The Time for Postponing Climate Action Is Over

In 1962, Rachael Carson warned us, with the publication of Silent Spring, that the indiscriminate use of pesticides was disrupting critical ecosystems and causing severe damage to human health.

"We are now awakening to the responsibilities that come
with our distinctive ability to consciously create our future."

Her message led to a ban on the use of DDT in the United States and eventual restrictions on its use in much of the world. Her warning also helped launch the environmental movement and its call to humanity to accept responsibility for the consequences of our impact on Earth.

Ten years later, in 1972, the book The Limits to Growth, by an MIT research team led by Donella and Dennis Meadows, again focused global attention on humanity’s environmental responsibility. Presented as a report to the Club of Rome, the book used computer modeling to demonstrate that sustained economic growth on a finite planet would lead to environmental and economic collapse in the early- to mid-21st century. It sold more than 3 million copies in some 35 languages.

The book stirred significant public debate at the time and had a defining influence in shaping the lives and thinking of many members of my generation. It came under withering critique, however, from a corporate establishment that profits from growth, and from neoliberal economists who provided intellectual cover for the establishment. To the detriment of people and planet, and unlike Carson’s book, The Limits to Growth had no discernible impact on public policy.

Yet, over the next 20 years, concern for the growing human threat to Earth’s essential living systems gained in status to become the dominant scientific consensus. In 1992, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a proclamation, “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity,” signed by more than 1,700 scientists, including a majority of the then-living Nobel Laureates in the sciences. Its message was clear and unambiguous:

“The earth is finite…. Current economic practices which damage the environment, in both developed and underdeveloped nations, cannot be continued without the risk that vital global systems will be damaged beyond repair.”

Read the story from Yes! Magazine by David Korten - “The Time for Postponing Climate Action Is Over.”

On the origins of environmental bullshit

I grew up in the Long Island suburbs of New York and have vivid memories of running behind the “fog trucks”. These trucks went through the neighbourhoods spraying DDT for mosquito control until it was banned in 1972.

Children play in the DDT fog left by the
‘fog truck’ in a New Jersey neighbourhood.

I didn’t know it until much later, but that experience, and exposure, was extended due to the pesticide industry’s lies and tactics – what is now labelled “post-truth”.

Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962. It was a beautifully written, if distressing, bit of what we today call “research translation”. The “silent spring” was the impact of DDT as songbird species were killed off.

Carson tried to expose the chemical industry’s disinformation. For doing so, she was roundly and untruthfully attacked as a communist and an opponent of progress. Silent Spring was one of the most popular and vetted overviews of environmental science of all time. Yet lies and bullshit prevented a decent policy response for a decade.

Read the piece on The Conversation by the Professor of Environmental Politics and Co-Director Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney,  David Schlosberg  -  “On the origins of environmental bullshit.”

Now it is our 'Silent Spring'

Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” from early in the 60s tells of the disappearance of birds through the overuse of insecticides.

Now something different, but similar is happening.

The Sunshine Coast Daily has reported in a story headed: “Concerns raised over number of dead birds on Coast beaches”, that abnormal numbers of mutton birds are accumulating along the beaches.

The millions of birds Carson discussed were dying because of human activities and the mutton birds (short-tail shearwaters) are also dying because of human intervention.