> Silent Spring had a huge and immediate impact on the American public, which Carson and her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, had very much expected and prepared for.
A couple of things here:
1. Could a book come out now that would have this kind of effect on the public and spur us to action? I suspect not because we're much more divided now than we were in the *early* 60s. (Yes, the divisions would grow quite large in the mid-to-late 60s, but the early 60s was the calm before the storm)
2. They expected that it would have the impact it did? I guess that goes back to #1.
Critical reflections about the ecological impact/carelessness of modern society was an already booming genre during that time, so the response they were preparing for was surely part of HM's decision to publish in the first place, not just some insight gleaned from how convincing the work felt or whatever.
And these books were consistently controversial and politicized at the time, which is why sales and discussion were high yet still lead to our 2020's society being only marginally more ecologically responsible than the that of 1960's (if that).
Nothing much has changed. In the way you're referencing, the US was extremely divided in the 1960's and is extremely divided again now. Practiced media companies know how to "prepare" for that by exploiting it for sales, and today's publishers do it just the same -- sometimes on ecological topics like this, sometimes on other controversial topics du jour.
> Nothing much has changed. In the way you're referencing, the US was extremely divided in the 1960's and is extremely divided again now.
The deep divisions mostly came later in the 60s. The early 60s was the calm before the storm. The Vietnam war was barely on anyone's radar in 1962 - there were only ~9,000 US troops there in '62 and these were being referred to as 'advisors' - the vast majority of Americans didn't even know where Vietnam was or that we had any troops there at that point. Kennedy had not yet been assassinated. The Civil Rights movement was in progress, but again, not on the radar for most Americans yet. Most Americans felt that the Soviet Union was the existential threat - not a lot of division about that at the time.
Silent Spring certainly seems to have had some major impact at the time it came out - by 1970, eight years later, we had the EPA and Earth Day. Again, it's hard to imagine any kind of book or film coming out today that would have a similar impact on the culture at large since we now have a collection of subcultures each with their own preferred media outlets. In '62 you got your news from your local newspaper and the networks (mostly CBS & NBC at that point, with ABC as sort of the upstart) - while newspapers did often have a political slant, broadcasters mostly all had the same political slant (or lack of one) due to the fairness doctrine.
> discussion were high yet still lead to our 2020's society being only marginally more ecologically responsible than the that of 1960's (if that).
I think this has more to do with Reagan and the rise of the right wing in the 80s and into the current era. That led to backsliding on ecological progress that was made in the 60s through the 70s. Jimmy Carter was probably our most ecologically-minded president - he even began to sound the alarm on climate change towards the end of his administration.
McCarthy's red scare, rising resistance to the oppressive Hollywood production code, Beat and motorcycle culture, Brown v Board of Education, the pre-1962 NY Times bestseller lists, etc all suggest deep division through the 1950's that would only crescendo during the Vietnam War and disperse for a while afterwards.
Because TV was ripe and widespread at that point, you can also personally survey talk show and comedy/variety show material of the 1950's and early 1960's to experience the state of the culture. While the fairness doctrine did constrain what could stated by whom and with what kind of counterpoint, capitalists and comedians found plenty of ways to reflect the actual cultural tensions, which (like today) were not small and (like today) were on track to get further heightened.
McCarthy was roundly discredited by about '56. He was out of office by '57. By the early 60s he was largely viewed as an extremist.
The election of 1964 (LBJ vs Goldwater) was very conclusive: Goldwater was easy to paint as an extremist - he only got 38% of the vote, it was a landslide for LBJ. (In reality, Goldwater, or at least the Goldwater he evolved into, was nowhere near as extreme as many in his party today - he was more of a libertarian and warned against having religious extremists control the party - the GOP did not heed his warnings)
Carter was repeatedly wrong about environmental issues, some quotes..“Unless profound changes are made to lower oil consumption, we now believe that early in the 1980s the world will be demanding more oil than it can produce.”
“World oil production can probably keep going up for another six or eight years. But some time in the 1980s it can’t go up much more. Demand will overtake production. We have no choice about that.”
The guy was both wrong and extremely unpopular and defeated by Reagan in a landslide. He was president during a period of unprecedented inflation, multiple geopolitical flubs, unpopular mandates (Like executive orders forcing everyone to set their thermostat at a certain temperature). Don't forget his other legacy, among others Corn-based ethanol, which is both worse for the environment than gasoline, subsidized by our taxes, and has a negative impact on food prices. Carter was a nice guy but a terrible leader.
