Again the population issue was coupled with environmental concerns. According to Dixie Lee Ray (former head of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission), David Brower had suggested that,
Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license … All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing… (David Brower, Friends of the Earth
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Brower had personally encouraged Paul Ehrlich to write the bestselling book
The Population Bomb
(1968), which popularised Fairfield Osborn’s overpopulation alarmism in
Our Plundered Planet
(1948). Ehrlich predicted that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s and 80s, even in the West.
A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions. (Paul Ehrlich,
The Population Bomb
, 1968)
A massive campaign of doomsday alarms of starvation and future disasters was then spread through the media.
Future Shock
The book
Future Shock
(1970), by sociologist, businessman and futurist Alvin Toffler, described the transition from agrarian to industrial to a post-industrial society (“the information age”) where the pace keeps speeding up (consumer goods being disposable or becoming obsolete and where both workers, professions, homes, relationships, body parts, and even nationalities become more temporary and replaceable).
All these rapid social and technological changes would cause a state of “shattering stress and disorientation” called “future shock.”
178
In 1972, a documentary with the same title was produced, narrated by Orson Welles, with scary sound effects and images to drive home the message of what shocks the present and near future had in store for humanity, alternating with joyful hippie music and visions of a future with intelligent robots, routine space travel, designer babies, artificial organs, and happy group marriages.
Toffler, however, was primarily a futurist and not a traditionalist. The shocking changes were something humanity just had to adjust to, but
selectively
, and by taking control of the technology for the benefit of humanity.
If we can begin to think more imaginatively about the future, then we can prevent future shock, and we can use technology itself, and build a decent, democratic, and humane society. (…)
We have now reached the point at which the technology is so powerful and so rapid that it could destroy us unless we control it. (Alvin Toffler, in the
Future Shock
documentary, 1972)
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These terrifying threats and the promising allures of a high-tech future would be echoed almost verbatim in 2016 by World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab and his fellow futurists (see Chapter 11).
The First Earth Day 1970
In September 1969, environmental champion U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson proposed holding teach-ins on college campuses the following spring, to create a greater public awareness of the threats to the environment. He then went on a national speaking tour to inspire local activists and set up a national organisation to coordinate the teach-ins.
180
April 22, during most colleges’ spring break, was chosen as the first Earth Day. Oil tycoon Robert O. Anderson again opened his wallet to fund it.
181
Meanwhile, Rockefeller friend Henry Luce’s magazines
Time
and
Life
conveyed the image of a planet under threat.
The first Earth Day, which was celebrated in thousands of schools, colleges and universities across the United States, marked the birth of the modern environmental movement and gathered students, anti-war activists, civil rights activists, hippies, Marxists and other radicals. They represented the new social revolution, challenging old ways of life.
One of the major Earth Day events, the “ENACT Teach-In on the Environment”, was held at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, March 11–14, 1970 (when this university had its spring break), organised by a university activist group calling themselves Environmental Action for Survival (ENACT). A
teach-in
is a combination of sitting protest and informal college seminar on a political topic, which became popular in the 1960s following the successful anti-war teach-in held all night at the University of Michigan in 1965. The organisers found it surprisingly easy to raise funds for the project.
Money began to pour in, from local sources and others farther afield, including such unlikely benefactors as Dow Chemicals, which contributed $5,000. ENACT would eventually raise an astonishing $70,000 to support their teach-in. (…) They raised so much money that they weren’t able to spend it all. (Bill Manning, ENACT)
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Finding venues and attracting media attention was also not a problem.
A lot of what is amazing about the teach-in is that it wasn’t that hard”, he says. “It just kind of happened, in this very organic way. We were able to get venues, we were able to get funding. The media came to us. A lot of things just kind of came together. (David Allan, a natural science graduate student, now Acting Dean of the U-M School of Natural Resources and Environment)
183
The five-day event, held both at campus and all around town, offered 125 seminars, speeches, workshops, debates, forums, rallies, demonstrations, field trips, films, concerts, etc, and attracted around 50,000 attendees. Over sixty major media outlets, including three TV-channels and a film crew from Japan, covered the event.
The opening rally, with Senator Gaylord Nelson as speaker, had an audience of 17,000. Besides environmental science, the event planners wanted to make it as inclusive as possible and therefore included topics such as the (Vietnam) war, women’s liberation, racial equality, and social justice under the umbrella of ecology.
Overpopulation and family planning was also debated, under the heading “Sock It to Motherhood: Make Love, Not Babies” (a popular slogan during the hippie era).
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This was actually one of the core concerns.
Central to the theme of the first Earth Day in 1970 was the understanding that U.S. population growth was a joint partner in the degradation of our nation's environmental resources. (Senator Gaylord Nelson)
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The image of mankind as a cancer or a plague on the planet was slowly eating its way into the soul of the people. Full-page Earth Day ads in leading newspapers helped drive the message home, in no uncertain terms.
Despite the misanthropic view of mankind, however, early environmental activism had positive effects, especially on local problems such as air, soil, and water pollution, and on environmental awareness in general.
