Fifty five years ago, on this day, May 10th, 1968 Time magazine published an article on “The Age of Effluence.” It began thus –
WHAT ever happened to America the Beautiful? While quite a bit of it is still visible, the recurring question reflects rising and spreading frustration over the nation’s increasingly dirty air, filthy streets and malodorous rivers—the relentless degradations of a once virgin continent. This man-made pollution is bad enough in itself, but it reflects something even worse: a dangerous illusion that technological man can build bigger and bigger industrial societies with little regard for the iron laws of nature….
Under the sub-heading “The Systems Approach”
It seems undeniable that some disaster may be lurking in all this, but laymen hardly know which scientist to believe. As a result of fossil-fuel burning, for example, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen about 14% since 1860. According to Ecologist Lamont C. Cole, man is thus reducing the rate of oxygen regeneration, and Cole envisions a crisis in which the amount of oxygen on earth might disastrously decline. Other scientists fret that rising carbon dioxide will prevent heat from escaping into space. They foresee a hotter earth that could melt the polar icecaps, raise oceans as much as 400 ft., and drown many cities. Still other scientists forecast a colder earth (the recent trend) because man is blocking sunlight with ever more dust, smog and jet contrails. The cold promises more rain and hail, even a possible cut in world food. Whatever the theories may be, it is an established fact that three poisons now flood the landscapes: smog, pesticides, nuclear fallout.
There’s this too…
Man has tended to ignore the fact that he is utterly dependent on the biosphere: a vast web of interacting processes and organisms that form the rhythmic cycles and food chains in which one part of the living environment feeds on another. The biosphere is no immutable feature of the earth. Roughly 400 million years ago, terrestrial life consisted of some primitive organisms that consumed oxygen as fast as green plants manufactured it. Only by some primeval accident were the greedy organisms buried in sedimentary rock (as the source of crude oil, for example), thus permitting the atmosphere to become enriched to a life-sustaining mix of 20% oxygen, plus nitrogen, argon, carbon dioxide and water vapor. With miraculous precision, the mix was then maintained by plants, animals and bacteria, which used and returned the gases at equal rates. About 70% of the earth’s oxygen is thus produced by ocean phytoplankton: passively floating plants. All this modulated temperatures, curbed floods and nurtured man a mere 1,000,000 or so years ago.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 323ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that everyone was worrying about air pollution, especially smog in cities, and water pollution and noise and so forth. And Time Magazine, as was its want ran articles like the age of effluence, which has a glancing mention of CO2 buildup, which had really come to some I wouldn’t call it prominence, then at least awareness in 1965 with Lyndon Johnson’s special message to Congress.
Since then, it had been popping up here and there, especially in science publications, but also, Roger Revelle had mentioned it in the Saturday Evening Post. Barry Commoner mentioned it in his 1966 book Science and Survival.
What we learn is that we learned nothing, to go full Hegel.
What happened next? The following year, the environment broke through in part because of the Santa Barbara oil spill as a focusing event. The time was right. The end of ‘69, you know, there was an Earth Day coming, lots of people talking about all these issues, and one of them was CO2 buildup.
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.
Also on this day:
May 10, 1978 – Women told that by 2000 “we will be frantically searching for alternatives to coal.”