It wasn't only Carter who thought we had hit or were close to hitting peak oil production. There were members of both parties who thought it likely. Also, you cite this as an example of him being wrong about an environmental issue, but that was more of an economic issue. I'm surprised you didn't cite his opposition to nuclear power as an example of where he was wrong on an environmental issue - yes, in hindsight we now know that wasn't the way to go, but we have to remember that in the 70s anti-nuke was the environmental position, while they were starting to know about climate change, they didn't yet have the idea that nuclear power (which was becoming increasingly unpopular) would be a good way of avoiding that.
The other thing to remember is that Carter was warning that being dependent on foreign oil was bad for US national security. This was why he was doing what he could to get us to reduce our energy consumption. As for the thermostats, I don't recall that we were being mandated to turn down the thermostats in our houses and I was there.
As for the inflation, he inherited a lot of that from the wartime spending expansion of his predecessors - Arab oil embargoes didn't help. And he did name Paul Volcker to lead the Fed even though in his interview Volcker told him that the only remedy would be to drastically raise interest rates. Volcker thought that he definitely wouldn't get the job (it was the year before an election year) so he was surprised when Carter picked him. So in that sense, Carter played a key role in killing the 70s inflation (which had been a problem even prior to Carter being elected - Remember Ford's WIN - Whip Inflation Now - buttons?) In the end, Volcker did what he said he was going to do. 10 year treasury rates hit ~15%. The economy swooned and it was a big factor in Carter not winning re-election, but that ended up killing the 70s inflation. He had the guts to pick Volcker even though it would not be good for him politically, but he knew that it would be the best choice for the economy in the longrun.
Also in regards to inflation, it should be remembered that Carter was a fiscal conservative trying to reign in spending, but his own party faught him on this. It's why Ted Kennedy primaried him in the 1980 Democratic primaries: he considered Carter to be too much of a tightwad.
Option 1 - Saint leader with no ties to money.
Option 2 - Corrupt leader with ties to money.
Cute but I'll go with option 2. He "sounded the alarm" to raise demand and price.
Why do you give merit to "members of both parties" opinion in fields of science? Said members choose to whom to listen and whom to ignore according to their agenda.
History showed us decades upon decades of corrupt leadership that blatantly lie to their people. And you're here reciting some rehashed propaganda?
Yeah, the dude obviously made bank working on all of those Habitat for Humanity houses. And all that supposed oil arbitrage resulted in his huge $9M net worth[1].
C'mon, not everyone has the same motives that you do.
(Note: when he left office Carter had a negative net worth because the blind trust he put his peanut farm in had been mismanaged. He and Rosalynn worked their way out of debt by writing books - about 30 of them.)
the political environment was deeply reeling from the Oil Shock embargoes and OPEC. People now probably do not know about gasoline rationing at that time.
People nowadays don't know much about the world except the last 10 years. Destined to repeat our mistakes. I hope we aren't entering another dark ages - which would be rich given how able our technology is.
And people now who I'd guess are probably under 50 are downvoting your comment here for some reason. I'm old enough to remember sitting in the backseat of my parent's station wagon waiting in a long line of cars at the gas station. You could only gas up on even/odd days depending on the last number on your license plate. This was around 1973 IIRC.
We were all wrong about domestic energy independence until the big shale finds/feasibility work in Texas and the Dakotas in the 2000s.
Syriana [1] is a pretty good example of the popular zeitgeist as late as its release in 2005. And its portrait of how lobbyism works, how nullified anti-trust was becoming in late Greenspan era, how un-winnable Middle East adventurism was going to play out are all still watching today [2] if you swap the worst of finance and the worst of tech in (neither of energy, tech, or finance are all bad even at the level of individual companies: a few bad apples as usual spoil the bunch in a fractal way).
We’re stuck with policies and capture from the pre-shale era because capture is a wratchet (which should be delivered over a Littlefinger monologue and a montage megacap CEOs chuckling over wrist slap fines at the Battery and SoHo House).
Carter was a bad leader, though I’ve heard from regular people alive then that it was his wimp out on the Iran hostage crisis and the fiasco with the chopper rescue (Eagle Claw maybe? Desert Claw?) that sealed the deal on the Reagan era and the disastrous consequences of that we still live with today. cough Summers cough what was I saying?
