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Lines and Circles: Temporality in the 1970s American Environmental Imagination

by

Sarah Cooperman

Nicolas Howe, Advisor

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Environmental Studies

WILLIAMS COLLEGE

Williamstown, Massachusetts

May 10, 2017 Cooperman 2

Cooperman 3

Acknowledgements

I would like to sincerely thank Professor Nicolas Howe for his advice, kindness, and guidance over the past year and a half. I shot him an email out of the blue last February asking if he would mind meeting with me about a potential thesis topic, and he quickly agreed to be my advisor despite never having had me in a course before at Williams. This project has been a challenging, interesting, exhausting, and exciting experience, and none of it would have been possible without Professor Howe. I feel supremely grateful for his pep talks and his warm support through every one of my “ah- hah!” and “oh no!” moments. Thank you, Professor Howe, for all you have done and continue to do for your students. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have had you as a mentor.

I also would like to thank Professor Les Beldo for being my second thesis reader. I think I scared Professor Beldo a bit when I walked into the first class he taught at Williams (ENVI 260 – The Whale) this fall and nearly started crying about how much I love whales. He welcomed my enthusiasm and encouraged me to think critically about my lifelong perceptions of whales. He luckily agreed to be my second thesis reader, and his advice was incredibly insightful, thoughtful, and beyond helpful. Thank you, Professor Beldo! I look forward to many future conversations about whales and other creatures.

My parents, Mary and Jonathan Cooperman, probably have no idea what my thesis is about (and neither do I, really), but they encouraged me throughout this year to work hard and invest my time in what I am passionate about. Ultimately, they reminded me, as they always have, that trying my best is what matters above all. It isn’t a cliché if your parents say it, right?

I could not have finished this project without Becky McClements’ friendship and support. Whether it was offering to read through trickier sections of my project or heading off campus with me to find new spots to write in (or adventure in), Becky was there for me every step of the way this year. I am beyond proud of her thesis project and am constantly inspired by her passion for those around her – and for the future of our food system!

Thank you to the Williams College Center for Environmental Studies for providing me with the funding to spend last summer beginning this research project on campus. The CES has been a crucial aspect of my Williams experience. I would especially like to thank Environmental Studies faculty members Henry Art, Pia Kohler, and Sarah Gardner for their mentorship in and out of the classroom over the past four years.

Lastly, I would like to thank the staff members at the Dunkin’ Donuts Williamstown store for powering me through this year with their kindness and deliciously-prepared, highly caffeinated drinks. Some days felt like the only people I interacted with were Barry Commoner and Paul Ehrlich, so thank you Ammie, Dave, Phil, Nadia, Rick, Linda and Sabrina for your enthusiasm! Cooperman 4

Cooperman 5

Table of Contents

Introduction ------6

Chapter 1: Ehrlich’s Bombs and Butterflies ------17

Chapter 2: Paul the Prophet ------38

Chapter 3: The Commoner Calm ------58

Chapter 4: Closing the Circle ------79

Conclusion ------102

Bibliography ------116

Cooperman 6

Introduction

In December of 1970, ecologist Barry Commoner organized a panel about population growth at the annual meeting of the American Association for the

Advancement of Science. He invited fellow ecologist and famed population control advocate Dr. Paul Ehrlich to participate in the hopes of having a civil discussion about the realities of overpopulation, but Commoner doubted Ehrlich’s insistence on population as the true root of the growing ecological crisis. Instead, he believed flawed technology and social inequality to be the underlying causes of environmental degradation. The conversation became heated. At one point, Commoner shot across the table, “Saying that none of our pollution problems can be solved without getting at population first is a copout of the worst kind.”1

Their seemingly irreconcilable arguments reached a point in the next few years where demographer Ansley Coale remarked that the “ideological commitments on both sides” were “obscuring the scientific questions.”2 A 1972 piece for Science echoed this:

“When you’re playing bridge and your opponent’s playing poker, it’s hard to agree on the rules.”3

Ehrlich vs. Commoner: The Basics

Ehrlich and Commoner arrived at a time when Americans were becoming increasingly aware of the ecological crisis in their midst. Following the end of World

1 “Environment: A Clash of Gloomy Prophets,” TIME Magazine, January 11, 1971, web, accessed April 11, 2017. 2 Ibid. 3 Constance Holden, “Ehrlich versus Commoner: An Environmental Fallout,” Science 21 (1972), 247, doi: 10.1126/science.177.4045.245. Cooperman 7

War II, the United States ushered in a widespread period of economic prosperity, resource consumption, and technological optimism. But these did not come without a cost. In 1948, the small mill town of Donora, Pennsylvania woke up to a thick layer of yellow smog which would kill twenty Donorans and sicken half the town. The zinc plant in Donora refused to stop churning out their product.4 Rachel Carson then published

Silent Spring in 1962, using data from the previous decade to describe the perilous impacts of insecticides like DDT on our planet’s birds, ecosystems, and potentially humans. In 1969, Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River in Ohio was so polluted from decades of industrial waste that it caught on fire. If there was something Americans could agree on, it was that we were in trouble – and we were causing the trouble. But how?

Ehrlich and Commoner both claimed to know the reason for our crisis and the path to survival, but each offered very conflicting theories about what needed to be addressed. Perhaps the best summary of their conflict was one that Paul Ehrlich created himself, the I=PAT equation. Written with his physicist co-writer John Holdren as a part of a critique of Barry Commoner’s 1971 The Closing Circle, the equation was as follows:

Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology5

Each thinker agreed that these three trends – population growth, affluence growth (the per capita consumption of goods and services), and an increase in faulty technology usage – contributed to environmental impact. However, Ehrlich and Holdren argued that

4 Ann Murray, “Smog Deaths in 1948 Led to Clean Air Laws,” NPR, April 22, 2009, web, accessed May 8, 2017. 5 Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren, “Critique: One Dimensional Ecology,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 5 (1972), 20. Cooperman 8 population was by far the biggest factor. Commoner, on the other hand, argued that “the largest contribution to the postwar increase in pollutant emissions” was made “by the technology factor” of the equation.6 It was a simple premise made even easier to understand through I=PAT. Were we supposed to blame people, money, or technology?

