Earth Days Page #2

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when I was up at Stanford,

they had to close down

high school baseball games

because the air had grown

so smoggy

as a result of the automobiles

and the vanishing

of the great electric trains.

What happened to Los Angeles

in my lifetime

was that it became

one huge suburb.

Ecology means

the study of organisms

in combination

with their environments.

We take groups of organisms,

put them in an environment,

and try and understand

what's happening.

My original interest

in human population developed

when I was an undergraduate

at Penn in the '50s.

As a biologist,

the thing that I saw first was

when I was in high school,

they were doing so much building

of subdivisions

for more and more people

in New Jersey

and spraying so much DDT around

that the butterflies

I was interested in studying

were disappearing.

That tied very directly

to population,

as do almost all of our other

environmental problems.

I was born

into a papermaking family,

so my youth was surrounded

by the felling of trees

and by paper mills

that produced vast quantities

of uncontrolled sulfur dioxide

and hydrogen sulfide.

I think I probably have a bit

of diminished lung capacity

that grew out

of breathing all of that acid

for all of those years.

There's probably some

Freudian rebellion

against my father

that was part of it.

So I was intensely aware

that there were these

destructive things going on

to the land around me.

But I guess as I was growing up,

it wasn't something

that I thought of

as... as a question.

I mean, this was just progress.

There is something

that's much more insidious

with things

that are not so visible

and nevertheless

have dramatic impacts.

Like nuclear fallout

from atmospheric nuclear tests.

When I was born,

Strontium-90 didn't exist.

By the time I was a teenager,

every living creature

on the planet had Strontium-90

in its bones or its shells.

That's a fairly

profound change...

...and we'd done it.

It felt to me

like the preciousness of life

was imperiled.

Subconsciously,

I may have understood

that my way of life, you know,

the sort of middle class

American way of life,

was imperiled.

I couldn't have

articulated it then

'cause I didn't understand

all the connections.

Bear in mind that,

as a child, I was,

you know, trained

to hide under my desk

in the event

of a nuclear explosion.

Living with the possibility

of the bomb

is foundational to this idea

that human extinction has been

put within human grasp.

The mushroom cloud

was the icon of my generation.

That image was

in every classroom

I went to as a child.

It was the epitome

of human creation and creativity

to have developed this

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