> Jimmy Carter was probably our most ecologically-minded president
Not disagreeing about Carter, but weirdly Nixon was perhaps just as concerned about the environment.
It makes me think it was more of the Zeitgeist of the time — just as Star Wars, Ronald Reagan and wearing your patriotism on your sleeve became the Zeitgeist after.
> Nothing much has changed. In the way you're referencing, the US was extremely divided in the 1960's and is extremely divided again now.
Don't believe the hype. There were bombings and assassinations in the 60s.
Partisanship has increased in recent memory but we don't come close to replicating the division caused by the ripples of the red scare, a draft for the vietnam war and a burgeoning and sometimes violent civil rights movement.
These days, people talk the talk but they fail to walk the walk like they did then.
I'm not sure what argument you're making, but if you measure social division purely by looking at public displays of violence you're going to miss all the warning signs until it's too late.
"Warning signs" are for the future. The comment was equating the extreme division of the 60s with now, not the future. You can make the argument that the present division is a warning sign of a future that will be equivalent to the division of the 60s but that's a very different argument.
"Partisanship has increased in recent memory but we don't come close to replicating the division caused by the ripples of the red scare, a draft for the Vietnam war and a burgeoning and sometimes violent civil rights movement. These days, people talk the talk but they fail to walk the walk like they did then."
That may be because there are no longer large numbers of people protesting the same thing.
Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter never got organized enough to push through a political agenda. Q-Anon was a hoax. The GOP, having won on guns and abortion, now lacks a coherent issue. Organized labor, once very powerful, isn't organized enough any more to push hard for anything. Nobody has enough mass to form a mass movement.
Fair enough. But why quibble over a couple of years? The point is that the amount of division we have going on now isn't unprecedented. Lots of people have the last time in their living memory.
Yes, the amount of division now definitely isn't unprecedented. But Silent Spring wasn't released into that very divisive part of the 60s - it was released just prior to it and that's what probably allowed it to have more of an impact. The media landscape was definitely more uniform then than now, information bubbles were much less of a thing - again, I can't imagine any book or film having that kind of impact now, that's my main point.
Another example would be the ozone layer: When it became clear in the 70s that CFCs were destroying the ozone layer we were able to make changes to stop that from happening over the course of a decade. Can't imagine us being able to do something like that now.
Having grown up in New England in the era, I remember "acid rain" being a big concern too. The polluters fought to keep anything from being done about the problem, but decades later some steps were actually taken by the US government (and others) and apparently there's been a fair amount of success.
I agree, now that "corporations are people" in the US it's hard to imagine being able to successfully battle them and force large-scale, cross-industry environmental-health measures to be taken. That is, unless it so happens that such measures maximize short-term profits in some way.
Not to nitpick but in the early 60s there was an entire race of people who were systematically marginalized to be Third Class citizens. (White) women were still effectively Second Class.
Indeed POC were still systematically marginalized in the early 60s. That's a division that existed since the founding of the US. Many whites began to pay attention to this after the murder of Emmett Till in '55. But when we talk about political division, were enough whites convinced yet in the early 60s that this was an issue that wasn't just confined to the South? The fault lines were definitely there, and there had been several aftershocks since the big one (The Civil War), the quakes to come were still a few years out. Those fault lines are still there.
Not entirely true. The CIO was pretty open to Blacks, not so much the AFL. Which became an issue in 1955 when they merged to become the current AFL-CIO.
A lot of our political divisions are essentially a reflection of the same issues that led to and pre-dated the civil war. Although nowadays the geography has expanded, you can still easily see the outline of the confederacy in today’s voting patterns.
Really? POC? A huge and extremely complex and diverse part of American society gets neatly categorized into a limp but politically correct acronym for the sake of what reason? It's really that difficult to say people of color, or say, African Americans, or blacks? Assuming you're not referring to many other types of people of color here, though a whole bunch of different ethnicities could fit into that strange way of categorizing so many human beings.
I do not think so. What would it be about? Just like Carson correctly predicted indiscriminate use of DDT would lead to resistance, the corporate 'immune system' has evolved to shut down stuff like this much more effectively.
I was his assistant in the early 2000s helping him get his UFOTOG project started. His stories and the level of depth developing custom tech shaped my career. I really miss him.
Except that in this case, the human went berserk not because of contradictory instructions but because the other humans were planning on destroying the last surviving plant life from earth.