As a population control advocate, Paul Ehrlich concerned himself primarily with the limits of our planet and our finite resources. A Neo-Malthusian who revived eighteenth-century philosopher Thomas Malthus’ arguments that humans were quickly outnumbering our resources, Ehrlich warned of famished, war-torn doomscapes to come if humans did not act immediately to curb population growth. The environmental crisis was a mathematical issue to Ehrlich even beyond I=PAT. Humans could reduce birth rates, or the death rates would naturally increase from war, famine, and disease. The choice was up to us.

Commoner, on the other hand, stayed away from Ehrlich’s obsession with resources. He was far more concerned with the “T” of I=PAT, believing that it was the way that affluent people abused modern technologies that got us into the ecological mess of the 1970s. The number of people on the planet did not matter nearly as much as how much affluent, technology-abusing countries polluted compared to the developing countries Ehrlich deemed as overpopulated.

Each had plenty to say about the other’s perspective, and none of it was very kind.

In May of 1972’s edition of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Ehrlich and Holdren critiqued The Closing Circle for its “seductive,” simple argument that industrialized societies were misusing technology, condemning the earth and its people to suffer in the

6 Barry Commoner, “Response,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 5 (1972), 44. Cooperman 9 process.7 They accused Commoner of having a “one-dimensional,” “optimistic” outlook.

They implied his incompetence as a moral leader by exclaiming how, if a leaking ship were tied up to a dock and passengers were “still swarming up the gangplank, a competent captain would keep any more from boarding while he manned the pumps and attempted to repair the leak.”8 Commoner responded in the same issue of Bulletin, calling

Ehrlich’s and John Holdren’s condemnations of his work an irrelevant, unproductive contribution to “the outlook of the concerned citizen” who wanted to know “how to act to resolve the environmental crisis.” 9 Commoner reflected on his longstanding disagreements with Ehrlich for wanting to discuss the “relative weight” of “all the factors” contributing to the origins of our ecological woes (not just overpopulation).10

Their arguments became personal. A 1972 Science article commented that the two authors had been “attacking one another’s views with growing signs of irritation and mutual disaffection.”11 Ehrlich’s assistant remarked that their feud had reached the point where each ecologist was “spending valuable time figuring out ways to embarrass the other.”12 Ehrlich offered to “bury the hatchet” with Commoner in 1972 while giving a public presentation, but Commoner refused.13 Commoner retorted, “If he wants to bury his hatchet, fine. I have no hatchet to bury; my task is to discuss the issues.”14 But they never attempted to reconcile their “issues.”

7 Ehrlich and Holdren, “Critique,” 16. 8 Ibid., 27. 9 Barry Commoner, “Response,” 17. 10 Ibid. 11 Holden, “Ehrlich versus Commoner,” 245. 12 Ibid. 13 “Ehrlich offers Commoner a Truce,” New Scientist 55, no. 805 (1972), 159. 14 Holden, “Ehrlich versus Commoner,” 246. Cooperman 10

Beyond I=PAT

Why did Barry Commoner and Paul Ehrlich clash so fiercely over such seemingly inoffensive variables, I, P, A, and T? This was the question I continually returned to while researching environmental discourse in the 1970s. Far more than just a mathematical equation was at stake in the debate between Commoner and Ehrlich, and the way each thinker understood I=PAT suggested conflicting spatial assumptions of the global environmental crisis. Commoner emphasized Affluence and Technology of

I=PAT, and in doing so, he represented a view that the planet’s ecological crisis was a symptom of an industrializing world faced with increasing income disparity.

Impoverished nations were left with the burden of environmental pollution caused by a few rich countries. On the other hand, Ehrlich’s emphasis on Population suggested a world where the overpopulating poor of the Global South were trampling over the civilized Anglo-American North, demanding resources that did not exist. I=PAT is a useful metaphor for understanding the basic geographic assumptions influencing this debate, but it does not suggest the significant differences in temporal imagination at play that are often overlooked by environmental historians and ecocritics.

Ehrlich once said, “One of the things that people don’t understand is that timing to an ecologist is very, very different from timing to an average person.” 15 He suggested that ecologists could look at long-term trends and understand the broader scope of environmental degradation outside the current moment. However, timing was very different between these two ecologists. I argue that temporality played just as much of a

15 The New York Times, “The Population Bomb? | The Population Bomb | The New York Times,” YouTube video, 7:25, filmed May 2015, uploaded June 4, 2015.

Cooperman 11 role in the vehement disagreement between Barry Commoner and Paul Ehrlich as their spatial disagreements, and this temporal divide paralleled a larger clash growing in

America’s religious landscape in the 1960s and 1970s. While fundamentalist Christianity was gaining popularity and normalizing apocalypticism for a mainstream American audience, many burgeoning anti-Christian countercultural religions advocated for a mystical and cyclical understanding of a Planet Earth without an expiration date. My argument is not that Ehrlich and Commoner were each secretly deeply religious men aiming to shroud their spiritual beliefs in scientific theory. Rather, I point out parallels between their perspectives and the rhetoric of these dominating religious trends to tease apart why two middle-aged scientists were able to captivate the public right when the modern American environmental movement was beginning.

While Paul Ehrlich did not dwell on the beginning of time so much, his most popular texts rested on the expectation of the end of time to come. His works like 1968’s

The Population Bomb and 1971’s How To Be a Survivor described worlds that were hurtling towards the inevitable end as humans had already reached “beyond that point” of no return. 16 He projected that “self-extermination” was inevitable if we continued populating the planet at current rates.17 Time was a finite resource with a knowable and looming end date, an understanding that allowed Ehrlich to describe the apocalypse with such confidence.

Commoner, however, invoked a cyclical conception of time. He described the

“endless cycles” of Earth’s ecosystems as self-reliant processes. Humans were inherently part of these ecosystems, but Commoner explained that human technologies put these

16 Ehrlich, TBH, 18. 17 Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 69. Cooperman 12 perfectly-balanced cycles at risk.18 Without humans, the planet would persist eternally in the same ecological processes that had sustained it for billions of years. The planet had no expiration date.

