from the point of view of the past, one of the things that would have surprised someone about the future is how little we talk about the future in a good sense now. in the past there was an obsession with the future -- most of it was expressed in science fiction, but much of it was talked about directly in science fact ... we'll go to the moon and establish a base ... we'll farm the oceans ... alchemy will become a reality and we'll figure out how to turn lead into gold.
now whenever we mention the future, it's nearly always in terms of tragedy or trouble lurking just over the horizon ... global warming will kill the entirety of the planet ... there will be a world food shortage ... the oceans buckle under human-caused environmental strain.
(as an aside, my opinion is that much of this future pessimism is caused by television news ... feeding a society that seems to infatuated with fear ... but i'm not wholly informed here -- i don't watch TV.)
in the past there was some talk of trouble in the future, but nearly always it revolved around one of two things: population explosion, or seemingly inevitable nuclear war with what was then known as the USSR. but unless you were someone like robert mcnamara, you didn't really worry about this stuff -- you left that to the bigger wigs as you tried to figure out just how big the flares in your pants should be.
the world today holds twice as many people as it did in 1969. given that, if you showed someone from the past the world today, from a ecological point-of-view (now we say "green") they'd probably be shocked at how little air pollution there is ... and for good reason, it was far worse before things like smoke stack scrubbers and catalytic converters.
if you asked someone from the past to guess what the cleanliness of the future would be like from here, they'd venture that a 40-year future would be even cleaner, given the vector we're on right now.
whether or not that's true doesn't matter. i think the sociological meta question is more interesting: if we've done this well to this point, why do we no longer have optimism?
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April 1970 was the first Earth Day in the US, and I was in fourth grade at the time. The art teacher at Glennon Heights Elementary School assigned every student the task of creating a poster for a contest to mark the occasion. My classmate Debbie T. won the contest with her interpretation of the assignment. Debbie’s poster hung in the display case next to the main office for weeks, so I remember it clearly: A large drawing of the Earth in the foreground, with bits of trash glued to the picture. A smaller drawing of the pristine moon, in the upper right corner, and the caption on the bottom: “We have just landed on the moon. Will we pollute that too?”
ReplyDeleteThere was also a commercial / public service announcement that aired enough times on TV that I remember it clearly: A car is racing down an open empty highway, and one of its occupants tosses a bag of trash out the window. The trash lands at the feet of a Native American man, and as the camera pans up his frame, a solitary tear rolls down his face.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4ozVMxzNAA
(okay after viewing the actual spot again, I had some of the facts wrong….) but the message was pretty powerful to stay with me for 40 years