My favorite era of sci-fi films, but I suppose I'm biased having grown up in that era.
Make no mistake, I was blown away when "Star Wars" came out like everyone else, but damn, it killed what had been a delicate and thoughtful genre of Hollywood.
There was a window after Kubrick’s “2001” and before “Star Wars” when science fiction in Hollywood was allowed to be for adults.
Robert Wise’s 1979 “Star Trek” is an interesting and unique transitional case because it retains the 2001-inspired ponderous abstract storytelling but got a Star Wars level budget. Personally I love it for that, but I know most people disagree.
(Speaking of Wise, his “Andromeda Strain” is an absolute 1970s sci-fi gem.)
> it killed what had been a delicate and thoughtful genre of Hollywood.
Well said. SF was just growing up and maturing into something important and worth having, and then that stupid fairy-tale-in-space came along and blew it all to hell. I still resent it for that.
Enjoy it mate, and all the other fat Brunners. (His Stand on Zanzibar is most of Gibson's Neuromancer ... more than a decade before.) Give the thin ones a miss.
I saw this movie as a kid and it haunted me. Somehow, when the internet was still in its infancy (pre-WWW), the title popped into my head—I still don’t know how—and I was able to rent it on VHS at the local video rental store. It was startling how much I remembered from seeing it on TV at the age of 6 or 7.
I had a similar reaction seeing Logans Run as a kid on TV (it must have been edited pretty aggressively as the movie is very racy).
I had no idea what I had watched but I remember this show about these people who are stuck inside a mall and can never go outside ever. It really affected me incredibly deeply and filled me with melancholy whenever I thought about it.
Finally in College I was renting old sci-fi and watching it, and as I was watching Logans Run I suddenly realized that it was the show I had seen as a child about the people who couldn't go outside.
A lot of 70s dystopian sci-fi hits pretty hard to be honest. Two more that come off as incredibly prescient are The Network (about a media company that will do anything for viewership) and THX1138 (about people who take drugs to control all their emotions, confess their sins to chatbots, and masturbate to porn every night).
Same here, a very enduring memory. Although I had largely forgotten about it until I heard a song (well, some sort of psychill instrumental I guess) by Carbon Based Lifeforms, named Photosynthesis, that samples a couple of lines from this movie: https://youtu.be/KQE29az48gM?si=9q3aVxcvV7TLxBa4&t=770
Oh wow I've been listening to this song my whole adult life and never new where that line came from! That's an incredible connection, I love haunting scifi movies from the 70s, and Carbon Based Lifeforms! Thank you for this!
The title refers to the idea of a submarine going silent so it can't be tracked by sonar. In early drafts of the screenplay, the hero wanted to do something similar with the Valley Forge, so he painted the ship black and tried to hide, knowing that Earth would come looking for it. That idea was abandoned but the title remained.
Interesting! I wouldn't be surprised if there was a concious or unconcious connection. Miyazaki did have a lot of influences in his work like Moebius and I get the feeling he consumed a lot of Western work which inspired him.
It was a not-too-successful attempt by the author to create an equivalency, I think. Silent Spring was the gateway text to environmental concerns in the early 60s. Silent Running was an environmental science fiction film that had a similar theme and might have had aspirations to have a similar impact.
The third- and second-from-last paragraphs reference a book found beside Lowell’s bunk: a copy of the “Conservation Pledge” from 1946 "when the magazine Outdoor Life held a contest to encourage outdoors enthusiasts to dedicate themselves to the preservation of the America’s natural resources. The winning entry, the one that adorns Lowell’s wall aboard Valley Forge, was submitted by L.L. Foreman, a former ranch hand turned author of pulpy adventure Westerns.
"The second-place winner of that 1946 contest? Rachel Carson."
So there's a hint that the protagonist of Silent Running had actually read Carson's Silent Spring!
I don't think you can say "nothing". As the article puts it:
> "There are a lot of climate crisis stories in modern sci fi, but a great many of them focus, intentionally or not, on the natural world’s utility to humans: we must preserve it or else we doom ourselves. Silent Running argues that we should preserve the natural world even if we can live without it, even if it serves no purpose in feeding the hungry or curing the ill, even if we can find a way to get along just fine."
If the idea of the importance of preservation of the natural world were much more widespread, humanity would be in a very different situation now. Dern's character's argument in the movie is just as relevant today, and the general answer today remains the same: the natural world is a secondary concern compared to humanity's unconstrained and unthinking growth.