Nineteenth Century Building Blocks

Commoner and Ehrlich were not the first environmentalists to invoke different understandings of time. In the mid-nineteenth century, Henry David Thoreau and George

Perkins Marsh raised similar temporal perspectives to the ones that Ehrlich and

Commoner would bring to battle in the 1970s.19

Thoreau was appalled by how industrialization was ruining his once beloved pastoral Massachusetts hometown. He argued that humans must reconnect with the natural world to understand how to restore our balance with it, and he took his own advice. Thoreau enjoyed walking in the woods and writing down his personal revelations, leaving Walden behind in 1854 as the most famous piece of his lasting legacy. In

Walden, Thoreau echoed many of Commoner’s musings on environmental cyclicality by

“re-learning to identify himself with the rhythms of nature.”20 Walden condensed two years of journaling into one narrative year to match a symbolic cycling of seasons with

18 Commoner, untitled lecture, Berkeley, March 15, 1973 19 George Perkins Marsh and Henry David Thoreau did not directly interact like Commoner and Ehrlich would in the mid- to late-twentieth century. Thoreau died before Perkins Marsh published his magnum opus, Man and Nature. Lawrence Buell notes in The Environmental Imagination that Thoreau could not have been aware of Marsh’s perspective, and it was unlikely that Marsh was “more than idly interested in Thoreau.” David Lowenthal writes in the Journal of Historical Geography, it is “always risky to box past tastes into present credos.” However, their differing perspectives on how to help the planet lurk in the much angrier debate to come in the 1970s. 20 Melvin E. Lyon, “Walden Pond as a Symbol,” PMLA 82, no. 2 (1967), 289. Cooperman 13 the narrative of his own spiritual rebirth.21 Thoreau suggested that Walden’s narrator was impervious to time.22

Diverging from the musings of Walden, Marsh predated Paul Ehrlich’s environmental apocalypticism when he wrote Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action in 1864. According to literary scholar Lawrence Buell,

Man and Nature represented “the first full-scale diagnosis of impending environmental disaster to be published in the English-speaking world.”23 Marsh had no lack of grim predictions for Americans. He wrote that “the Earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant, and another era of equal human crime and human improvidence…would reduce it to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the depravation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species.”24 Marsh approached America’s industrialization analytically and mathematically. We were dooming ourselves for the end of time. The environment was being polluted, and it needed a managerial “techno-fix” rather than a spiritual prescription for getting more in touch with nature.25

But Marsh pointed out something about their differing opinions that Commoner and Ehrlich never would. Marsh recognized that Thoreau was “an observer of organic

21 Ibid. 22 Richard Lebeaux, Thoreau’s Seasons (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 214. 23 Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 301. 24 George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (New York, 1864): 42-43. 25 David Lowenthal, “Nature and morality from George Perkins Marsh to the millennium,” Journal of Historical Geography 26 (2000), 12. Cooperman 14 nature, in the old religious sense.”26 Thoreau’s “old religious” attitudes refer to his animistic pagan tendencies to Romanticize the natural world around him as well as his prophetic voice and puritan asceticism. Whereas Judaism and Christianity historically had viewed time as a linear process with an end in store, Thoreau’s narrative of personal rebirth and environmental rejuvenation had more in common with the cylical conceptions of time attributed to so-called “Paganism” and Eastern faiths like Buddhism and

Hinduism.27

Temporality and Religion

In fact, we see these conflicting metaphors at work in the American imagination more often in religious traditions than in scientific ones. In most traditions of Judaism and Christianity, time is linear and finite. Human history has a definite God-given beginning and end laid out in the Bible, and human “time” is the space between the

26 Marsh, Man and Nature, 267 note 235; see page 12 of Lowenthal’s “Nature and morality from George Perkins Marsh to the Millenium” further discussion of Marsh’s generally favorable opinions of Thoreau. 27 “Paganism” and “Pagans” are both problematic terms. They were created by Christians living in the Roman Empire as a way to categorize non-Christians. Typically, these “Pagans” were from the countryside. In fact, pagan is probably to be understood as “country dweller.” According to George Chryssides in the Historical Dictionary of New Religious Movements, Paganism had “further dimensions of relating to agrarian interests, such as fertility and the cycles of the seasons.” But being a term created to describe outsiders, “Pagan” has been used in a derogatory way throughout history after the advent of Christianity. I use “Pagan” and “Paganism” in this essay because these terms were largely reclaimed by the countercultural religious movement in the 1970s. Practitioners like Tim Zell, founder of the Church of All Worlds in 1961, explicitly labeled themselves as Pagans or Neo-Pagans. Ultimately, I recognize that the label Pagan is an ill-defined, “fuzzy” term, as Christopher P. Jones explains in a 2012 article for Common Knowledge. It was “devised by an in-group to denote an out-group” when Christianity was the “default position of religious discourse,” but it has been reshaped and reclaimed by movements like Wiccanism, Druidism, and Goddess Worship in the past century. I recognize that “Pagan” is a pis aller, as Jones suggests, and I use the term consciously. Cooperman 15 beginning and end. Carl C.F. Henry described Christian time as ‘the divinely created sphere of God’s preserving and redemptive work, and the arena of man’s decision on the way to an eternal destiny.”28 Christianity views the human experience as a three-act play with birth, death, and ultimate immortality in heaven as the main events.29

Contrastingly, religions predating the advent of Christianity often view time as a continuous, cyclical drama. Religious traditions emphasizing cyclicality see time as a repeating series of natural cycles, where humans progress little but exist in a continuous series of repeating processes. Buddhism, for example, conceives of the world as Saṃsāra, a “suffering-laden cycle of life, death, and rebirth, without beginning or end.”30 Pagan societies have long emphasized their “close connection to seasonality and agricultural and human reproduction, and no real sense of…time depth.”31 Viewing time as linear is perceived as dangerous by Pagans because linearity belittles the complexities that have been at work in perfect, self-adjusting harmony for the entirety of the planet’s existence.

My analysis delves into the tension between these religious perspectives as they arise in Commoner and Ehrlich’s rhetoric. I devote two chapters in this essay to both men in order to analyze their individual environmental perspectives and then to point out parallels between the temporal symbolism at play in their rhetoric to the religious movements happening concurrently.

