1969 June 01 Stephanie Mills delivers here “Future is a Cruel Hoax” commencement address at Mills College.
“Our days as a race on this planet are, at this moment, numbered,” she proclaimed, “and the reason for our finite, unrosy future is that we are breeding ourselves out of existence.”
“I am terribly saddened by the fact that the most humane thing for me to do is to have no children at all. But the piper is finally demanding payment.”
http://www.conversationearth.org/cruel-hoax-stephanie-mills-106/
http://www.conversationearth.org/cruel-hoax-stephanie-mills-106-encore/
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 324ppm. As of 2024 it is 426ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that environmental awareness had been growing through ‘67-68 and had been picked up in the mainstream media. And of course, there had been the Santa Barbara oil spill in late January 1969. And alongside that, the vicious assault on democracy and people that had been People’s Park, which Stephanie Miller would have been extremely well aware of, and who knows, possibly participated in.
What we learn from this is that ecological awareness among the young was well underway. It didn’t need Earth Day. It didn’t need a hero Senator sponsoring stuff. The senator was catching a wave that already existed.
What happened next, Stephanie Miller had a career as an activist, if you want to call it that, devoted her life to activism. And the mega machine kept making machining. And the emissions kept climbing.
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:
June 1, 1965 – Tom Lehrer warns “don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air”
June 1, 1992 – “environmental extremists” want to shut down the United States, says President Bush
June 1, 2011 – Japanese office workers into short sleeves to save the planet