Fifty eight years ago, on this day, November 26th, 1966, the UK Conservation Society has its first meeting.
Inaugural General Meeting of the Conservation Society, Herring 2001
Lady Eve Balfour, ‘Inaugural address to the Conservation Society’, 26 November 1966,
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 321ppm. As of 2024 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the great British public were getting a little worried about pollution, species loss, pesticides, you name it. And there had been a letter in The Observer a few months earlier, that kick started the whole thing. And this was the first meeting of the Conservation Society. (Compare it with, for example, Amnesty, which also started with a newspaper article followed by a letter.)
What we learn is that by the mid 1960s, the problems were becoming apparent, and couldn’t be denied really. And groups of citizens were taking it upon themselves to come together to try to inform/lobby governments.
What happened next, the Conservation Society held some useful meetings. In 1968 its president was Lord Ritchie Calder. And he gave a blistering speech called Hell on Earth which had a small mention of the problem of C02 buildup, something that he had been talking about in mildly apocalyptic terms, at least in 1963 and had already mentioned on radio at the beginning of 1968.
And the ConSoc, had its high watermark, probably with Paul Ehrlich’s visit in 1971. But thereafter, the fact that it was a small, relatively small c-conservative organisation, and there were newer, more media-attuned organisations like Friends of the Earth and then Greenpeace meant that ConSoc was on a long, slow decline. However, this can be overplayed. And in the mid 70s, there’s a series of really interesting and useful reports by ConSoc groups in different parts of the UK.
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:
November 26, 1996 – Australian climate modelling is ridiculed
November 26, 1998 – “National Greenhouse Strategy” (re)-launched