28 Everett F. Harrison, Geoffrey W. Bromiley, and Carl F. H. Henry, Baker’s Dictionary of Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Publishing Group, 1987) 524. 29 Marcus Bach, Major Religions of the World (Nashville: The Graded Press, 1959), 22. 30 Jeff Wilson, “Saṃsāra and Rebirth,” Oxford Bibliographies, last modified September 13, 2010, web, accessed May 7, 2017, doi: 10.1093/OBO/9780195393521-0141. 31 David Petts, Pagan and Christian: Religious Change in Early Medieval Europe (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 81. Cooperman 16

Chapter 1 focuses on the symbols of linearity in Paul Ehrlich’s texts and how he intersects with a history of Neo-Malthusian thought. Ehrlich uses frighteningly vivid depictions of an apocalyptic future to suggest that runing out of time – not just resources like food and water – is the most terrifying consequence of overpopulation. Chapter 2 expands on my analysis of the linear metaphors at play in Ehrlich’s works by drawing parallels between his rhetoric and the rhetoric of fundamentalist Christianity. Both

Ehrlich and fundamentalists use fear of the End Times to motivate their believers, and both imagine time as a series of predetermined steps in a single direction.

Chapter 3 explores the alternative to this linear perspective by analyzing the way

Barry Commoner emphasizes cyclicality. His rhetoric focuses on a wholly interconnected and personified Earth, thus stepping away from the apocalyptic implications of a finite understanding of time. In Chapter 4, I look at where cycles have been used as environmental symbols in non-Christian religious rhetoric before – including pseudo-

Pagan thinkers like Thoreau in the nineteenth century, but I focus even more on the countercultural nature religions at play in the 1970s when Commoner was writing.

This classic debate during the heyday of American environmentalism is ultimately not as purely secular as it might appear to be on the pages of academic journals or on stage at scientific conferences. Using deeply conflicting metaphors of religious temporality as a tool to compare Commoner and Ehrlich’s environmental perspectives, I push against a simplistic understanding of what we might ordinarily think about as just another stubborn, logical argument in environmentalism.

Cooperman 17

Chapter 1: Ehrlich’s Bombs and Butterflies

“Population growth will kill you stone cold dead.” – Paul Ehrlich32

On a February day in 1975, Paul Ehrlich sat down with Christine Russell of

BioScience magazine in his Stanford University office. Russell joked that Ehrlich had been “called a ‘pessimist,’ a ‘prophet of doom,’ and an ‘alarmist.’” She asked him what he would call himself. His response? “I’m a diagnostician.” He continued: “If I see doom coming, I say doom.”33

By 1975, Ehrlich had spent plenty of time dwelling on doom. His 1968 national bestseller The Population Bomb delivered a bleak story of an imperiled global future. In

The Population Bomb, he warns of unstoppable famines coming in the 1970s and said that “nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”34 He paints a world full of “death and misery” resulting from the “progressive deterioration of our environment.”35 To Ehrlich, the culprit was obvious: “too many people.” 36

In this chapter, I explore how Paul Ehrlich’s belief that time was finite contributed to and fortified his apocalyptic rhetoric. I begin by discussing how Ehrlich fixated on limits and symbolically framed time as a limited resource in The Population Bomb and

How To Be a Survivor. Other contemporary Neo-Malthusians like Garrett Hardin echoed

32 Clyde Haberman, “The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion,” The New York Times, May 31, 2015, web, accessed April 4, 2017. 33 Christine Russell and Paul Ehrlich, “Interview: Paul Ehrlich: Scientist as Social Prophet,” BioScience 25, no. 2 (1975): 79, accessed March 24, 2017, doi: 10.2307/1297107. 34 Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, prologue. 35 Ibid., 46. 36 Ibid., 67. Cooperman 18 this. Ehrlich did not fear the loss of resources, but rather, he feared that running out of resources would bring us to the inevitable end of human time. I then trace Ehrlich’s background and influences to a longer tradition of Neo-Malthusian apocalypticism which culminated in The Population Bomb. I conclude by drawing parallels between Ehrlich’s narrative and mid-twentieth century science fiction to suggest that ultimately, to Ehrlich, time was humanity’s enemy just as it was in some of the most popular fictional dystopian novels.

Ehrlich’s Lines and Limits

From where Ehrlich sat in Palo Alto, there simply were not enough resources on

Earth to sustain all of its people. His concerns brought national attention to Neo-

Malthusianism, a movement that brought Thomas Malthus’ eighteenth century warnings into the twentieth century. Malthus’ 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population argues that, while agriculture follows a linear geometric growth rate, the human population’s exponential growth rate will soon far surpass the planet’s resources. Only famine and war have the power to limit human population to a sustainable level for our agricultural capabilities.37 The Population Bomb as well as later texts like 1971’s How to Be A

Survivor (co-written with Richard Harriman) carry a signature Neo-Malthusian focus on limits. In The Population Bomb, Ehrlich argues that the earth can only handle so much pressure before it cracks, and we can not continue “beyond that point” when we reach it.38 To Ehrlich, we were fast approaching our tipping point.

37 Thomas Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population (London: J. Johnson, 1798), 11. 38 Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 19. Cooperman 19

Like Malthus, Ehrlich largely viewed and described human reproduction as a process in which purely mathematical principles determined what was to come. This perspective often manifested as condescension towards people in developing nations where population limits were being reached the fastest. The Population Bomb opens with a description of the crowded streets of Delhi, India, denigrating the city for its smell and

“ancient” technology. His entrance to the “crowded slum” area forces him to come face to face with people everywhere. This is a point he reinforces rhetorically by writing,

“People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming.

People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to busses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.” 39 Ehrlich later describes Indians as if they were wild animals themselves. He argues that if even America’s “relatively informed populace” struggles to understand population control techniques like sterilization, unintelligent Indians will need to simply be told what to do. In The Population Bomb, Ehrlich favors a policy of “sterilizing all

Indian males with three or more children,” and with the direct help of the U.S. government to provide “logistic support in the form of helicopters, vehicles, and surgical instruments” for vasectomies.40 He limits the human experience to the number of children a person has, using Indians as a racist example for uncontrolled “breeding” like lab rats.

We either control the birth rate, or the death rate controls us.

