Fifty two years ago, on this day, September 22, 1971, (in)famous Australian activist Maurice Crow wrote about the climate crisis …
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 326.4ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that everyone in Australia was running around like a headless chicken saying the apocalypse was at hand from business to mainstream NGOs to the communists. And they had been importing American radical commentary in their International Socialist magazine etc. Maurice Crowe just put an effort at a local spin on it.
What I think we can learn from this is that calls for “system change” were around 50 years ago. And as per a recent article in Environmental Politics, what is meant by system change is a moveable feast.
What happened next
The environmental movement ran aground a bit but as late as 1975 there was a “radical ecology” conference in Melbourne and Crow was part of it.
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.