her own, in
Silent Spring . The earth doesn't just placidly swallow any quantity of any poison and give it back as fresh water. There's a price to be paid for dumping poison into the land and the sea--and, believe it or not, this was staggering news at the time. We'd thought for thousands of years that we could do any damn thing we wanted.
Then just six years later
Paul Ehrlich dropped another bomb on us–
The Population Bomb. Wow, the future was beginning to look downright GRIM.
But there were things we could DO--at least about some of this. We could, by God, see to it that the government tightened up controls on polluting industries. We could join environmental organizations and vote for environmental candidates. It came as a surprise--to those of us who cared--to see that some very popular politicians cared a whole lot more about polluting industries than they did about us. It took us a while to see that environmentalists were being perceived as people who were in favor of IT--the environment--and AGAINST us humans. Political candidates soon began to shut up about protecting the environment.
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