Ehrlich presents his arithmetical understanding of life and death through an overwhelmingly apocalyptic framework. He scoffs at the ridiculous and irrational prospect that moving to another planet could allow us to “escape from the laws of

39 Ibid., 15. 40 Ibid., 150-151. Cooperman 20 population growth” that have us hurtling toward a famished future.41 Ehrlich dramatized

Malthus’ gloomy approach to the planet, explaining that the “war, pestilence, and famine” to come are “three of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.” Ehrlich thought we were on the cusp of “self-extermination.”42 Americans were merely doomed to watch the globe finally fall around us with “tears streaming down our cheeks.” The inevitability of the end was not a belief so much as a fact to Ehrlich.

As a result, Ehrlich’s sheer confidence in our overpopulated planet’s doom made his grim prophecies all the more palpable. At the start of The Population Bomb, Ehrlich uses terms like “will” instead of “might” or “may” to describe future events. Ehrlich states very early on that “it is difficult to guess what the exact scale and consequences of the famines will be. But there will be famines.”43 He transitions from talking about what

“will” happen to describing future scenarios in the present tense in the same way one would talk about current events. Ehrlich goes so far as to quote Pope Pius XIII ten years in the future when Pius fictionally accuses the United States in 1979 of “‘eating meat while the hungry of the world lack bread.’” Meanwhile, Ehrlich projects, Americans in

1979 “are starving” and “cities are cycling regularly between riots and uneasy peace under martial law.”44 In his final chapter, “What if I’m Wrong?,” Ehrlich guards against possible doubt about his predictions. To do this, he invokes Pascal’s famous wager that we should “play it safe.” If Ehrlich is right, “we will save the world,” but if he is wrong,

“people will still be better fed, better housed, and happier thanks to our efforts.”45

41 Ibid., 21. 42 Ibid., 69. 43 Ibid., 36. 44 Ibid., 75. 45 Ibid., 198. Cooperman 21

Ehrlich’s focus on confidently describing the earth’s future – and more importantly, its end – depended upon a distinctly linear understanding of time. He closes The

Population Bomb by stating matter-of-fact that “more than half of the world is in misery right now,” which should be “enough to galvanize into action, regardless of the exact dimensions of the future disaster.”46 He frames current human suffering as tangible evidence for a greater trial of humanity to come in the future, so we have to act now.

Ehrlich’s apocalyptic approach creates urgency and doubt that the planet could possibly recover on its own without humans taking measures to curb population growth immediately. There is no planetary recovery or renewal – just an end.

The image that best represents this linear understanding of time is Spaceship

Earth, an ecological symbol Ehrlich and Harriman use to illustrate humanity’s shrinking resources in How to Be A Survivor. Spaceship Earth was gaining in popularity among economists concerned with limited resources in the 1960s because it implied that we

“travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves.”47

Ehrlich and Harriman describe a planet whose “overcrowded passengers” are hungry and dying thanks to “dwindling” resources and a lack of a backup plan.48 They write of

“tourist and steerage passengers” who live and die “mostly in misery, unable to get their fair share” of resources.49 They explain that we are “beyond the point where man might start over again, after a lapse of hundreds or thousands of years, to rebuild” our society.

Humans had pushed what might have once resembled an ecosystem beyond the point

46 Ibid. 47 Adlai Stevenson, Adlai Stevenson of the United Nations 1900-1965, edited by Albert Roland, Richard Wilson, and Michael Rahill (Manila: Free Asia Press, 1965), 224. 48 Paul Ehrlich and Richard L. Harriman, How to Be a Survivor (New York: Ballantine Books, 1971), 1. 49 Ibid. Cooperman 22 where it could “be restarted.”50 Spaceship Earth, in Ehrlich’s interpretation, hurtles through the galaxy in one direction: forward. As it travels along its axis, Spaceship

Earth’s resources decline with no source of replenishment or rejuvenation. Humans can only hope to extend our Spaceship’s voyage.51 The more optimistic moments of the text rely on a similarly linear understanding of time. Ehrlich and Harriman write, “one finds occasionally some small signs that the trend may be reversed.”52 Humans are stuck on this line in space. We may either reverse trends to extend our time left aboard, or we can continue hurtling forward towards the planet’s inevitable end. Time itself is framed as a resource aboard Spaceship Earth, and running out of it is the most terrifying consequence of all.

Ehrlich was still far from the only Neo-Malthusian relying on this kind of temporal symbolism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Garrett Hardin was a popular ecologist voice whose famed essay “The Tragedy of the Commons” was published in

Science in 1968, the same year as The Population Bomb. In true Neo-Malthusian fashion,

“The Tragedy of the Commons” argues that finite common resources will be drained if policies are not put in place to control public access.53 Invoking a mathematical approach to human reproduction, Hardin exclaims that “freedom to breed will bring ruin to all.”54

However, Hardin championed a different, equally bleak symbol for survival apart from

Spaceship Earth: the lifeboat. His essay describes a world where rich people float along in comfortable lifeboats while the poor of the world are in “much more crowded

50 Ibid., 11. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 138. 53 Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, no. 3859 (1968): 1247. 54 Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle (New York: Knopf, 1971), 6. Cooperman 23 lifeboats.”55 Hardin explains that the poor “continuously” fall out of their crowded boats, swimming alongside the rich boats and hoping to reap some benefits. He asks: “What should the passengers on a rich lifeboat do?”56 If the poor are allowed to fight their way aboard, chaos ensues. The boats sink. Hardin built on this metaphor in Psychology

Today’s essay, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor,” which states that the “less provident and able will multiply at the expense of the abler and more provident, bringing eventual ruin upon all.”57 He implies that people in rich countries are worth preserving and investing in as a “small safety factor” while allowing poor people to drown off the sides of the lifeboat. To those who question these ethics, Hardin states that his advice to the guilt-stricken would simply be to “yield your place [on the lifeboat] to others” and watch the needy person greedily snatch your spot.58 Time plays the same linear role in this metaphor as it does in Spaceship Earth. As the time spent in lifeboats increases, the desperation of those aboard increases with drastic consequences for the survival of those trying to stay afloat. A tiny lifeboat in a vast ocean or a single planet drifting through the gargantuan universe can only last so long before time runs out.