I had the paperback with Bruce Dern on the cover. I might have read it before seeing the movie, don’t remember. I remember being mesmerized by the book as a teen. This post brought back memories not accessed in decades.
I really don't see the "prescience". Movies about an apocalyptic future are nearly a dime a dozen and considering how far silent running shot from the mark on almost anything of how our present world is, it's hardly brilliant. The earth is still here and full of life, more of us than ever live on it and despite this, all major metrics of human development are better than they have ever been. Yes, we still have many environmental problems, but solutions are at least possible for them and our planet is far from the hell so many movies and books of the 70's predicted for the early 21st century. Also, in at least some ways, we're even improving certain things in interesting ways, or at least working towards doing so.
Climate change is something to worry about constructively, but many of its worst consequences still exist only as predictive models no matter how much many here would like to twist otherwise and by no objective, reasoned measure are we living in an ecological hell that's in any way worse than it was in the 70s, never mind in the fantasy future worlds predicted by literature and film from that era. If anything, rivers, oceans and other landscapes are now cleaner and greener in many places than they were several decades ago.
I know that a bit of optimism isn't fashionable among a certain segment of the population, but it's if anything at least more realistic and accurate than the ridiculous notion of calling Silent Running prescient.
Fashionable nihilism about the world via contrived comparisons may be fun for dramatic dinner party conversation, but as an objective means of analyzing the world, it's mostly crap.
> If anything, rivers, oceans and other landscapes are now cleaner and greener in many places than they were several decades ago.
There's a bit of a y2k issue here: things have got a lot better because a lot of work has been done. But getting the work done required political action, which required scare stories.
Good science fiction is often more about the present than about the future: a projection of current problems into an amplified version of reality.
Sometimes that device gets overdone: 2004 Battlestar Galactica felt to me carrying much of 9/11 background.
Silent Running is far from alone in the pessimist outlook. It's funny that, living in a civilization so much indebted to technology, the stories that we keep telling ourselves about it are so negative.
We've accepted that as a given. I recently enjoyed a lot Altered Carbon, that has as a premise a technology that provides immortality for the masses. Well, guess what: that good guys are trying to destroy it. Because reasons.
Also the cities seem like a shithole, not sure why.
I really recommend you give the trilogy of books in which that story happens a try. They go into a lot more detail about how the Protectorate (all the worlds colonized by Earth's UN government) is and delve a lot into the practical economic details of different characters lives. This includes minor characters. I'm not sure how badly the TV series mangled the essential backstory and plot of the books, since I disliked it nearly from the start, but in the books, nobody is opposed to immortality for the masses and though there are a lot of grim details about life in that future, for most people it's described as being more or less decent. The governments of the different worlds offer social welfare, economic freedom, religious freedom and so forth. There are economic booms and busts but overall life isn't absolutely shitty. People also generally get sleeve insurance (something like health insurance but for having a new body on standby), nanotechnology to conserve health from birth in babies and so forth.
In many ways it's like a futuristic version of life for many in the developed world today, except that governments in the books tend to be self serving, often corrupt oligarchies and the justice systems are often draconian and corrupt too... Oh wait.
> Fashionable nihilism about the world via contrived comparisons may be fun for dramatic dinner party conversation, but as an objective means of analyzing the world, it's mostly crap.
Y'know what else is mostly crap? Forgetting that things changec because of projected problems like this. Go look at any movie from the late 1960s showing the LA skyline and just look at the smog. Car manufacturers would never have attended to that problem without being forced to by publically popular legislation. There are many other examples here that have avoided "ecological hell" and post-facto "well, nothing bad happened" analyses are mostly crap because something did happen, except it gets conveniently forgotten by a culture that has the memory of a goldfish.
"If anything, rivers, oceans and other landscapes are now cleaner and greener in many places than they were several decades ago."
The Global Living Planet Index graph shows a significant decline in the population abundance of vertebrate species from 1970 to the present, indicating a substantial loss in global biodiversity.
I discovered Silent Running almost backwards when 65daysofstatic played a live re-score of the film many years back. Looks like it’s easily searchable still, comes highly recommended.
101 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadA couple of things here:
And these books were consistently controversial and politicized at the time, which is why sales and discussion were high yet still lead to our 2020's society being only marginally more ecologically responsible than the that of 1960's (if that).
