Fifty five years ago, on this day, October 15th, 1971, an Australian newspaper reviews “The Greening of America” – a Right Put On?
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 326ppm. 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 civil rights movement had begun with “let’s treat black people as if they were human beings”, and then that had ramified to ”let’s not kill Vietnamese people, and gosh, let’s treat women and homosexuals as if they’re human beings.” Radical, eh? And then from the late 60s this had led on to there’s this thing called ecology, and we should probably watch out for it, and the book industry was hoping to make money and so therefore the bookshelves were full of various tracts, and a runaway bestseller among them was The Greening of America by Charles Reich. Had a picture of Nixon tinged green. And this the hardcover cover
This sounds ridiculous 50 years later, but you have to remember that shortly after Nixon was inaugurated, the Santa Barbara oil spill had happened, and Nixon started bleating about how important it was, and this is the last decade to do anything, do or die, blah blah blah.
The specific context was that Reich’s book was selling in Australia too.
What I think we can learn from this is that long-forgotten books seemed very important at the time.
What happened next. Reader… America was not greened. Charles Reich made a mea culpa in his book Opposing the System.
And the emissions kept climbing, and the concentrations kept climbing.
On this topic, you might like these other posts on All Our Yesterdays
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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:
October 15, 1971 – “Man’s Impact on the Climate” published – All Our Yesterdays
October 15, 1985 – Villach meeting supercharges greenhouse concerns… – All Our Yesterdays