I went to high school in the early 1970s, mostly in Alaska. We had hippies up there, but it was hard to tell them from rural residents who weren’t native. The antiwar stuff was more a matter of fashion for most kids, but we had some who were serious about it. Along with that were the population fear mongers, anti-pollution freaks, climate change folks, and dopers. Oh yeah — climate change meant fearing global cooling.
Some things weren’t really a problem. Population, as Crichton shows, was already on the decline. Protests against the “population bomb” were utterly misplaced. The anti-war folks were generally correct, but I’m not really sure they had that much do with our the US actually leaving SE Asia. We lost on the ground, and I simply don’t believe some of the bogus recriminations about how we lost it here first. We never should have been there in the first place, so if that’s the case, we should be protesting again.
Pollution was an issue, and still is, but Crichton is completely wrong about pharmaceuticals — they have already been shown a serious danger. Industrial pollution we are reducing, not a moment too soon, and not nearly in enough places. And Chernobyl is hardly a non-issue. I sincerely hope we learned our lesson there. Nuclear technology is hardly that safe. It can be done, but most governments tend to lavish such things with neglect. Only rarely do people in power actually care about their fellow humans, so we can expect more disasters, such as Yellowstone.
But the new fear of global warming was never anything but pure hogwash, an attempt at watermelon politics: green is the color you see, but it’s pure red murderous communism inside. It remains a profit seeking, fear mongering power grab, and humanity be damned. Instead, it seems the old fears of ice ages were accurate. But that doesn’t mean burning petroleum isn’t harmful on the scale we now do it. It may not kill us all, but the long term effects are dismissed by the heedless masses.
Still, I am much more concerned with something deeper. All of the above would never be an issue if we simply lived by God’s Laws. It’s the moral pollution which will kill us first.