The Limits of Christianity

When Ehrlich and Hardin do (eventually) snap back from their apocalyptic future scenarios, it is mostly to condemn their audience for their bad behaviors. One of the worst behaviors to these two was practicing Christianity, and they were not the first to

55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 Garrett Hardin, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor,” Psychology Today (September 1974): 38. 58 Ibid., 41. Cooperman 24 voice this concern. In 1967, historian Lynn White Jr.’s influential “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” ran in Science magazine. The essay discusses how the Christian dogma of creation combined with the Western world’s post-Medieval industrialization has allowed humans to view nature’s existence solely for our own benefit. Our nature- abusing technologies and scientific achievements have convinced us that we are “superior to nature, contemptuous of it, willing to use it for our slightest whim.”59 White argues that Westernized Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has ever seen due to its insistence on God’s will that “man exploit nature for his proper ends.” He also claims that Christianity makes it possible to “exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects” in its ridding our culture of animism.60 Because the environmental crisis is fundamentally religious and rooted in “orthodox Christian arrogance” towards nature, White suggests that any solution must be religious but cannot share the same ideals of modern Christianity.61 White briefly acknowledges the globe’s current “population explosion” as an issue as well, brought on by a disdain for the limits of natural systems.62 Condemning Christianity was controversial but captivated thinkers like Ehrlich.

59 Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science 155, no. 3767 (1967): 1206. 60 White Jr., “The Historical Roots,” 1205. 61 Ibid., 1207. 62 White’s argument was extremely popular and controversial. It was reprinted in the Boyscout Handbook as well as included in publications by the Sierra Club, Time Magazine, and the New York Times. For further discussion on the legacy of White’s essay, see: Elspeth Whitney, “Christianity and the Changing Concepts of Nature: An Historical Perspective,” in Religion and the New Ecology, ed. David M. Lodge and Christopher Hamlin (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2006): 31. Cooperman 25

It was exactly this train of thought that Paul Ehrlich would expand on in The

Population Bomb.63 The problem for Ehrlich was not just “too many people,” but rather

“too many people” sharing the same “orthodox Christian arrogance.”64 At the end of The

Population Bomb, Ehrlich says White’s thesis “elegantly” describes how Christianity fails the environment in its belief that God “made a world for us to dominate and exploit.”65 Ehrlich argues that Christianity forces followers to please God through any means necessary, including “dominating nature, rather than living in harmony with it.”66

Christianity legitimizes every consumption pattern that Ehrlich believes landed us in this ecological mess in the first place. Agreeing with White, Ehrlich says in The Population

Bomb that “it is probably in vain” that so many people “look to science and technology” to solve the ecological crisis when changes in religious beliefs could be necessary.67

Ehrlich explains that the “much-despised ‘hippie movement’” might have the answer in its adoption of “religious ideas from the non-Christian east” that emphasize physical love and a “disdain for material wealth.” They may not “have the answer, but they may have an answer.”68

White’s influence continues to shine in Survivor, where Ehrlich and Harriman write that our environmental dilemma is an “unfortunate outgrowth of a Judeo-Christian heritage” while praising the non-Christian religious attitudes of pantheistic “Eastern and gentle Pacific cultures in which man lives (or lived) a leisurely life of harmony with

63 Ian Angus and Simon Butler, Too Many People? Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011): 8. 64 White, “The Historical Roots,” 1207. 65 Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 171. 66 Ibid., 170. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. Cooperman 26 nature” before Christianity corrupted these lifestyles.69 The authors even label those under the influence of the “Protestant ethic” as “victims.”70 Hardin similarly points blame at Christianity for legitimizing consumption beyond feasible mathematical limits. In

“Living on a Lifeboat,” Hardin says that we should reject our temptation to live by the

“Christian ideal of being ‘our brother’s keeper’” so we do not take 150 people into a lifeboat meant for 60 and drown in “complete catastrophe.” 71 To these thinkers,

Christianity represented a dogmatic symbolization of humanity’s obsession with exploiting Earth’s limited resources unchecked. Ironically, Christianity only drew us closer to that looming end date.

Before the Bomb - 1932-1968

Paul Ehrlich’s exposure to decades of growing Neo-Malthusian apocalypticism explained his development into the nation’s most popular ecological “diagnostician” in the 1960s. He was only a young boy when he began to notice something strange about the butterflies that he loved to chase around Philadelphia’s parks: they were disappearing.

In the 1930s, DDT was a common feature of the increasingly not-so-natural suburban world that many middle-class American children like Ehrlich were growing up in. This

69 Ehrlich and Harriman, How To Be a Survivor, 129; The term “Judeo-Christianity” is problematic. Former Massachusetts U.S. Representative Barney Frank once said, “I’ve never met a Judeo-Christian. What do they look like? What kind of card do you send them in December?” The earliest use of the term in American history dates back to the early 1800s when it was tied to converting Jews to Christianity, but it was popularized after the Holocaust. Similar to “Paganism,” “Judeo-Christianity” is a term largely invented by Christians to find a way to include “others” in a Christian-dominated society. Thus, I only use “Judeo-Christian” in this essay when directly quoting its use by thinkers like Ehrlich and Harriman. 70 Ibid., 137. 71 Hardin, “Living on a Lifeboat,” 562. Cooperman 27 deeply affected Ehrlich.72 Two decades before Rachel Carson would make DDT a public enemy, Ehrlich was catching on. How could humans have so great an impact on a creature as innocent as a butterfly?

This was a question Ehrlich strived to answer as a budding ecologist in the 1940s.

