Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [142]
Environmental protection was not simply a matter of keeping a few species alive; rather, it was a necessary component to “saving the earth.” Antiwar sentiment also ran through these sentiments. “Peace, as has often been said, is indivisible,” E. F. Schumacher wrote. “How then could peace be built on a foundation of reckless science and violent technology?” 14 Practically speaking, antiwar protest networks often converted to other forms of activism.15 They brought their opposition to anything that was associated with what Thomas Hughes has called the military-industrial-university complex.
Ken Smith of the Seattle-based environmental community Ecotope, stated in 1973 that “Since the 1960s, a vision of energy conservation has grown. The vast resources wasted in the Vietnam War while millions starved explicated the problem. Now we have moved from antiwar to environmental activism.”16 Smith and many activists from protest movements saw problems with the environment as merely one strand of a society that was dangerously out of whack.
George McGovern, in his introduction to Defending the Environment , a book by environmental lawyer Joseph Sax, wrote, “In the United States today frustration abounds in nearly every area of human concern—the ending of a tragic war, the eradication of the silent violence of hunger, the extension of racial and human justice, and the reversing of an inexorable environmental tragedy which began two centuries ago.”17
What’s more, the ongoing military buildup of the Cold War obviously exacerbated this general unease with the way things were going. Nuclear weapons provided humanity with its first real opportunity to destroy the entire world, which would clearly have been quite an environmental issue. Leaders like Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford biologist, were quick to connect nuclear weapons with what was often termed a war on the environment. Near-term survival of humans as a species and the earth as a host for life was genuinely considered to be questionable. Faith in humanity to avert near-term catastrophe ran low. Few would have anticipated the go-go late ’90s.
Ehrlich’s book, Population Bomb, illustrates the tangle of these ideas. One of the most popular books of the late ’60s and early ’70s, the Bomb went through twenty-two printings between May of 1968 and November of 1970 alone. Ehrlich is remembered largely as a “neo-Malthusian” who argued that a vast human die-off in the developing world was going to occur because the world would run out of food.
But this shorthand bottling of his ideas shortchanges the apocalyptic strangeness that one gets reading the book now. The Population Bomb intersperses population dynamics research, policy talk, a zero population–growth manifesto, and very bad short fiction. It shows how tightly bound nuclear and environmental fears were: “The End is Near” was always near. Ehrlich’s nuclear holocaust scenario went:
Freddy was happy behind the plow. The mule was strong, and the work was going well. Only in some parts of the southeast had survival been possible and he’d been one of the lucky ones. His mother had died after a twenty-year battle with radiation-induced illness; but they’d had some good times, and she’s lived to see him marry Louise. If only she’d lived to see the baby born and known that it was all right. So few were.18
Other characters in that scenario die or contemplate suicide with cyanide. This is as dark a vision of the future as it is possible to imagine—an eco-horrorshow. And this was what a Stanford professor was writing for a popular audience! In Ehrlich’s own words, the most optimistic of his three scenarios “has considerably more appeal than the others, even though it presumes the death by starvation of as many as a billion people.... I challenge you to create one more optimistic.”19 (Luckily, we have all lived one that is many times over more optimistic.)
Guided by a new knowledge of ecological systems, a faith that humans should live “in harmony with nature,” and a fear that the world might end soon, environmental