If 1960's Environmentalists Had Acted NOT Just Debated/Got High What Would it Be Like Now?

Question

Any views? Would it have made a difference to the way we live now if they had acted instead of debated and got high?
What about Global Warming?

Answer 1

Actually the environmentalists of the 1960's did act.

The environmental movement that we have today was built by the environmentalists of the 1960's. I was part of that group back in the 1960's. Incidentally we did not sit around debating and getting high.

The big problem as I saw it then and I still see today is the need for the willingness to take the most effective action, not necessarily the action that makes people feel good.

One of the areas where we need improvement is concentrating our effort on those activities that will get us the greatest return.

For example, much of the micromanaging of people's lives came out of the 1960's. At that time it was thought that it would be easier to change the way that individuals behave rather than implement legislation that would make a difference.

An example of that is the use of coal for electric power generation. It was thought that if people would just conserve electric power that would reduce the use of coal. Unfortunately the results have been marginal at best.

If the same amount of effort to get people to use less electricity had been used to ban the use of coal for the generation of electricity we probably would have succeeded and the results would have been much greater than the results that we achieved from micromanaging the behavior of millions of people.

We see the effects of the backlash right here in this site in Yahoo Answers. People who normally would be supporters of the effort to ban coal instead are arguing over small issues such as whether we shoud ban SUV's, and who is the most ideologically pure. We have been bogged down with these types of arguments for the past 40 years.

If instead we had focused our efforts to get the use of coal banned and not permitted ourselves to get sidetracked by all of the minutiae we would have succeeded at getting the use of coal banned and the results for the environment would have been far greater than what we have achieved to date..

Also, we found that micromanaging the behvior of millions of people creates a backlash that absorbs an enormous amount of time, energy, and resources that could have been used more productively. We see the effects of that backlash here on this site on a regular basis.

The problem was not that the environmentalists did not act. The problem is one that is still true today and that is the environmental movement does not take the most effective action to solve the problem and often gets bogged down in minutiae.

Answer 2

Go back and look at environmental history for the decade. Much our our current policy and law was first created that decade. It made a huge difference, and the United States is a better nation as a result. A brief timeline below:

1966: National Wildlife Refuge System Act
1968 National Trails Systems Act
Wild and Scenic Rivers Act
1969 National Environmental Powers Act

And of course Earth Day in 1970 was proposed and planned during the '60's. Rachel Carson's book and other doings opened the floodgates and got people off their tooshes. So while some hippies may have been indulging, there was a lot going on that made a huge difference in how our country's lands and waters were managed.

Answer 3

Many scientists tried to bring people's attention to environmental degradation, that's why we have the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act, and the Environmental Protection Agency among others, but people kind of forgot about it in the 80"s when they got more concerned with making money and the business community; especially the oil power generating and automotive industries made a full court press to water down regulations and claimed they cost to much, well we'll see how much it ends up costing now.

Answer 4

we'd be worse off.

late 60's and 70's the rage was global cooling.

we had "irrefutable data for the last 30 years, the earth was cooling because of man"
famine, death, parts of the earth uninhabitable by man, all by the year 2000.


funny these same thing are going to happen with global warming. and we have "irrefutable data too"

overpopulation by the 90's. famine, disease, death. no more oil.

research this stuff.

it's the same old story, just updated.

but the important thing is NOT ONE prediction has came true in the last 40 years.