Nothing much has changed. In the way you're referencing, the US was extremely divided in the 1960's and is extremely divided again now. Practiced media companies know how to "prepare" for that by exploiting it for sales, and today's publishers do it just the same -- sometimes on ecological topics like this, sometimes on other controversial topics du jour.
The deep divisions mostly came later in the 60s. The early 60s was the calm before the storm. The Vietnam war was barely on anyone's radar in 1962 - there were only ~9,000 US troops there in '62 and these were being referred to as 'advisors' - the vast majority of Americans didn't even know where Vietnam was or that we had any troops there at that point. Kennedy had not yet been assassinated. The Civil Rights movement was in progress, but again, not on the radar for most Americans yet. Most Americans felt that the Soviet Union was the existential threat - not a lot of division about that at the time.
Silent Spring certainly seems to have had some major impact at the time it came out - by 1970, eight years later, we had the EPA and Earth Day. Again, it's hard to imagine any kind of book or film coming out today that would have a similar impact on the culture at large since we now have a collection of subcultures each with their own preferred media outlets. In '62 you got your news from your local newspaper and the networks (mostly CBS & NBC at that point, with ABC as sort of the upstart) - while newspapers did often have a political slant, broadcasters mostly all had the same political slant (or lack of one) due to the fairness doctrine.
> discussion were high yet still lead to our 2020's society being only marginally more ecologically responsible than the that of 1960's (if that).
I think this has more to do with Reagan and the rise of the right wing in the 80s and into the current era. That led to backsliding on ecological progress that was made in the 60s through the 70s. Jimmy Carter was probably our most ecologically-minded president - he even began to sound the alarm on climate change towards the end of his administration.
Because TV was ripe and widespread at that point, you can also personally survey talk show and comedy/variety show material of the 1950's and early 1960's to experience the state of the culture. While the fairness doctrine did constrain what could stated by whom and with what kind of counterpoint, capitalists and comedians found plenty of ways to reflect the actual cultural tensions, which (like today) were not small and (like today) were on track to get further heightened.
The election of 1964 (LBJ vs Goldwater) was very conclusive: Goldwater was easy to paint as an extremist - he only got 38% of the vote, it was a landslide for LBJ. (In reality, Goldwater, or at least the Goldwater he evolved into, was nowhere near as extreme as many in his party today - he was more of a libertarian and warned against having religious extremists control the party - the GOP did not heed his warnings)
“World oil production can probably keep going up for another six or eight years. But some time in the 1980s it can’t go up much more. Demand will overtake production. We have no choice about that.”
The guy was both wrong and extremely unpopular and defeated by Reagan in a landslide. He was president during a period of unprecedented inflation, multiple geopolitical flubs, unpopular mandates (Like executive orders forcing everyone to set their thermostat at a certain temperature). Don't forget his other legacy, among others Corn-based ethanol, which is both worse for the environment than gasoline, subsidized by our taxes, and has a negative impact on food prices. Carter was a nice guy but a terrible leader.
The other thing to remember is that Carter was warning that being dependent on foreign oil was bad for US national security. This was why he was doing what he could to get us to reduce our energy consumption. As for the thermostats, I don't recall that we were being mandated to turn down the thermostats in our houses and I was there.
As for the inflation, he inherited a lot of that from the wartime spending expansion of his predecessors - Arab oil embargoes didn't help. And he did name Paul Volcker to lead the Fed even though in his interview Volcker told him that the only remedy would be to drastically raise interest rates. Volcker thought that he definitely wouldn't get the job (it was the year before an election year) so he was surprised when Carter picked him. So in that sense, Carter played a key role in killing the 70s inflation (which had been a problem even prior to Carter being elected - Remember Ford's WIN - Whip Inflation Now - buttons?) In the end, Volcker did what he said he was going to do. 10 year treasury rates hit ~15%. The economy swooned and it was a big factor in Carter not winning re-election, but that ended up killing the 70s inflation. He had the guts to pick Volcker even though it would not be good for him politically, but he knew that it would be the best choice for the economy in the longrun.
Also in regards to inflation, it should be remembered that Carter was a fiscal conservative trying to reign in spending, but his own party faught him on this. It's why Ted Kennedy primaried him in the 1980 Democratic primaries: he considered Carter to be too much of a tightwad.
Cute but I'll go with option 2. He "sounded the alarm" to raise demand and price.
