1979: THE ENVIRONMENT AND THE WAY THINGS LOOKED
Hitch-hiking around the USA in 1979 was still a popular way to get around – at least for international travellers who had a few dollars less. The problem I had in 1979 was the speed limit: 55 mph on the interstates. This was the time when America grappled with the consequences of the petrol price hikes of the mid-70s and when car makers started to make more fuel-efficient models.
I was a student: Enviornmental Sciences. What were the things we were thinking about as the North Sea oilfields opened up and the Brandt Report procalimed a ‘North South Divide’ that needed US -Soviet co-operation to transfer resources to the South?
Well, food was the number one issue: how could the world feed over 4 billion people? The ‘Green Revolution’ was not looking like all it had been cracked up to be. There was starvation. Something had to be done (and ‘Live Aid’, more a signal than an actual cure, was still some years away).
Climate did figure. But, the concern in 1979 was at least in part about Ice Ages: we are after all only 500 human generations out of the most recent one. The eruption of Mount St Helens in 1980 would feed the idea that we could be in for a colder spell to come and polar ice melt was not yet happening isn amounts most people were noticing.
Some peole were, however; scientists of the Climatic Research Unit at UEA were amongst those modelling where the ‘Greenhouse Effect’ might lead us. Yet, there seemd then to be more worry about the ozone layer and its depletion and about the developing evidence of deforestation Norway brought about by ‘acid rain’.
It is interesting to recall these things now. Climate change through carbon production is now an accepted fact and Cambridge is at the epicentre of the R & D that will make tomorrow possible, through technology and its use. It is striking that ozone depletion and acid rain were also theories in the 1970s: but the ‘theoretical’ solutions (respectively, cutting out the use of CFCs in aerosols and cutting down coal burning) were readily adopted. So these are no longer problems.
And the populaton of humans is now nearly 8 billion and rising, yet starvation is not the issue it once was, in global terms. Technological fixes can work, at least for some time.
What will people make of the things we worry about today, in 2065?