Tag: Conservation Society

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Activism Education United Kingdom

June 14, 1973 – Education for the Future? Meh.

Fifty years ago, on this day, June 14, 1973, the UK based “Conservation Society” tried to lay out what would be needed for, you know, a future…

It begins with the prescient words – “We are in the presence of another climacteric more dramatic than any the human race has yet experienced.”

Yep.

June 14 1973 The Conservation Society launches “Education for our Future” Fairhall, J. (1973) Preparing young for crisis. The Guardian, June 14, p.6.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 332ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was

Everyone was running around talking about survival and education. And what that would look like. There had been a seminar in 1972 in London, and this Conservation Society effort probably drew on that.

What I think we can learn from this

We’ve been talking about the skills that we would need to educate the young for 50 years that’s included lots of nice words like holistic and environmental and ecological and we have not done it for the most part.

What happened next

Obviously we did not educate ourselves for a new society. If we had, projects like this would not even exist.

The Conservation Society wound up in 1987, ironically just before the next big wave

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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Activism Ignored Warnings United Kingdom

November 23, 1968 – “Hell upon Earth” warning about environmental destruction,inc. climate…

On this day, November 23, 1968  Lord Ritchie Calder gave a presidential address to the Conservation Society (a British NGO from the mid 60s to the late 1980s). Its cheerful title? Hell Upon Earth.

And among the litany of dangers ahead, this on climate change….

“It has been estimated that, at the present rate of increase (6,000 million tonnes a year) mean annual temperature all over the world might increase by 3.6 degrees centigrade in the next forty to fifty years, The experts may argue about the time factor and even about the effects but certain things are apparent, not only in the industrialised northern hemisphere but in the southern hemisphere. The north-polar ice-cap is thinning and shrinking. The seas with their blanket of carbon dioxide are changing their temperature with the result that marine plant life is increasing and is transpiring more carbon dioxide. With this combination fish are migrating, changing even their latitudes. On land the snow line is retreating and glaciers are melting.”

Calder’s speech wsa reported in the New York Times on the 24th

“Hell on Earth”  NYT article – LONDON, Nov. 23 — Lord Ritchie-Calder, president of the Conservation Society, painted a gloomy picture today of the future of the world because too many “ignorant men are pretending to be knowledgeable.”

And in the Observer by John Davy

[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 323ppm. At time of writing it was 417ishppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]

Why this matters. 

I used to think that unless you were particularly switched on, then climate change wasn’t really on your radar until 1988.  Then I pushed that back to the late 1970s… then…

What happened next?

Calder kept at it – see his widely-syndicated “Selling off the Old Homestead”, originally in Foreign Affairs, in January 1970

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Activism United Kingdom

July 22, 1966 – “The Conservation Society” holds launch event

On this day, July 22, 1966, the Inaugural meeting of the “Conservation Society”

There’s this corking article if you’re interested-

Herring, H. (2001) The Conservation Society: Harbinger of the 1970s Environment Movement in the UK. Environment and History 7, 4 pp. 381-401.

Why this matters. 

We need to remember that organizations come and go, and are creatures of their time, and can be “trapped” – by their own cognitive and emotional settings, by others expectations and perceptions of them. A little like humans themselves, donchathink?

What happened next?

The Conservation Society was influential and important in the late 60s – we will come back to the 1968 lecture by Ritchie Calder. Its apogee was 1971-2, when it hosted a conference with Paul Ehrlich as a guest speaker. Its decline in influence through the 1970s and 80s (it was wound up in 1987) was tied to the rise of groups like Friends of the Earth and The Ecology Party (aka The Green Party), not tied to population concerns and not perceived as old, white and conservative.