Why do you give merit to "members of both parties" opinion in fields of science? Said members choose to whom to listen and whom to ignore according to their agenda. History showed us decades upon decades of corrupt leadership that blatantly lie to their people. And you're here reciting some rehashed propaganda?
C'mon, not everyone has the same motives that you do.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_Unit...
(Note: when he left office Carter had a negative net worth because the blind trust he put his peanut farm in had been mismanaged. He and Rosalynn worked their way out of debt by writing books - about 30 of them.)
Syriana [1] is a pretty good example of the popular zeitgeist as late as its release in 2005. And its portrait of how lobbyism works, how nullified anti-trust was becoming in late Greenspan era, how un-winnable Middle East adventurism was going to play out are all still watching today [2] if you swap the worst of finance and the worst of tech in (neither of energy, tech, or finance are all bad even at the level of individual companies: a few bad apples as usual spoil the bunch in a fractal way).
We’re stuck with policies and capture from the pre-shale era because capture is a wratchet (which should be delivered over a Littlefinger monologue and a montage megacap CEOs chuckling over wrist slap fines at the Battery and SoHo House).
Carter was a bad leader, though I’ve heard from regular people alive then that it was his wimp out on the Iran hostage crisis and the fiasco with the chopper rescue (Eagle Claw maybe? Desert Claw?) that sealed the deal on the Reagan era and the disastrous consequences of that we still live with today. cough Summers cough what was I saying?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syriana
[2] https://youtu.be/apM0d3M-sps?si=Ip7P2FD9s15B47HD
Not disagreeing about Carter, but weirdly Nixon was perhaps just as concerned about the environment.
It makes me think it was more of the Zeitgeist of the time — just as Star Wars, Ronald Reagan and wearing your patriotism on your sleeve became the Zeitgeist after.
Don't believe the hype. There were bombings and assassinations in the 60s.
Partisanship has increased in recent memory but we don't come close to replicating the division caused by the ripples of the red scare, a draft for the vietnam war and a burgeoning and sometimes violent civil rights movement.
These days, people talk the talk but they fail to walk the walk like they did then.
That may be because there are no longer large numbers of people protesting the same thing. Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter never got organized enough to push through a political agenda. Q-Anon was a hoax. The GOP, having won on guns and abortion, now lacks a coherent issue. Organized labor, once very powerful, isn't organized enough any more to push hard for anything. Nobody has enough mass to form a mass movement.
I really don't think this is substantially true. I think we're about as divided as we were then.
Another example would be the ozone layer: When it became clear in the 70s that CFCs were destroying the ozone layer we were able to make changes to stop that from happening over the course of a decade. Can't imagine us being able to do something like that now.
I agree, now that "corporations are people" in the US it's hard to imagine being able to successfully battle them and force large-scale, cross-industry environmental-health measures to be taken. That is, unless it so happens that such measures maximize short-term profits in some way.
That's pretty fucking divided.
That's what POC stands for. It includes blacks, hispanics and native Americans - all of those groups were/are impacted by white supremacy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26212975
3 years ago | 60 comments
Make no mistake, I was blown away when "Star Wars" came out like everyone else, but damn, it killed what had been a delicate and thoughtful genre of Hollywood.
Robert Wise’s 1979 “Star Trek” is an interesting and unique transitional case because it retains the 2001-inspired ponderous abstract storytelling but got a Star Wars level budget. Personally I love it for that, but I know most people disagree.
(Speaking of Wise, his “Andromeda Strain” is an absolute 1970s sci-fi gem.)
Well said. SF was just growing up and maturing into something important and worth having, and then that stupid fairy-tale-in-space came along and blew it all to hell. I still resent it for that.
Me too. I still to this day have an original theater poster from it hanging in my office, next to my Collossus The Forbin Project one.
I do remember as a kid being very confused when the forest ships from the movie showed up in the fleet of ships following the Battlestar Galactica.
I had no idea what I had watched but I remember this show about these people who are stuck inside a mall and can never go outside ever. It really affected me incredibly deeply and filled me with melancholy whenever I thought about it.
Finally in College I was renting old sci-fi and watching it, and as I was watching Logans Run I suddenly realized that it was the show I had seen as a child about the people who couldn't go outside.
A lot of 70s dystopian sci-fi hits pretty hard to be honest. Two more that come off as incredibly prescient are The Network (about a media company that will do anything for viewership) and THX1138 (about people who take drugs to control all their emotions, confess their sins to chatbots, and masturbate to porn every night).
