The Penguin History of the World

Suspicion of science had never wholly disappeared in western societies, although tending to be confined to a few surviving primitive or reactionary enclaves as the majesty and implication of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century gradually unrolled. History can provide much evidence of uneasiness about interference with nature and attempts to control it, but until recently such uneasiness seemed to rest on non-rational grounds, such as the fear of provoking divine anger or nemesis. As time passed, it was steadily eroded by the palpable advantages and improvements that successful interference with nature brought about, most obviously through the creation of new wealth expressed in all sorts of goods, from better medicine to better clothing and food.

In the 1970s, however, it became clear that a new scepticism about science itself was abroad, even though only among a minority and only in rich countries. There, a cynic might have said, the dividends on science had already been drawn. None the less, scepticism manifested itself there first in the 1970s and 1980s as ‘green’ political parties sought to promote policies protective of the environment. Although their direct political impact was limited, they did proliferate; the established political parties and perceptive politicians therefore began toying with ‘green’ themes, too.

Environmentalists, as the concerned came to be called, benefited from the new advances in communications, which rapidly broadcast disturbing news even from previously uncommunicative sources. In 1986, an accident occurred at a Ukrainian nuclear power station. Suddenly and horribly, human interdependence was made visible. Grass eaten by lambs in Wales, milk drunk by Poles and Yugoslavs and air breathed by Swedes were all contaminated. An incalculable number of Soviets, it appeared, were going to die over the years from the slow effects of radiation. The alarming event was brought home to millions by television not long after other millions had watched on their screens an American rocket blow up with the loss of all on board. Chernobyl and Challenger showed to huge numbers of people for the first time both the limitations and the possible dangers of an advanced technological civilization.

Such accidents reinforced and diffused the new concern with the environment. It soon became tangled with much else. Some of the doubts that have recently arisen accept that our civilization has been good at creating material wealth, but note that by itself that does not necessarily make men happy. This is hardly a new idea but its application to society as a whole instead of to individuals is a new emphasis. It led to a wider recognition that improvement of social conditions may not remove all human dissatisfactions and may actually irritate some of them more acutely. Pollution, the oppressive anonymity of crowded cities and the nervous stress and strain of modern work conditions easily erase satisfactions provided by material gain and they are not new problems: 4,000 people died of atmospheric pollution in a week in London in 1952, but the word ‘smog’ had been invented nearly half a century before that. Scale, too, has now become a problem in its own right. Some modern cities may even have grown to the point at which they present problems that are, for the moment, insoluble.

Some fear that resources are now so wastefully employed that we confront a new version of the Malthusian peril. Energy has never been used so lavishly as it is today; one calculation suggests that more has been used by humanity during the last century than during the whole of previous history – say, in the last 10,000 years. Eighty-seven per cent of this energy comes from fossil fuels, created from the fossilized remains of plants accumulated in the earth’s crust over millions of years. Reserves are running out just as thousands of millions of people hope to raise their levels of consumption to current levels in the West. This is clearly an unsustainable situation. Many governments and companies are now investing much in developing ‘sustainable’ forms of energy, such as geo-thermal, solar, tide, wind and waste. But in reality very little progress has been made over the past decades, especially in developing applied technologies based on these resources. With nuclear energy still encountering much resistance, humankind is facing a bleak future in energy terms.

We may, too, already have passed the point at which energy consumption is putting unmanageable strains on the environment (for instance, in pollution or damage to the ozone layer), and to further increase those strains would be intolerable. The social and political consequences that might follow from environmental changes that have already occurred have not yet begun to be grasped and we have nothing like the knowledge, techniques or consensus over goals such as were available to land men on the moon.