Earth Days Page #3

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had divorced themselves

in some large measure

from the inflow of solar energy

by tapping into

fossil energy resources,

we'd been able to, seemingly,

for a period of time--

for a century or so--

violate some of these basic

principals of ecology.

And that, by and large,

they'd led us

into some really

unfortunate consequences.

The idea here is:

what do you really do to try

to bring the carbon cycle

back into balance?

It occurred to me that

we need to begin to apply

the principals of ecology

to the way we build our cities,

to the way that we manage

our agricultural system,

to the way that we make

industrial processes.

I was literally awake all night

excited with this thing,

and got up the next morning,

knowing what I was going to do.

I was going to come back

to the United States,

I was going to become

engaged in political activity

and I was going to be trying

to see if I could somehow

insert this insight

into the body politic.

There were no environmental laws

when I became

Secretary of Interior.

The rivers of this country,

essentially were sewers.

There was a smog episode

in New York City

that killed a large number

of people.

Air pollution

that killed people.

We made, during the 1960's,

the first list

of endangered species

and what was at the top

of the list?

The American Bald Eagle,

our national symbol.

Like lots of others

in my generation,

I thought that all of beauty

was going to be destroyed.

I thought that cheesy suburbs

would overrun

the fields and the hills.

It was a sense that we were

finalizing our alienation

from nature

and poisoning the planet.

And I didn't want to live

in a world like that.

When I was growing up,

progress was defined

by growth

and gross national product.

That you could see

the gross national product

grow ever higher at the

same time that there was

this growing recognition

that life was,

in some very important ways,

getting worse as we progressed.

Our air and water were polluted.

Our most beautiful natural

places were being destroyed.

Cities were becoming

increasingly unlivable.

Food was becoming

increasingly processed

to the point where it was

neither nutritious nor

enjoyable and on and on.

All of which contributed

to this sense of progress,

but at the same time, people

had a mounting discontent.

That, in some sense, was one

of the great underlying engines

of launching the

environmental movement.

The environmental movement

that grew out

of Rachel Carson's book

was built on the foundation

of the conservation movement.

There were big issues like

preserving the Everglades

and not putting

an airport there.

And the National

Wildlife Federation

was right

in the forefront of this.

There was a big proposal

for dams in the Grand Canyon.

Can you imagine damming

the Grand Canyon?

This was raised into

a big national issue,

particularly by the Sierra Club.

And I was persuaded,

as Secretary of the Interior,

that the project

should be abandoned.

The environmental movement

enlarged

the conservation movement.

It enlarged it beyond concern

for the management

of United States resources

to the future

of the planet itself.

What really alarmed me

about the state

of the planet's ecology

was a book by Paul Ehrlich

on overpopulation.

It just made perfect sense to me

that-that human overpopulation

was driving

the degradation

of the quality of life.

When I was born, there were

2 billion people on the planet.

When I wrote

The Population Bomb in 1968,

there were 3 and a half billion

people on the planet.

That number has

now almost doubled.

We're over 6.5 billion.

And people say,

"Well, population growth

is slowing down,

we're only going to add

if we're lucky another

2 and a half billion people."

Well, 2 and a half billion

people is more

than there were on the entire

planet when I was born.

The population situation is bad

beyond what any demographer

even dreamed of 25 years ago.

What about the resource

situation in the world?

The most important resource to

all of us, of course, is food.

When Paul Ehrlich's book

The Population Bomb came out

in... late '60s,

he was instantly famous.

He was instantly controversial.

Some time in the next 15 years

the end will come,

and by the end I mean

an utter breakdown

of the capacity of the planet

to support humanity.

I'd been a student of-of

Paul Ehrlich's at Stanford.

I trusted him and liked him.

I bought it completely.

It was a global perspective

which was interesting

because many of the things that

environmentalists were doing

up to then were not so global.

You can be absolutely sure

that we have had it.

Everybody who's looked into

the overall population resource

environment picture comes up

with the same kind of estimate

of what would be required if

we're to have a 50/50 chance

of getting through

the next couple of decades

with civilization intact.

He grabbed

the thorniest thistle of all,

which is us, you know--

human reproduction.

I was totally galvanized.

And I went to my dorm room

and just sort of blasted out

a draft of this speech

to deliver at commencement,

titled "The Future

Is a Cruel Hoax."

It was pretty drastic,

uh, rhetoric.

I said, you know,

mankind's moved across

the face of the Earth

like a great unthinking,

unfeeling cancer.

And that the most humane

thing for me to do

would be to have

no children at all.

I was a media figure overnight.

It was personal.

I said I'm not going

to have a child.

This is very serious.

Um, and...

and I was a woman saying it.

All right.

I-I went around and gave

80 speeches in a year.

If every student says,

"I'm not going to have

more than two children,"

then within five years,

the population growth curve

will begin to drop.

So, the future is in our hands

in a very, very real sense...

The pill had just recently

become available,

so this is something I can do

as an act of conscience.

We had a lot of illusions

about Earth.

One of them was that

it was basically flat

and infinite with no finitude

to our resources.

And we had very

stereotyped ideas

of what the Earth looked like

from space.

If you look at all the images,

that people made before

we had the photographs,

almost none of them have clouds.

And weather and climate.

There is such a thing as icons.

And icons help frame

people's thinking.

My sense was that a photograph

of Earth from space

would be different

in every possible way

from a painting of the Earth

from space.

In, uh, 1966, I took some LSD

on a rooftop in San Francisco.

I noticed that the buildings

of downtown

were not parallel

to one another.

It was as if you were looking

with a fish-eye lens.

They had this, uh, slightly

divergent quality to them.

And so, basically,

I'm mentally elevating myself

higher and higher and higher

until the horizon closes

around me in a circle.

What I am looking at is

the surface of a sphere.

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