WORLD ECOLOGY YEAR 1972
A manifesto on the world ecology year 1972 at a meeting held in San Francisco in July 1969.
January/February 1971
By the Mother Earth News editors
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When Tweedledum (the "free" capitalist world) and Tweedledee (the earnestly dreary communist world) had agreed to have a battle —
Just by then flew a monstrous crow
As black as a tar-barrel,
Which frightened both those heroes so
They quite forgot their quarrel.
Because today every political, international, ideological, and racial dispute is piffling and irrelevant beside the fact that human beings, with misapplied technology, are about to destroy their planet. Air and water, for example, cannot be divided by political boundaries; the rich must breathe the same air as the poor. We are, as the saying goes, all in the same boat—and the boat is sinking.
* The planet is dangerously overpopulated, and there will be a world-wide famine by 1975 unless food production is increased by 25%.
* Water is the most essential ingredient of life in shortest supply. We are wasting and contaminating it at top speed.
* The very existence of nuclear weapons and radioactive wastes presents the problem, not merely of avoiding atomic war, but of how to get these materials off the planet.
* Likewise, we have created, for military reasons, chemical and biological poisons whose mere presence, much less actual use, is a danger to all life on earth.
* We are increasingly being suffocated not only with the gases from burnt oil, but also under mountains of paper (involving also the disasters of deforestation) employed for recording life rather than living it, and so representing an insane confusion of reality with words. Thus, doctors and nurses must devote so much time to paperwork that they can hardly practice medicine.
* Human life depends on coexistence with a vast variety of animals, insects, plants and bacteria, many of which are in danger of extermination through industrial wastes and ill-conceived methods of hunting, pest-control, and commercial fishing.