Earth Day comes 364/365ths too infrequently

Environmentalists felt so triumphant in 1970, the year of the first Earth Day. I had been with IBM for three years, and I was thrilled that the IBM Chairman had been featured in the press as lauding the designation of April 22 as Earth Day. I wrote a letter of gratitude to the Chairman, whom I remember as Frank Cary, but it couldn't have been before 1973. Must have been Thomas J. Watson, Jr.
    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.

Half a world population ago

In 1968, a couple of years after Lunar Orbiter I made the first images of Earth—back when the planet's human population was half what it is today—I gave a talk recommending zero population growth at a meeting of a chapter of the American Association of University Women.

Many of those present had already heard the term zero population growth, and some may have read Stanford University ecologist Paul Ehrlich's bestseller of that year, The Population Bomb, which was among my primary sources of information. The basic idea was that if humans, on average and as a personal commitment, produced just enough offspring to replace themselves (two per couple), then population could remain approximately constant. Zero population growth. Or, as an entry in Wikipedia puts it, "In the long term, zero population growth can be achieved when the birth rate of a population equals the death rate...."

Ehrlich's predictions of worldwide famines between 1970 and 1985 because of overpopulation may have failed in their details, but few informed people today doubt that overpopulation has driven and continues to drive global warming, including unmistakable changes in weather patterns, shrinking polar icecaps, and the rising acidity of oceans (some of the increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere going into the formation of carbolic acid)—all of which have stark consequences for life on earth.

For along with rising numbers of humans come their rising expectations, which can be summarized briefly as expecting to live like an American. You know, drive an SUV and produce, by Third World standards, an astounding amount of garbage.

I don't know how accurate Erhlich's 1968 prediction was for when the Earth's population would double (I'd have to read his book again to check), but he did expect it to double. He knew how difficult it would be to achieve ZPG, because, to quote Wikipedia again, "a country's population growth is often determined by economic factors, incidence of poverty, natural disasters, disease, etc."

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, here are the Earth's population figures for 1966 and 2008: 3,416,212,203 and 6,677,602,292 (doubling in those 42 years). Its prediction for the next 42 years (2050) is 9,392,797,012. While that would be a growth of less than half the preceding period, remember that the extra people will be hustling to realize their growing expectations...so long as conditions don't worsen to the point where such expectations are impossible to maintain and many will give up hustling in favor of desperately hoping and waiting for an afterlife.