Ehrlich was 13 years old when World War II ended in 1945, ushering in a national sense of economic security and a safety net of peace. Fueled by pure optimism, millions of civilians began to turn their attention from nuclear bombs to nuclear families. Marriages and birth rates both reached historical highs and millions of families nestled into the suburbs. When his own family moved from urban Philadelphia to the suburb of

Maplewood, New Jersey in the early 1940s, Ehrlich’s fascination for the disappearing butterflies only increased. Ehrlich learned how to catch and preserve specimens at summer camp as a young teenager, and he loved collecting them in his backyard. At age fifteen, he began commuting to New York City to work for the butterfly curator at the

American Museum of Natural History who had no money to offer Ehrlich but paid him in colorful, unlabeled specimens. One year later, Ehrlich published his first scientific field notes in the Lepidopterist Society’s news publication after spending the summer examining the eye color of over four hundred specimens at his house. His mother would remark later that Ehrlich was “pretty much a loner. After all, he had a butterfly net and he was chasing butterflies, and people ridiculed him.” But Ehrlich did not mind – he became confident in his ability to understand the fascinating ways in which ecosystems worked

72 Paul Sabin, The Bet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 14. Cooperman 28 and enjoyed investigating the “beautiful” patterns in nature that many his age did not think twice about.73

Ehrlich’s concerns about his neighborhood’s butterfly populations reflected a growing concern about resource depletion within the national academic community.

Malthusian ideals were first given new life thanks to Fairfield Osborn, a geologist, and

William Vogt, an ecologist and ornithologist. In 1948, Osborn published Our Plundered

Planet and Vogt released Road to Survival, two books that burst onto the national stage.

Each became an international bestseller, with Our Plundered Planet being translated into thirteen languages and Vogt’s version being condensed into a piece for Reader’s

Digest.74 Road to Survival was particularly popular and, according to one estimate, it eventually reached up to thirty million pairs of American eyes and was the most popular environmental book until Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published in 1962.75 Both books were read by “literally millions,” according to a review in 1951, and these authors certainly “left their mark on the minds of many throughout the world.”76

One of those many readers was Ehrlich, who was just entering his freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania when these titles were published. His own butterfly research as a teenager helped him recognize that population was ecologically consequential and primed him for adopting Neo-Malthusianism. Ehrlich would later

73 Ibid., 14-15. 74 Pierre Desrochers and Christine Hoffbauer, “The Post War Intellectual Roots of the Population Bomb: Fairfield Osborn’s ‘Our Plundered Planet’ and William Vogt’s ‘Road to Survival’ in Retrospect,” The Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development 1, no. 3 (2009): 39. 75 Björn-Ola Linnér, The Return of Malthus: Environmentalism and Post-War Population Resource Crises (Isle of Harris: The White Horse Press, 2003), 37. 76 Erich Zimmerman, World Resources and Industries: A Functional Appraisal of the Availability of Agricultural and Industrial Materials (New York: Harper, 1951), 813- 814. Cooperman 29 describe how he “traced his own Malthusian beliefs to a lecture he heard Vogt give” when he was attending college.77 Osborn and Vogt each took a different approach to framing their arguments while exuding “Malthusian pessimism” by viewing population as a problem rather than a benefit to society. Both provided a simple description of the woes the planet was facing by pointing towards a critical lack of resource capital amidst a growing global population.78 Osborn argued that humanity had essentially “blindsided” itself by its own accomplishments to the point where it had ignored all of the negative impacts humanity had had on the environment.79 Vogt asserted that Europeans had been one of “the most destructive group of human beings” to have “ever raped the earth.”80 He also took a more aggressive stance on population control methods, praising disease- ridden mosquitos as “blessings” and an “asset” to poor countries facing resource scarcity.81 He argued against the United States providing aid of any kind, explaining that rich countries should not “subsidize the unchecked spawning” of citizens in poor countries like China and India.82 To Vogt, there was no “kindness in keeping people from dying from malaria so they could die more slowly of starvation.”83 Despite Vogt’s more charged (and racist) rhetoric, each author framed economic development and an increase in technological capacities as core problems in spurring a global resource crisis.

77 Andrew Jamison and Ron Eyerman, Seeds of the Sixties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994): 77. 78 Samuel P. Hays, “The Mythology of Conservation,” in Perspectives on Conservation ed. Henry Jarrett and John Galbraith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1958), 41-42. 79 Desrochers and Hoffbauer, “The Post War Intellectual Roots,” 44. 80 William Vogt, Road to Survival (New York: H. Wolff, 1948), 114. 81 Ibid., 28 and186. 82 Ibid., 77. 83 Ibid., 13. Cooperman 30

Ultimately, both argued that solutions to this must be government and industry-sponsored with an enthusiastic public working to make sure that “the job shall be done.”84

In the next decade, perhaps the most famous Neo-Malthusian text was Hugh

Everett Moore’s “The Population Bomb!” Moore was a prominent businessman who founded the Dixie Cup company, and as a staunch population control advocate, he also founded the Hugh Moore Fund for International Peace. This fund published Moore’s twenty-two page pamphlet in 1954, right as Ehrlich was working towards his masters degree in zoology at the University of Kansas. Describing how human populations were all in “acute peril,” Moore’s pamphlet suggested the answer was lowering the birth rate through contraceptives, voluntary sterilization, and abortions instead of waiting for an increased death rate to control human population growth.85

As Paul Ehrlich’s own career as a Stanford ecology professor (specializing in butterfly population distribution) was picking up in the early 1960s, Neo-Malthusianism was gaining momentum thanks to the Paddock brothers. William Paddock was an agronomist and plant pathologist, while Paul Paddock was a retired Foreign Service

Officer of the State Department with experience as a diplomat in developing countries like Russia and, in his own words, Communist China. 86 In 1967, they published

Famine—1975!. They painted dark predictions of an “inevitable” future marked by “the

Time of Famines” which, if Americans followed the Paddocks’ plan, could “be the

84 Fairfield Osborn, Our Plundered Planet (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1948), 200. 85Hugh Everett Moore, “The Population Bomb!,” The Hugh Everett Moore Fund for International Peace (1954), 9. 86 William and Paul Paddock, Famine—1975! (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967), ix. Cooperman 31

American twentieth-century dragon to slay.”87 The two brothers proposed a simple triage system that categorized developing nations as “Can’t-be-saved,” “Walking Wounded,” or

“Should Receive Food.” 88 Little about this plan was actually feasible and more importantly, this triage system was criticized for the same “contempt for human life” that

