Fifty seven years ago, on this day, July 17th, 1968, a Democratic Senator with Presidential ambitions organises a chat-fest.
on July 17, 1968, Jackson organized a Joint House-Senate colloquium in order to hash out the environmental challenges facing the country. Although it was ignored completely by the press, it was an influential event on Capitol Hill. Half of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s cabinet members attended.
“Out of that colloquium grew Jackson’s idea for a National Environmental Policy Act — a sweeping idea that, when it was enacted into law 18 months later, forced the federal government to examine the environmental consequences of almost every one of its actions, whether it was to build a supersonic transport or to carve a barge canal,” said William W. Prochnau and Richard W. Larsen in a biography of Jackson published four years later (Prochnau and Larsen, p. 68-69). https://www.historylink.org/File/9903
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 323ppm. As of 2025, when this post was published, it is 430ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.
The broader context was that environmental concerns had been growing over the 1950s and 1960s getting a significant boost with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962.
The specific context was that there had been repeated efforts by Democrats – especially Gaylord Nelson and Jackson – to get environmental legislation through, against the usual opposition. But pressures were slowly growing, and colloquia like this was part of that slow boring of hard boards (as per Max Weber).
What I think we can learn from this is that they sentence you to at LEAST twenty years of boredom for trying to change the system from within. Twenty should be considered a very light sentence…
What happened next – after the Santa Barbara Oil Spill of January 1969, things got a bit “easier” – Nelson suggested and got his “Earth Day”. Scoop Jackson, the Senator for Boeing, never got to be president…
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:
July 17, 1912 – Braidwood Dispatch and Mining Journal on climate change
July 17, 2006 – Australian Prime Minister shits on renewables, blah blah “realistic”