Lessons from 1971 for the eco-activist writers of today
Apocalypses are much less fun to live through than to imagine. The past few decades have brought humankind and most other species on Earth to the brink of destruction. We now face mass extinctions, raging wildfires and extreme weather events — among numerous issues to be discussed at the crucial COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow next month. If only there’d been some warning, if only someone had raised an alarm.
They did: loud and clear. When, in 1962, Rachel Carson brought the disastrous effects of pesticides and DDT to wider attention with her book Silent Spring, she was dismissed by many as amateur and hysterical. Yet Carson’s work is now seen as one of the foundational works of the environmental movement, and celebrated for galvanising a whole generation of eco-conscious writers.
By 1971, exactly 50 years ago, humanity’s role in a looming environmental crisis was well understood, as three remarkable publications from that year make clear. Indeed, it’s shocking how prescient they seem, how much wisdom was on offer in the aftermath of a decade of environmental disasters, including oil spills and worsening pollution, as well as ongoing civil rights abuses and wars.
The Whole Earth Catalog, launched in 1968 by writer and entrepreneur Stewart Brand, offered a wildly eclectic mix of essays, fiction, product reviews and recommendations. Steve Jobs would later describe it as being “sort of like Google in paperback form . . . it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions”.
In 1971, alongside excerpts from Carl Jung’s psychological reflections and ads for kayak kits, The Last Whole Earth Catalog carried “Think Little”, a powerful essay written by the great American poet, novelist, farmer and environmentalist Wendell Berry. In it, Berry issued a chilling warning: “In five years the energy of our present concern will have petered out in a series of public gestures — and no doubt in a series of empty laws — and a great, and perhaps the last, human opportunity will have been lost.”
What is, perhaps, most striking to the reader today is Berry’s argument that environmentalism cannot be done in isolation: it should be seen as “not a digression from the civil rights and peace movements, but the logical culmination of those movements. For I believe that the separation of these three problems is artificial. They have the same cause, and that is the mentality of greed and exploitation,” he writes.
In the same year, Frances Moore Lappé, then a 27-year-old researcher on poverty, published Diet for a Small Planet, a book that has since sold more than 3.5m copies and is now in its 20th edition. As well as recipes for walnut cheddar loaf and spinach rice casserole, Diet for a Small Planet advocated a plant-based diet, arguing that a meat-centred diet is “at the very heart of our waste of the Earth’s productivity”, and warned about the mass mechanisation of food production.
Lappé saw politics and the plate as being interlinked, and then — as now — she argues that the world has enough to feed all of its inhabitants, and that the “injustice of hunger” is avoidable “in a world of plenty”.
Even children’s literature had a moment of environmental epiphany in 1971, when Dr Seuss, already an established and much-loved children’s author, published The Lorax, an eco-fable about the fight to save the Truffula forest from a greedy industrialist called the Once-ler. The titular Lorax is a short, mossy creature who “speaks for the trees for the trees have no tongues”, attempting to reason with the Once-ler who, too late, is left to brood over a land stripped of natural resources.
Although Dr Seuss’s book became a model for how to write children’s books about environmental crises, and would go on to sell 1m-plus copies, it also triggered intense pushback from the logging industry, whose members attempted to ban The Lorax from school reading lists in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Fifty years ago, we already knew that Earth was in trouble. The growing body of environmental writing from that year, including these three texts — one countercultural, one an enduring bestseller, the third a hugely popular children’s book — changed the hearts and minds of many. The fact that these writers did not spark a revolution is not their failing alone.
So what lessons do they offer to today’s environmental writers? That they must reach the widest possible audience; that they must join the dots between social, political and environmental crises. And perhaps, above all, that in the face of looming disaster, they must inspire us to do more, rather than drown in despair. As Wendell Berry, now 87, said in a recent interview: “Even the people on our side, they’re all telling us: be afraid, be afraid, be afraid. We’ve got to refuse that too.”
Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café