Nearly five decades later, Earth Day is celebrated in more than 193 countries across the globe, coordinated by the Earth Day Network.
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Revolution from Above
Among the young activists of the time, we find a new generation of Rockefellers (including David’s daughters Abby, Neva Goodwin, and Eileen) to spread the new message of environmentalism, feminism, New Age, free sex, and global justice, ironically founded in Marxist ideology and opposition to capitalism.
This group also included Dr. José Argüelles, an art teacher, initiator of the Whole Earth Festival, and one of the co-founders of the Earth Day concept who would later whip up global hysteria around the year 2012.
In the anthology
This Cybernetic Age
(1969), the author of one of the chapters, John D. Rockefeller III, praised the new revolutionaries who were clearing the ground for a new global culture.
Instead of worrying about how to surpress the youth revolution, we of the older generation should be worrying about how to sustain it. The student activists are in many ways the elite of our young people. They perform a service in shaking us out of our complacency. We badly need their ability and fervor, in these troubling and difficult times.
A unique opportunity is before us to bring together our age and experience and money and organisation with the energy and idealism and social consciousness of the young. Working together, almost anything is possible. (John D. Rockefeller III,
This Cybernetic Age
)
187
The ’68 revolution and green movement were thus largely orchestrated from above, with active help from the upper classes rather than spontaneously from the grassroots – a disturbing fact that some clearsighted radicals at the time pointed out. Soon, however, these connections would be forgotten and ever new generations of activists shouting slogans at the same forces that had created them. The young environmental and social justice activists thus became little more than useful tools for propagating the destructive Neo-Malthusian ideals of the ultra-rich.
International plutocracy has often pursued policies, used movements, and promoted doctrines that most people would consider to be anti-capitalist. Yet both capitalism and the Left arose during the same period in history, both have the same historical outlook, and both view traditional culture, the family, and nations as obstacles on the path towards a World State. (Kerry Bolton,
Revolution from Above
, 2011)
188
In a short period of time, numerous new radical organisations with environmental protection on the agenda were initiated. Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace became two of the most vocal and influential.
Greenpeace
Greenpeace was founded in 1971 by Irving Stowe, Jim Bohle, Paul Cote, and others. It developed out of a protest group against nuclear tests, called Don't Make a Wave Committee, and from the Society for the Prevention of Environmental Collapse (SPEC) and quickly grew to become one of the leaders in the environmental activism. Its objective was to expose corporate environmental misconduct using methods such as organising boycotts and campaigns as well as spectacular and sometimes risky environmental actions.
Within Greenpeace there were also visions of creating an ecological spiritual movement (which can be seen in the in New Age symbolism of the Rainbow Warrior, the name of the ship used in Greenpeace’s risky protest actions against whale hunting).
As with Friends of the Earth, there was a connection to the Sierra Club (in Greenpeace’s case, in the form of financial help with the founding).
189
Unlike other environmental organizations, Greenpeace had an ambition not to accept government funding and were funded mainly by philanthropic foundations, fund-raising and membership fees.
190
The Stockholm Conference 1972
June 5–16, 1972, Stockholm hosted the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. Conference Secretary-General was the Canadian oil-man Maurice Strong. Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme held the welcoming speech.
The conference motto was “Only One Earth” and was introduced with the slogan “Man Builds, Man Destroys” in a UNEP propaganda film about the conference.
191
Developing countries criticised the conference for being too focused on the needs of industrialised nations and suspected that the latter wanted to limit their economic and population growth. At the preparatory Founex Conference, however, which Strong and British economist Barbara Ward (Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth) had organised in Switzerland the previous year, a foundation for cooperation had been laid as the concept of sustainable development was formed. The phrasing of the agreement guaranteed that economic development could go hand in hand with conservation.
Barbara Ward (member of Fabian Society) was an early advocate of S
ustainable Development
and the (ostensible) redistribution of wealth to developing nations (see NIEO, Chapter 5).
***
In addition to the official conference, a number of alternative events were arranged in Stockholm. The conference attracted professional activists from other parts of the world and provided an opportunity for the newly formed radical environmental organisations to start applying pressure. During the first days there were some violent demonstrations and 200 activist tried to interrupt the conference.
At an abandoned air field outside Stockholm, a tent camp was provided by the Swedish Government, with the help of hippie collective Hog Farm of Woodstock fame. There were public debates, progressive musical performances, pow wows with Native Americans, a demonstration for the whales, and a party to celebrate life.
It was a motley crew of peace- and environmental activists, communists, hippies, Native Americans, drug users, and local youth. Many were anti-imperialists, protesting against the U.S. war in Vietnam and other controversial issues of the time. Some local activist groups were well organised and arranged alternative bus tours and other activities.
192
However, t
here were also sharp dividing lines between groups, especially between revolutionaries and hippies. The well-organised
communists were marching around the city center, while the hippies
took the specially provided busses to Skarpnäck to get high with Hog Farm, listen to music concerts and partake in the various happenings
.
193