I may remember him as Frank Cary because I want to believe that whoever it was had already ingratiated himself to my wife by personally approving her taking a center piece floral arrangement from our table at an employee dinner in San Francisco. The ingratiation had been heightened by the fact that she had first asked a lower-level IBM manager if it would be okay to take the flowers, and he had been unwilling to say one way or the other. Mr. Cary didn't hesitate a millisecond. It was clear to my wife why he became the Chairman eventually.
And my wife had impressed the hell out of me, marching right up to Frank Cary's table like that.
I sort of think that we even got that first Earth Day off, but I can't remember for sure.
In 1970, the human population of the earth was "only" 3.7 billion.
Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, still seemed to hope that mankind could achieve zero population growth.
In 2009, however, when the human population was very near its current 6.9 billion, he said that "perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future."
Yes.
He could had factory farming in mind, among the range of devastations that made him more pessimistic.
In Jonathan Franzen's April 18 reflections in The New Yorker, "Farther Away: 'Robinson Crusoe,' David Foster Wallace, and the island of solitude," Franzen describes an annual Chilean cattle-branding festival:
Of the hundred-plus cattle, at least ninety were malnourished, the majority of them so skeletal it seemed remarkable that they could even stand up. The herd had historically been a reserve source of protein, and the villagers still enjoyed the ritual of roping and branding, but couldn't they see what a sad travesty their ritual had become? [emphasis mine, p. 94](Note that the locals seemed to be enjoying it. The human tendency to perpetuate received sentiment, however irrational, will be the subject of a future post.)
My thought for today, as hopeless as it is, is that, if every day had been Earth Day since 1970, the human population of the earth might still be less than four billion and humans might no longer be eating the creatures with whom they share the planet and experience their brief, bittersweet life on it.
Alas, Earth Day is just another empty gesture that people observe out of thoughtless habit, an empty sentiment.
To control population growth, the world needs much better political and social leadership than it's getting. The themes of family planning, birth control, and education (especially in the Third World) need to become as important as the control of carbon emissions. Then perhaps we can avoid the unlivable beehive that looms in our future.
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