Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
part of dynamic and theoretically global aquatic systems, generally stayed
within the confines of watersheds and drainage patterns, and even com-
mon air pollution due to industry and agriculture— itself a form of atmo-
spheric problem— was a primarily regional concern. An international
environmental movement focused on resources and global environmental
degradation grew up in tandem with American environmentalism during
the 1960s, but many of the international movement's primary concerns
represented no more than a global summation of these key regional issues.
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Among environmental activists worldwide, NASA's images of the earth
from space helped shape an ideal of cooperative environmental protec-
tion articulated in the “Only One Earth” theme chosen for the 1972 U.N.
Conference on the Human Environment. But when former Sierra Club
director and Friends of the Earth founder David Brower famously exhorted
environmentally conscious Americans to “think globally, act locally,” his
“global environment" reflected an amalgamation of “environments” dis-
crete in space and time, each worthy of protection.
The chemical constituents of the stratosphere, which circulated glob-
ally in the thin layer of gases encircling the earth, did not fit neatly into
this vision. CO
2
, ozone, and nitrogen oxides, though measured in parts
per million and parts per billion, resided semipermanently as potential
environmental offenders in a boundless global space. Traveling at the speed
of sound through the gaseous mixture of the atmosphere, the SST might
alter the environment in its global totality, and the effects of that alteration
might be felt anywhere— or everywhere.
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Second, the uncertainties of large-scale, long-term climatic change fur-
ther distinguished the atmosphere from other aspects of the global envi-
ronment. The causal link between supersonic transports, ozone reduction,
and skin cancer, though controversial, presented environmentalists with
an easily identifiable public health concern, albeit one difficult to connect
to specific individuals or groups. The human and biological impacts of a
change in the temperature of the stratosphere were more difficult to grap-
ple with. The impacts of climatic change on the biosphere might occur
over decades, or even centuries. Changes in the atmosphere and climate
transcended what the SCEP authors referred to as the “first-order” effects
of other large-scale issues like population growth and pollution. Instead,
the health of the stratosphere and the stability of the climate constituted
an overall “status of the total global environment,” with less directly
