Sometimes, like say when you’re watching the Leonardo DiCaprio/worldsaving vehicle 11th Hour, you might get the feeling that no one really saw global energy problems and ecological disasters coming. Like everyone in the 1940s was just wearing a fedora, talking like Humphrey Bogart, and happily eating coal for breakfast.
But it didn’t happen like that. There were plenty of thinkers with visions of the apocalypse dancing in their heads. Even ideas like ecosystem services — the ecowonk’s favorite — were anticipated and articulated. Fairfield Osborn called those services the “natural life-giving elements of the earth” in this passage from Our Plundered Planet (1948):
The tide of the earth’s population is rising, the reservoir of the earth’s living resources is falling. Technologists may outdo themselves in the creation of artificial substances for natural subsistence, and new areas, such as those in tropical or subtropical regions, may be adapted to human use, but even such recourses or developments cannot be expected to offset the present terrific attack upon the natural life-giving elements of the earth. There is only one solution: Man must recognize the necessity of cooperating with nature. He must temper his demands and use and conserve the natural living resources of this earth in a manner that alone can provide for the continuation of his civilization. The final answer is to be found only through comprehension of the enduring processes of nature. The time for defiance is at an end.
Via > Adam Rome’s The Bulldozer in the Countryside
Image: Fuel advertisement via the LOC’s Advertising Ephemera collection.
