On this day, Allen Ginsberg wrote to his friend Gary Snyder, about what he’d heard at the ‘Dialectics of Liberation’ conference, from Gregory Bateson.
Ginsberg’s letter of 26 July 1967, sent from New York to Kyoto where Snyder was then living, in which he notes, in a telegraphic style the poets sometimes used in their correspondence:
Now International Dialectics of Liberation—[Stokely] Carmichael angry and yelling, I stayed calm and kept chanting prajnaparamita. Gregory Bateson says auto CO2 layer gives planet half-life: 10-30 years before 5 degree temp rise irreversible melt polar ice caps, 400 feet water inundate everything below Grass Valley 58—to say nothing of young pines in Canada dying radiation—death of rivers—general lemming situation. (Ginsberg in Morgan, 2008, p. 418)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 322.5ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Bateson had been reading Barry Commoner’s “Science and Survival” published the previous year. The book was extremely influential in its own way, and helped get people switched on to the carbon threat.
What I think we can learn from this is that about the carbon dioxide build up,there was ‘common knowledge’ from earlier than folks realise…
What happened next
Ginsberg was on TV in September, and gave one of the first warnings about the greenhouse effect.
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.