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8. We’re All in the Same Boat?! The Disuniting of Spaceship Earth
- Rutgers University Press
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176 8 Ten days before the first Earth Day celebration, on April 13, 1970, an explosion aboard Apollo 13 put its three-person crew at risk and forced the American spacecraft to abort a mission to the moon. Four days from reentering the Earth’s atmosphere but with only two days of electricity and water, Apollo 13 hung above the earth, and the fate of its passengers hung in the balance. To a Texas doctor writing to President Richard Nixon, the incident provided a compelling analogy for the planet’s environmental crisis. “Apollo 13, following an environmental disaster, is in peril with its finite supplies of oxygen, water and fuel,” he wrote. “Earth with finite resources of air, water and land faces a similar peril.” And time was running out: “Apollo 13 has until Friday to resolve its dilemma, Earth a very few years.”1 Earth Day represented, in many ways, the apotheosis of the view of Spaceship Earth in jeopardy. Despite their other numerous divisions, many Americans could agree with the metaphor’s core concept: that the earth’s resources were limited and running short. The Spaceship Earth metaphor also suggested a sense of unity, a sense that “we are all in the same boat together” and that Americans and indeed the whole human race had better work together, or else they faced catastrophe—a sinking ship. “Survival on the frail spaceship Earth,” the Washington State ZPG chapter proclaimed in their Earth Day newsletter, “depends on each of us—we sink or swim together.” To many We’re All in the Same Boat?! The Disuniting of Spaceship Earth “Above all, humanity as a whole must take action first to stop population growth.” —Paul Ehrlich, 1970 “After the political exhaustion of 1968, and the heavy drain of our war in Vietnam, the nation badly needs to feel a common sense of mission and unity. But ecology can hardly make our differences disappear.” —John Lindsay, “The Plight of Our Cities,” 1970 WE’RE ALL IN THE SAME BOAT?! 177 observers, the environment could bring together the country at a difficult time. “Ecology is one major political issue,” Life reported in early 1970, “on which the country may be united.”2 And yet, if the idea of global environmental crisis and concern about population growth seemed to bring people together in 1970, over the next decade and a half it began to divide them, sometimes bitterly. During the 1970s and 1980s, Americans across the widening political spectrum became increasingly critical of Malthusian environmentalism––not just the idea of unity but also the idea of crisis. “While population trends encouraged people to think of the world as a whole,” historian Matthew Connelly has written, “it also provided new reasons and new ways to divide it.” In one attack after another, critics on the right and the left targeted both Malthusian diagnoses and remedies. Even environmentalists split over population.3 The consequences were dramatic. In 1970, the population movement had reached a place that few could imagine just a half decade earlier. President Nixon had established a high-level commission to create a national population policy, and a national environmental movement had coalesced, at least partially in response to concerns about overpopulation. By the mid 1980s, though, despite isolated pockets, population had fallen off the national agenda almost entirely. Several factors drove this change, including demographic trends. Internationally, although total population continued to grow, the rate of growth of the world’s population began to level off and even decline beginning in the late 1960s—ironically, at just the moment that Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb appeared. Domestically, the American population growth rate reached the replacement level in 1972. The food supply situation also improved dramatically because of the green revolution and other changes. In 1976, the Food and Agriculture Organization reported that food production had increased 0.4 percent per year since 1952, and that only seven countries, most in Africa, still had major food problems. Finally, policy changes played a role. By the early 1970s, the population movement had achieved much of what it had aimed for, including expanded legal access to birth control and abortion, as well as much greater funding for education and family planning services, especially for the poor.4 But significant cultural and political changes were afoot as well. Concern about population had peaked in the 1960s because of worry about poverty overseas and at home, and quality-of-life concerns. During the 1970s, though, new environmental measures...