Mother Earth News - Mother Earth News 1971

A SHORT MESSAGE ABOUT DDT.. one brown pelican hatched in california this year.

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.

THEREFORE:

The individual must acquire a new sensation of himself-not as a skin-bounded person threatened by the rest of the world-but as a localized action of the entire universe, inseparable from every other biological, geological, and astronomical process.

There must be a World Ecology Year in 1972 (at the very latest) to divert the attention of all nations and peoples from their trivial quarrels to the overwhelming and centrally important problem of mans relation to his physical environment.

Many bridges are being built toward this MUST by 1972, including:

The Swedish Delegation to the United Nations (825 Third Avenue, New York, N.Y.) which has already taken the preliminary steps for this action under the auspices of the U. N.

The Growth Centers of North America (some 90 independent organizations involved in the Human Potential-Humanistic movement) would like to invite a large number of ecologically concerned leaders in science, philosophy, sociology, and other disciplines to spend from 6 to 12 months in 1972 as guests of these Centers to conduct seminars and lectures to determine action on these problems.

Many other individuals and groups unknown to us are concerned with the ecological problem, and we invite them to get in touch with their nearest Growth Center, with the Swedish Delegation, or with the Esalen Institute.

This manifesto is issued at the request of the Growth Centers of North America, at a meeting held, in San Francisco in July 1969.

Richard Farson
Michael Murphy
Robert B. Shapiro
Alan Watts

ILLUSTRATION: MOTHER EARTH NEWS STAFF

Our wildlife is one of the most important gifts on this planet and we must take care to preserve it.

The number of adult citizens, students and organizations that are today criticizing our Western way of life, particularly the U.S.A. mode of life, is rapidly increasing. The system -as it has come to be called-is rejected by such groups as the Hippies, Beats and youthful expatriates that choose flight without remedy. The system is rejected with some political savvy by most student groups that one would be tempted to lump together under the catch-all rubric of The New Left. It is rejected by a composite of intellectually gifted, knowledgeable and socially concerned scholars, some of which are associated with such periodicals as Dissent and Liberation . It is scorned in its own economic terms by Robert Theobald, Ben Seligman and other professional economists: by scholarly social critics, like Michael Harrington and Paul Goodman; or by historians like H. Stuart Hughes and Staughton Lynd. And almost all who repudiate the system are disgusted with its crass materialism, outraged over its moral indifference and overwhelmed with the myopic and immature uses to which money and leisure are put by those who have both.

There is little doubt that ours is a sick society, if we examine the themes most Americans live by. Nor is there any way of changing the system by violent revolution. In the industrially advanced countries of the West, revolution has almost become a romantic notion. The institutions and processes of the system; that is, its components, are too deeply interdependent for revolution in the classical sense to have any relevance. The system can be changed rapidly and effectively, of course, by such imaginative measures as Waskow 1 has described. It can be changed piecemeal-with what results remain to be seen-by quasi-Establishment intellectuals such as Moynihan and Keyserling, if their ideas are given a proper tryout. But most reformist proposals are too moderate and slow to produce radical change or dislocations.

While it is difficult to change the system drastically, it is not difficult to swim against the stream of its prevailing ideas. In a sense this was done by Stuart Hughes. 2 Individuals can develop novel ideas which, once diffused to others, create nodes of spiritual resistance to the prevailing themes of our culture. Groups can form which experiment with new modes of communal life-developing social styles that give the lie to the alleged necessity of our suburban nightmares or the civic spoliation caused by realtors, organizations can expose various types of social pathologies produced by industrial shortsightedness and by the disastrous domination of what Veblen and Simmel have called pecuniary canons of judgment. Some groups may choose to educate the public about the poisons in our food or the pollution of our air and water.

Still other groups may try to awaken citizens to a sense of the possibilities for personal development, self-actualization and social improvement. Some groups seek to do this in religious terms which are to be expressed in action. Others seek the same objectives in purely secular terms that arouse our often latent sense of justice. Books are written to open the eyes of the social zombies of our time and prompt many of the living dead to change their way of life. Periodicals are published which penetrate more deeply into the causes of many of our social pathologies and much of our spiritual malaise.