The New York Review of Books had its finger on the pulse. In its 23 April 1970 issue, Robert Heilbroner had a review of Population, Resources, Environment by Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich under the heading “Ecological Armageddon”.
It began with the observation
Ecology has become the Thing. There are ecological politics, ecological jokes, ecological bookstores, advertisements, seminars, teach-ins, buttons. The automobile, symbol of ecological abuse, has been tried, sentenced to death, and formally executed in at least two universities (replete with burial of one victim)…
And quickly predicted what would happen –
the ecological issue has assumed the dimensions of a vast popular fad, for which one can predict with reasonable assurance the trajectory of all such fads—a period of intense general involvement, followed by growing boredom and gradual extinction, save for a die-hard remnant of the faithful.
(This got dubbed, in a 1972 article by someone else, the ‘Issue Attention Cycle’).
And then, when he is paraphrasing the Ehrlich argument –
The strain consists of the limited ability of the soil, the water, and the atmosphere of these favored regions to absorb the outpourings of these fast-growing industrial processes.
The most dramatic instance of this limited absorptive power is the rise in the carbon dioxide content of the air due to the steady growth of (largely industrial) combustion. By the year 2000, it seems beyond dispute that the CO2 content of the air will have doubled, raising the heat-trapping properties of the atmosphere. This so-called “greenhouse” effect has been predicted to raise mean global temperatures sufficiently to bring catastrophic potential consequences. One possibility is a sequence of climatic changes resulting from a melting of the Arctic ice floes that would result in the advent of a new Ice Age; another is the slumping of the Antarctic ice cap into the sea with a consequent tidal wave that could wipe out a substantial portion of mankind and raise the sea level by 60 to 100 feet.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 328,1ppm. As of 2023 it is 420ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was
“Everyone” was talking about it. This issue hit the newsstands in time for the first “Earth Day”
What I think we can learn from this
Issues come and go, independently of the actual problem.
What happened next
The issue went away again. The problem did not…
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.