A water lily grows in a pond. It doubles in size every day, but its rapid growth goes unnoticed. Even after 29 days, half the pond is still free. On the 30th day, however, the horror is great: the water surface is completely covered by the water lily.
How wonderful when plants grow so luxuriantly! one would probably rejoice today. But in 1972, this parable from The Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome report, alarmed millions of readers. The pond stood there for the earth and the water lilies for the human millions who would soon “suffocate” all life if their uncontrolled multiplication and their constantly increasing consumption of resources were not stopped. That shock helped transform a long-held uneasiness among many about the global environmental movement.
Four years earlier, the former Alitalia, Fiat and Olivetti manager Aurelio Peccei had invited a circle of scientists, politicians and industrialists to Rome to talk to them about the state of the world. Humanity, he worries, is getting out of hand, the balance is tipping, and unchecked growth is endangering life on the planet. The Club of Rome commissioned Donella and Dennis Meadows and a team of other scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to investigate these questions. Their report, which they published four years later under the title “The Limits to Growth”, confirmed the fears.
The study was based on a computer simulation carried out for the first time, for which the team used five parameters of global development as a basis: industrial production, population growth, agricultural production, exploitation of natural resources and habitat destruction. The result: If humanity does not get a grip on its growth and consumption, within 100 years the world will literally be exhausted, resources will be exhausted, nature will be destroyed, and there will be no more space.
“Population Bomb”, “Suicide Program”, “Garbage Planet”: The non-fiction titles gave little hope
Environmental pollution, overexploitation, scavenging were by no means new phenomena in 1972. Ever since the post-war boom of the 1950s, unbridled consumption has been wreaking havoc in Europe and North America. Mechanisms for “nature conservation”, as it was called at the time, were still largely unknown. Garbage accumulated in ever-growing heaps. Bodies of water tipped over regularly. Catastrophic tanker accidents like that of the Torrey Canyon 1967 on the British coast shocked television viewers. it could not go on like that.
Here and there reminders had repeatedly come forward, sometimes with a great response. The best known of them was Rachel Carson, who warned of the consequences of pesticides in agriculture in “Silent Spring” (1962). The 1972 ban on DDT in the USA and Germany was largely due to her book. But the broad debate about the protection of “creation” only began in Germany and other western countries in the early 1970s.
This was not only due to “The Limits to Growth”, which sold 30 million copies including its later editions, but also to the many other warning and admonition books that appeared around this time. Anyone who moans today about the apocalyptic sound of climate activists has forgotten how the books that appeared on this subject between 1971 and 1973 were titled: “Population Bomb” (Paul Ehrlich); “The Suicide Program. Future or Demise of Mankind” (Gordon Rattray Taylor); “Garbage Planet Earth” (Hans Reimer); “Total Auto Society” (Hans Dollinger), “Growth Mania and Environmental Crisis” (Barry Commoner); or “The Future Shock” (Alvin Toffler). “It’s possible that the earth has to die,” SZ editor Christian Schütze titled an essay in Mercury.
The reason for the growing pessimism was not only the increasingly obvious environmental destruction itself, but also a new scientific understanding of the function of systems, cybernetic control circuits, circular instead of linear processes and the type of natural balance that prevails in ecosystems.
When people first saw the world from space, they realized a few things
These concepts found their visual counterpart in a photograph that forever changed Western worldview. It showed the earth from a previously unknown perspective, from space. NASA published the first image, taken from a satellite, in 1967. Iconic, however, was the more precise shot, more favorably lit by the sun, which the crew of the Apollo 17 made on her flight to the moon in 1972. The photo of the “blue planet” is one of the most reproduced images in human history.
Up until the late 1960s, the mushroom cloud had been the symbol of fear of human destruction of the world. Now it has been replaced by the photo of the astronauts. It not only showed the mysterious beauty of the earth; it not only showed that man, who considers himself so important and causes such drastic damage, is absent from the image of the planet, as if he had no business there; above all, it showed the earth as a closed system for the first time. It was an unexpected, very sobering insight: “The expansion into the outer space produces the ultimate, immanent planetary interior”, as the curator Anselm Franke put it in the catalog for the 2013 exhibition “The Whole Earth” in the Berlin House of World Cultures. described. Instead of conquering new living space in space, the astronauts come back with the realization that the small, fragile earth is all we have. And that there is no outside, no vent, no planetary backyard for our garbage, our pesticides and the smoke from the chimneys, but that they will now forever be part of the Earth system. (The existential threat to the earth from the CO2 concentration, which was only recognized later, could have been guessed from this picture.)
A total of 30 million copies sold: the report “The Limits to Growth” published in 1972.
(Photo: Sebastian Kahnert/picture alliance/dpa)
“The Limits to Growth” not only marks the beginning of the environmental movement, but also the end of its precursory phase, which was “still sapping the planning and feasibility euphoria of the previous decade,” as historian Patrick Kupper writes. It was the 1968ers, the hippies, who took up the impulses of the experts, technocrats and those who warned of doom, but built them into utopian counter-models. They had already planned to change many things in the world, so the end of the destruction of nature became one of the most important items on the list. But they did not advocate population management in the Third World and a centrally controlled loss of prosperity, but a new relationship to nature, to others, to oneself. Not only was nature threatened, but also the health of every individual – and not only through poison in the food or lead in the air, but also through capitalist labor, through consumer pressure, through the media. The rhetoric of the ticking “time bomb” was replaced by one that promised more happiness and fulfillment through environmental protection, that recommended the commitment of each individual instead of control from above. The line led from the founding of Greenpeace in 1972 via the first organic shops, the anti-nuclear movement, to the founding of the Greens in 1983.
From the hippie commune to Silicon Valley. The eco-pioneers took tortuous paths
One of the great masterminds of this alternative culture, which developed from 1968 out of the student protests and the alarm about the worn-out “Spaceship Earth”, was the Californian Stewart Brand. The biologist, hippie activist, and rock impresario got NASA to release the first satellite photo of Earth in 1967, the precursor to the iconic 1972 image.
The “whole earth” not only became the title and cover motif of the first issue of Brands “Whole Earth Catalogue”, but also the ideological guiding star for a new way of life, which he propagated on the tightly printed pages of the legendary magazines. They were sales catalogues, do-it-yourself guides and underground postilles for cyberneticists, dropouts, nature romantics and the rest of Californian counterculture. Spades and tents were among the “tools” presented there, as were synthesizers and the first computers.
As heterogeneous as this milieu was, their contribution to ecology was mixed. Many rural communities failed after months. The search for life in harmony with nature often led directly to narcissism and esotericism, it was “retreat and engagement” in equal measure (Norman Klein). And many of those who had just been shearing sheep soon became the pioneers of Silicon Valley. Steve Jobs called the Whole Earth Catalog “one of the Bibles of my generation” and “a kind of Google in print”. The ecological revolution did not materialize, but the digital revolution took place – with a technologically upgraded capitalism that was anything but resource-efficient.
In Germany the development was different. The influence of the environmental movement in society grew steadily. Many of their demands, which were once considered radical, such as “Nuclear power? No thanks” have long been mainstream. However, in 50 years we have hardly come any closer to the goal of creating a balance between man and nature. According to Anselm Franke, ecology remains the “only utopia that was passed on from the 20th to the 21st century without prejudice.” After all, most people today agree that this utopia must become reality.
Read more episodes of the column “1972: The Year That Remains”. here.