By
Andrew DeMarco
Just last month we celebrated what has become an annual event since 1970, “Earth Day.” Founded as a day of education about environmental issues, Earth Day is now a globally celebrated holiday that is often extended for a whole week. It was the brainchild of Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin to raise public awareness of air and water pollution and to bring environmental causes to the national spotlight. While much has changed in regard to the way we handle pollution and conservation since the first Earth Day, much was made last month of some of the original predictions made for our world on that day 43 years ago.
Here are some of those predictions:
“We have about five more years at the outside to do something,” ecologist Kenneth Watt declared to a Swarthmore College audience on April 19, 1970.
Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich: “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make.” “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.
Other predictions called for both global warming and global cooling along with the rising of sea levels. (I guess they weren’t quite sure which would win out.) There were warnings of the world running out of oil and other fuels and air pollution levels would be so intolerable that most of us would not be able to breathe.
Well here we are in 2013, and while we now have the benefit of hind sight many of these originally predictions seem like gloom and doom and very farfetched. Some would say that it was a typical overreaction by “tree huggers” and none of it was ever real. While this might be true, I prefer to look at it another way. Maybe these predictions would have come true if not for good old ingenuity.
For example, when confronted with a challenge, it seems that humankind will always find a way to overcome it. Just look back to that day in 1961 when President Kennedy issued a challenge to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade and by July of 1969 we had accomplished this. I remember my grandfather marveling at this accomplishment because as he said it didn’t seem that long ago for him that he was marveling about the Wright Brothers. So maybe just maybe it was again when faced with a challenge we can come through.
Advances in agriculture have increased crop production, and although 100 million have died in ten years from famine, which still is far too many, it is a far cry from the 100 to 200 million a year that was predicted. Some will say genetic altering of crops is harmful, I say saving lives through this innovation is more important.
Energy shortages which were predicted did not come to pass, due to a number of factors. First legislation, and although I am not a fan of big government too many regulations in this case may be working. When faced with increasing mileage standards, car makers always seem to manage to come through using technology to get better mileage out of their cars. Also, whether you are a fan of fossil fuels or not, advances in the extraction of oil and coal have also contributed to this prediction falling flat. Again the legislation of clean air standards has led to the advances in the cleaner burning of these fuels improving air quality and thus another prediction has not come true.
I also believe that human ingenuity will lead to further advances in the development of ways to make even nuclear energy cleaner and safer and the development of alternative energies such as wind and solar more practical.
So whether you believe in global warming or cooling, alternative energy or fossil fuels, looking at Earth Day one could say it has been a success not in its predictions but in educating us about our environment and providing us with an incentive to make improvements through technology and innovation. I look forward to human ingenuity to continue to be challenged and overcome obstacles. (I hope they are working on that asteroid deflector right now.) Knowing that we can make this world a better place when challenged fills me with that feeling that Cousin Bob would call that …. Rosy Glow.
Bob's Rosy Glow 