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1 During her college commencement, normally a moment of optimism, Stephanie Mills delivered an address so grim that it made headlines. In her short speech from the spring of 1969, “The Future Is a Cruel Hoax,” Mills declared that she was “terribly saddened that the most humane thing for me to do is to have no children at all.” Paradoxically, Mills was born in 1948, at the beginning of one of the most prosperous periods in American history. Growing up in Phoenix, Arizona, she belonged to a generation of Americans more familiar with Cheerios and Schwinn bicycles than with breadlines and wartime rationing. But having recently read Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, published in 1968, Mills had grown concerned about the threats that a growing population posed to both the United States and the world. “Our days as a race on this planet are, at this moment, numbered, and the reason for our finite, unrosy future is that we are breeding ourselves out of existence. Within the next ten years, we will witness widespread famines and possible global plagues.”1 Mills was part of a wave of concern about population growth that, after gathering for some time, swept over the country in the late 1960s and 1970s. President Lyndon Johnson signaled its arrival in his State of the Union address in 1965, warning of an “explosion in world population” and a “growing scarcity in world resources.” Concern escalated as the decade unfolded. In July 1968, a New York Times editorial spoke of “a population explosion” that threatened “to plunge the world into hopeless poverty and chaos.” Population growth, President Richard Nixon told Congress in 1969, is “one of the most serious challenges to human destiny in the last third of this century.” Few nations have been more aware of—and anxious about—population growth than Americans in the late 1960s and 1970s.2 Introduction From Rubbish to Riots “Every generation . . . writes its own description of the natural order, which generally reveals as much about human society and its changing concerns as it does about nature.” —Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy, 1994 Mills worried about population growth for environmental reasons. Although many who warned of increasing numbers of people at the time often mentioned resource shortages, the most strident had a strong environmental logic, often drawn from modern biology, that emphasized carrying capacity, ecological interconnection, overconsumption, degradation, and hard limits to growth. A young, intense, and articulate Stanford University biologist named Paul Ehrlich led the charge. “Our problems would be much simpler,” Ehrlich wrote in The Population Bomb, “if we needed only to consider the balance between food and population. But in the long view the progressive deterioration of our environment may cause more death and misery than any conceivable food-population gap.” This logic led Ehrlich to a legendary pessimism. “It is highly unlikely,” he stated in a Newsweek interview in the early 1970s, “that we will get through the next two decades without a major disaster resulting in the deaths of hundreds of millions of human beings.” Other biologists such as Garrett Hardin of the University of California–Santa Barbara voiced even more extreme positions.3 Mills, Ehrlich, and Hardin were part of a quickly growing force in American politics in the late 1960s: the environmental movement. In 1962, biologist and nature writer Rachel Carson had published Silent Spring, her attack on DDT and chemical pesticides. In April 1970, as many as twenty million Americans participated in the first Earth Day “teach in,” one of the largest rallies in American history . This movement was unlike anything Americans had seen before. It differed in substantial ways from the conservation movement led by Theodore Roosevelt and U.S. Forest Service chief Gifford Pinchot in the 1890s and early 1900s: it was more comprehensive, more broad based, and more pessimistic. Led by Adam Rome, historians have begun to reexamine where the movement came from. Writing in the Journal of American History recently, Rome pointed out that the explanations of environmentalism that historians normally point to—postwar abundance, new technologies, and new ecological thinking— do not say much about why the movement exploded when it did. Why did Earth Day happen in 1970 and not 1962 or 1975? For Rome, this was not a pedantic question about dates, but a mystery that, if solved, could shed new light on the movement. He concluded that environmentalism cannot be understood without connecting it to broader patterns of American postwar life, such as the liberal...

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