Fifty-nine years ago, on this day, July 14th, 1967, Edward Mishan, had a long article in the Spectator (back when it was still a serious publication).
The rights of man and the rape of his environment: a blueprint for a peaceful revolution
Mishan, Edward J The Spectator; Jul 14, 1967;
“Of course, it happens innocently enough. Machines that are employed to produce services for some simultaneously produce ‘dis- services for others. The recipients of the services acknowledge their value by a willingness to pay for these services. Symmetrical reasoning would require that the recipients of the disservices should receive payment for absorbing these disservices. Things have not worked out this way, however. It is true that such nice calculations would not matter much in a society with only rudimentary technology and an abundance of land relative to its population but this is not the condition of Britain today.
“With the postwar growth of technology and population these disservices or ‘spillover effects the noise, smell, smoke pollution or other noxious by-products of the operation of industry or their products have become too conspicuous to be ignored any longer by civilised countries.
They range from the strangulation by traffic of cities, resorts and once-quiet hamlets to the extermination of wild life by the indis- criminate use of pesticides; from ubiquitous jets to the spreading plague of beach transistors; from the destruction by mass tourism. of the world’s dwindling resources of natural beauty to the neighbour’s petrol lawn-mower. Indeed, together these spillover effects represent the most outstanding example of postwar growth yet recorded.”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 321ppm. As of 2026, 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 the ‘diseconomies’ were steadily growing, with the coming of motorways, airport expansion etc. Yes, some things (visible air pollution in cities) seemed to be improving, but overall, the trajectory was not great. In 1961 Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had been published. In 1966 the Conservation Society had been founded/
The specific context was a couple of months before this (but after the book had been written), the Torrey Canyon oil spill had been perpetrated….
In 1965, while at the LSE, he wrote his seminal work The Costs of Economic Growth,[2] but was unable to find a publisher until 1967.[3] In this work he expanded on his original 1960 thesis[4] which stated that the “precondition of sustained growth is sustained discontent”, warning developing nations that “the thorny path to industrialisation leads, after all, only to the waste land of Subtopia”.[5]
What I think we can learn from this – the roots of the upsurge of environmental concern were there in the mid-1960s, in publications conservative and liberal…
What happened next
The Spectator went off a cliff. Is now edited by Michael Gove.
On this topic, you might like these other posts on All Our Yesterdays
References
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You can see the chronological list of All Our Yesterdays “on this day” posts here.
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.
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Also on this day:
July 14, 1996 – Australian Medical Association and Greenpeace
July 14, 2000 – Miners versus the ALP/ and climate action
July 14, 2000 – Wind power providers want carbon labelling…
July 14, 2011 – “Four Degrees or More: Australia in a Hot World” conference closes