Fifty three years ago, on this day, June 22, 1970, Rep John Culver of Iowa shares his eco-concerns, reads “the Imperiled Environment” into the Congressional Record.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 327.6ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Earth Day had happened in April and there were many articles about the desperate state of the planet. And many of these articles – including this one – included a couple of paragraphs about the long-term problem of carbon dioxide build up.
What I think we can learn from this is that many US politicians knew what was at stake they could read the tactic of reading something into the record is helpful for historians 50 years later it’s not clear it was particularly helpful for anyone at the time.
What happened next
The carbon dioxide build up continued to get intermittent press but it was only in 1988 that the issue exploded.
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.
The New York Review of Books had its finger on the pulse. In its 23 April 1970 issue, Robert Heilbroner had a review of Population, Resources, Environment by Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich under the heading “Ecological Armageddon”.
It began with the observation
Ecology has become the Thing. There are ecological politics, ecological jokes, ecological bookstores, advertisements, seminars, teach-ins, buttons. The automobile, symbol of ecological abuse, has been tried, sentenced to death, and formally executed in at least two universities (replete with burial of one victim)…
And quickly predicted what would happen –
the ecological issue has assumed the dimensions of a vast popular fad, for which one can predict with reasonable assurance the trajectory of all such fads—a period of intense general involvement, followed by growing boredom and gradual extinction, save for a die-hard remnant of the faithful.
(This got dubbed, in a 1972 article by someone else, the ‘Issue Attention Cycle’).
And then, when he is paraphrasing the Ehrlich argument –
The strain consists of the limited ability of the soil, the water, and the atmosphere of these favored regions to absorb the outpourings of these fast-growing industrial processes.
The most dramatic instance of this limited absorptive power is the rise in the carbon dioxide content of the air due to the steady growth of (largely industrial) combustion. By the year 2000, it seems beyond dispute that the CO2 content of the air will have doubled, raising the heat-trapping properties of the atmosphere. This so-called “greenhouse” effect has been predicted to raise mean global temperatures sufficiently to bring catastrophic potential consequences. One possibility is a sequence of climatic changes resulting from a melting of the Arctic ice floes that would result in the advent of a new Ice Age; another is the slumping of the Antarctic ice cap into the sea with a consequent tidal wave that could wipe out a substantial portion of mankind and raise the sea level by 60 to 100 feet.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 328,1ppm. As of 2023 it is 420ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was
“Everyone” was talking about it. This issue hit the newsstands in time for the first “Earth Day”
What I think we can learn from this
Issues come and go, independently of the actual problem.
What happened next
The issue went away again. The problem did not…
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.
Fifty three years ago, on this day, April 8, 1970, Australian academic Charles Birch had an article in the Australian National University publication Woroni about “Pollution.”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 328.1ppm. As of 2023 it is 420ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was
This was all part of the huge rise in awareness of pollution/environment issues from the late 1960s… Birch was an interesting character.
“Louis Charles BirchFAA (1918–2009) was an Australian geneticist specialising in population ecology and was also well known as a theologian, writing widely on the topic of science and religion, winning the Templeton Prize in 1990. The prize recognised his work ascribing intrinsic value to all life.“
What I think we can learn from this
Again, we knew. The people who run the countries of the world, the elites who attend the elite universities and go on to jobs in finance, industry, politics, academia, they were told about this, and that information has continued to be ‘out there’.
What happened next
Birch kept teaching his students about this problem, and writing about it. When I was writing for The Conversation about Australia, people would occasionally leave comments to the effect that he had switched them on to the issue 45 years previously…,
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.
Fifty three years ago, on this day, January 26, 1970, a Nixon-era scientist (a professor in Applied Physics no less) called Hubert Heffner expressed (understandable!) uncertainty about climate change. In September the previous year Daniel Moynihan had written a memo – now famous on the internet – about the possible consequences of carbon dioxide build-up.
“Moynihan received a response in a Jan. 26, 1970, memo from Hubert Heffner, deputy director of the administration’s Office of Science and Technology. Heffner acknowledged that atmospheric temperature rise was an issue that should be looked at.
“The more I get into this, the more I find two classes of doom-sayers, with, of course, the silent majority in between,” he wrote. “One group says we will turn into snow-tripping mastodons because of the atmospheric dust and the other says we will have to grow gills to survive the increased ocean level due to the temperature rise.”
Heffner wrote that he would ask the Environmental Science Services Administration to look further into the issue.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 325ppm. As of 2023 it is 419.
The context was the US administration of Nixon was trying to use environmental issues to change the conversation in Europe, away from, well, you know, napalming Vietnamese children. That’s part of the context of the Moynihan memo. The Germans were underwhelmed by this as a tactic. Meanwhile, the United Nations bureaucracy was grinding forward with preparations for the Stockholm conference, to be held in June 1972.
What I think we can learn from this
It was still okay at this point to be just not quite sure. We must not allow hindsight to condemn folks for not knowing for sure (I think by late 1970s that argument becomes much much less viable).
What happened next
In August 1970 the first Council on Environmental Quality report came out, with a chapter written by Gordon MacDonald – see here .
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Do comment on this post.
On this day, December 18 in 1970, an article was published in Science, about “Manmade climatic changes,” written by Helmut Landsberg.
Landsberg (who would be dismissive of Stephen Schneider later in the decade) ran through a number of possible ways in which humans might inadvertently alter the climate – carbon dioxide was only one route, and as he noted, perhaps a little disingenuously, given that he knew CO2 levels were rising,
“our estimates of CO2 production by natural causes, such as volcanic exhalations and organic decay, are very inaccurate; hence the ratio of these natural effects to anthropogenic effects remains to be established.”
Landsberg (1970)
[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 326ppm. At time of writing it was 419ishppm- but for what it is now, well, see here for the latest.]
The context was this –
The first big wave of eco-concern about global issues (beyond smog and DDT, onto extinction, overpopulation, and, yes, climate change) was in full swing. Earlier in the year the first report of the President’s council on environment quality had even mentioned the possibility of carbon dioxide build up being a Very Serious Thing.
It perhaps gives you pause for thought? We’ve been failing to act on climate for half a century.
What happened next?
Stockholm conference on the Environment in 1972. Didn’t give us much, but UNEP, and UNEP and the WMO shepherded the climate agenda forwards… That took another sixteen long years…
On 2 February 1970, TIME magazine’s front cover had a picture of ecological thinker Barry Commoner against two possible backdrops
According to Egan (2007) Time
“incorporated a new “Environment” section. The editorial staff chose for that issue’s cover a haunting acrylic painting by Mati Klarewein of Barry Commoner, its appointed leader in “the emerging science of survival.” Commoner was set in front of a landscape half of which appeared idyllic and the other half apocalyptic, presumably suggesting the environmental choices facing humankind. The urgency of those choices was implicit.” (Egan, 2007:1)
Commoner had already written a bunch of important books, and would write many more (see Egan, 2007) for more on this. While we are here though, Commoner’s four laws of Ecology deserve a mention –
Everything is connected to everything else
Everything must go somewhere,
Nature knows best,
There is no such thing as a free lunch.
Why this matters
We need to remember, imo, that the stark choice keeps getting put, and we keep resiling from it, but by not choosing, we are, in fact, choosing…
What happened next
The “Malthusian moment” passed by 1973. Commoner ran for President in 1980, but didn’t cost Carter the election the way Nader cost Gore in 2000.
Commoner died, aged 95, in 2012. See Green Left Weekly obituary here.
References
Egan, M. 2007 Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival: The remaking of American Environmentalism. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