Woah. Prescient.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Boy_and_His_Dog
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_Ellison
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_on_the_Edge_of_Foreve...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...
Same here, a very enduring memory. Although I had largely forgotten about it until I heard a song (well, some sort of psychill instrumental I guess) by Carbon Based Lifeforms, named Photosynthesis, that samples a couple of lines from this movie: https://youtu.be/KQE29az48gM?si=9q3aVxcvV7TLxBa4&t=770
For those who haven't seen the movie, here's a 16 sec non-spoiler clip that gives a little context to the lines in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6Xhzo6VAWg
Glad this thread motivated me to finally write down the movie titles.
Neither one's wikipedia article makes any mention of the other.
Did I miss something?
"The second-place winner of that 1946 contest? Rachel Carson."
So there's a hint that the protagonist of Silent Running had actually read Carson's Silent Spring!
> "There are a lot of climate crisis stories in modern sci fi, but a great many of them focus, intentionally or not, on the natural world’s utility to humans: we must preserve it or else we doom ourselves. Silent Running argues that we should preserve the natural world even if we can live without it, even if it serves no purpose in feeding the hungry or curing the ill, even if we can find a way to get along just fine."
If the idea of the importance of preservation of the natural world were much more widespread, humanity would be in a very different situation now. Dern's character's argument in the movie is just as relevant today, and the general answer today remains the same: the natural world is a secondary concern compared to humanity's unconstrained and unthinking growth.
Climate change is something to worry about constructively, but many of its worst consequences still exist only as predictive models no matter how much many here would like to twist otherwise and by no objective, reasoned measure are we living in an ecological hell that's in any way worse than it was in the 70s, never mind in the fantasy future worlds predicted by literature and film from that era. If anything, rivers, oceans and other landscapes are now cleaner and greener in many places than they were several decades ago.
I know that a bit of optimism isn't fashionable among a certain segment of the population, but it's if anything at least more realistic and accurate than the ridiculous notion of calling Silent Running prescient.
Fashionable nihilism about the world via contrived comparisons may be fun for dramatic dinner party conversation, but as an objective means of analyzing the world, it's mostly crap.
There's a bit of a y2k issue here: things have got a lot better because a lot of work has been done. But getting the work done required political action, which required scare stories.
Sometimes that device gets overdone: 2004 Battlestar Galactica felt to me carrying much of 9/11 background.
Silent Running is far from alone in the pessimist outlook. It's funny that, living in a civilization so much indebted to technology, the stories that we keep telling ourselves about it are so negative.
We've accepted that as a given. I recently enjoyed a lot Altered Carbon, that has as a premise a technology that provides immortality for the masses. Well, guess what: that good guys are trying to destroy it. Because reasons.
Also the cities seem like a shithole, not sure why.
I really recommend you give the trilogy of books in which that story happens a try. They go into a lot more detail about how the Protectorate (all the worlds colonized by Earth's UN government) is and delve a lot into the practical economic details of different characters lives. This includes minor characters. I'm not sure how badly the TV series mangled the essential backstory and plot of the books, since I disliked it nearly from the start, but in the books, nobody is opposed to immortality for the masses and though there are a lot of grim details about life in that future, for most people it's described as being more or less decent. The governments of the different worlds offer social welfare, economic freedom, religious freedom and so forth. There are economic booms and busts but overall life isn't absolutely shitty. People also generally get sleeve insurance (something like health insurance but for having a new body on standby), nanotechnology to conserve health from birth in babies and so forth.
In many ways it's like a futuristic version of life for many in the developed world today, except that governments in the books tend to be self serving, often corrupt oligarchies and the justice systems are often draconian and corrupt too... Oh wait.
Y'know what else is mostly crap? Forgetting that things changec because of projected problems like this. Go look at any movie from the late 1960s showing the LA skyline and just look at the smog. Car manufacturers would never have attended to that problem without being forced to by publically popular legislation. There are many other examples here that have avoided "ecological hell" and post-facto "well, nothing bad happened" analyses are mostly crap because something did happen, except it gets conveniently forgotten by a culture that has the memory of a goldfish.
The Global Living Planet Index graph shows a significant decline in the population abundance of vertebrate species from 1970 to the present, indicating a substantial loss in global biodiversity.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-living-planet-inde...