Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
In Europe and America the 1960s and 1970s witnessed a growing concern that
economic growth, development consumerism and related lifestyle demands were
undermining the ecological balance, economic stability and security of the planet.
These concerns were intensified with the publication of a single image, the lonely
and luminous planet earth, taken by an astronaut from the Apollo Eight spacecraft
in 1968, which revealed the beauty and fragility of the world as never seen before:
Earthrise
as seen from the moon. In 1972 a further image from the Apollo Project,
Blue Marble
, quickly became the most published image in history and an icon of,
and for, the new sustainability advocates and the wider environmental movement.
World-famous pressure groups were formed, such as Friends of the Earth and
Greenpeace. A number of ecologically minded writers following in Rachel Carson's
footsteps came to prominence such as Charles A. Reich who wrote
The Greening
of America
(1970), Theodore Roszak and
The Making of a Counter Culture
(1969)
and
Where the Wasteland Ends
(1972), and E.F. Schumacher's game-changing
Small
is Beautiful
(1973). In 1966 Kenneth E. Boulding wrote 'The economics of the coming
Spaceship Earth', in which he stated there were no unlimited reservoirs of anything
and that humanity would have to recognize and find its place in a cyclical ecological
system capable of continuous reproduction but which continually needed inputs of
energy to maintain itself. In 1970 the first major environmental event to have any
real social, public and cultural impact was held in the US. Thus, following an earlier
discussion in the United Nations that there should be a global holiday, Earth
Day drew attention to environmental degradation in a manner never seen before.
In 1972 the editors of
The Ecologist
issued a call to action, writing, in
A Blueprint
for Survival
:
The principal defect of the industrial way of life with its ethos of expansion is
that it is not sustainable. Its termination within the lifetime of someone born
today is inevitable - unless it continues to be sustained for a while longer by an
entrenched minority at the cost of imposing great suffering on the rest of mankind.
(Goldsmith
et al
., 1972: 15)
The same year, 1972, saw the publication of the landmark study
Limits to Growth
by a global think-tank known as the Club of Rome and the first serious international
discussion of global environmental issues at the United Nations Conference on the
Human Environment in Stockholm.
The Club of Rome (Meadows
et al
., 1972) report attempted to combine optimism
concerning human potential to innovate and transcend environmental and demo-
graphic problems with a well-evidenced warning that if contemporary trends continued
there would be dire economic and ecological consequences. Their global model was
built specifically to investigate five major trends - accelerating industrialization, rapid
population growth, widespread malnutrition, depletion of non-renewable resources
and a deteriorating environment. The authors looked to the future too, posing some
key questions: What do we want our world to be like? Can we continually keep
expanding production and consumption? The answer was a clear No. Achieving a
self-imposed limitation to growth would require considerable effort, however. It
would involve learning to do many things in new ways. It would tax the ingenuity,
the flexibility, willpower, moral sense and self-discipline of the human race. Bringing
a deliberate, controlled end to growth would be a tremendous challenge, not easily