Vogt was criticized for just two decades before.89

In a world predating Lynn White Jr.’s essay, Neo-Malthusianism was not inherently anti-Christian. Famine—1975! mourned the decline of the “Protestant Ethic” in society, explaining that Americans had lost their “traditional Calvinistic belief in the rewards of hard work.” As a result, the Paddocks argued that the “fiber of the nation” would “become less hardy, less self-reliant.”90 Protestant values were framed as a part of the solution to overpopulation. Some members of the academic community reacted positively to this. Wilbur Bullock, a zoologist at the University of New Hampshire and a devout Baptist evangelical, reviewed Famine—1975! in the Journal of the American

Scientific Affiliation. Bullock stated that Christians must “plan to exercise our compassion in a concern for the feeding of the physical man as well as the spiritual man.”91 Bullock took the Paddocks’ message to heart, exclaiming to his readership that

“we as Christians have work to do.”92

87 William and Paul Paddock, Famine—1975! (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967), 9; 247. 88 Ibid., 206. 89 Desrochers and Hoffbauer, “The Post War Intellectual Roots,” 39. 90 William and Paul Paddock, Famine—1975!, 236. 91 Wilber L. Bullock, “JASA Book Reviews for December 1968,” Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation (1968): 237. 92 Ibid. Cooperman 32

By the 1960s, Ehrlich had grown from being one of the “impressionable young people” who came “under the influence” of Vogt and Osborn to a successful population biologist with multiple academic publications on butterfly evolution and population.93

The Population Bomb was a triumph of decades of Neo-Malthusian thought. After all,

Ehrlich would explain in 1975 that he “got interested in these problems originally” by reading Vogt and Osborn “back in the late 1940s.”94 Ehrlich was quite familiar with

Hugh Everett Moore’s famed pamphlet as well, perhaps most obviously from the simple fact that he used Moore’s popular title (with permission) for his own book. Additionally,

Ehrlich discussed the influence of Famine—1975! in The Population Bomb. Ehrlich praised the Paddocks, saying they “deserve immense credit for their courage and foresight in publishing Famine—1975!,” further calling it “one of the most important books of our age.”95 Some would soon say the same of Ehrlich’s book.

The influence and popularity of The Population Bomb cannot be understated. It was an instant bestseller that went on to sell some 2 million copies and was translated into multiple languages for an international audience.96 Many readers found Ehrlich’s arguments compelling – irresistible, even. In 1970 alone, Ehrlich gave 100 public lectures and appeared on two hundred radio and television shows.97 He catapulted from a biology professor to a household name. A 1971 New York Times round-up of ecological literature hailed The Population Bomb as “the outstanding account of the origin and

93 Allan Chase, The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism (New York: Knopf, 1977), 381. 94 Christine Russell, “Interview: Paul Ehrlich,” 77. 95 Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 161. 96 Paul and Anne Ehrlich, “The Population Bomb Revisited,” The Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development 1, no. 3 (2009): 63. 97 Sabin, The Bet, 12. Cooperman 33 effects of the human landslide” and that environmental events in the years since its publication had only been “unmistakable” examples of the “veiled and relentless working of our mighty fecundity” that Ehrlich warned of.98 Historian Michael Egan proclaimed

The Population Bomb to be the “loudest and most persuasive treatise on the ecological problems of human overpopulation” in history.99 What was so loud about it?

The Monster of Time

Ehrlich hit a panic button that Neo-Malthusian science fiction had already been pushing for the American public, and parallels between Ehrlich’s rhetoric and that of dystopian science fiction tales demonstrate that Ehrlich’s linear conception of time hammered home the terror of his arguments. Generally speaking, Neo-Malthusians spent far more time dwelling on what the future would look like as opposed to what could be done in the current moment to prevent that future. Ehrlich was commonly criticized by politicians and economists for not providing coherent, feasible strategies that would prevent the famished futures he described. As literary critic Ursula Heise wrote, Ehrlich intended for his reader to have the “visceral experience” of what were “otherwise abstract mathematical figures.”100 Ehrlich said he would not bore his audience with an “avalanche of statistics” in favor of creating a more elaborate narrative. His description of future scenarios as if they were present events, such as when he quoted the future Pope, made the traumatic scientific facts seem far more realistic and, as a result, scarier. The

98Richard J. Neuhaus, In Defense of People (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1971): 175. 99 Michael Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007): 120. 100 Ursula Heise, “The Virtual Crowds: Overpopulation, Spaces and Speciesism,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 8, no. 1 (2001): 5. Cooperman 34

Population Bomb often feels more like a work of science fiction than a scholarly report because science fiction at the time fixated on exactly what Ehrlich warned about: Earth’s limits and the coming end of time.

Apocalypse was a particularly salient theme in science fiction post-World War II when ordinary Americans were questioning the extraordinary power of science. As literary scholar Lawrence Buell explains, the nuclear end to the war convinced

Americans that humanity had “more history-annihilating power than any generation before it.”101 Annihilative apocalypticism dwelled on the prediction of a coming end to history “controlled by no God at all and followed by the void.”102 Consider the dominant image in the title of The Population Bomb. In Ehrlich’s narrative, population had explosive and immediate repercussions like the nuclear bombs the title alluded to.

Population became a hot topic after the “Golden Age of Science Fiction” began in the early 1940s.103 In 1951, C.M. Kornbluth published “The Marching Morons,” a story that depicts a world centuries in the future in which intelligent people are practicing birth control while low-IQ people are not. The elite ruling class are desperate to solve “The

Problem” of an overpopulating moronic public, ultimately relying on a man named John

Barlow who had come back to life after being frozen since 1988. He tricks the morons into traveling to Venus, marketing it as a fantastic place to invest in land. In reality, the spaceships carrying the morons simply kill them all once out of earth’s sight. The elites ultimately send Barlow on a spaceship too, angry with him for not solving The Problem

101 Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 299. 102 Ibid.,299; Douglas Robinson, American Apocalypses: The Image of the End of the World in American Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988): 26. 103 Adam Roberts and Don Brine, The History of Science Fiction (New York: The Macmillan Company, 2006): 195. Cooperman 35 centuries before when he had the chance along with the rest of twentieth-century civilians. Ehrlich retells this story in his work. In The Population Bomb, he suggests that

The Problem of overpopulation is the defining crisis of our age, and Ehrlich identifies the human race as being at the very same moment in history the elites in “The Marching

Morons” are upset about: the moment when late twentieth-century civilians fail to act against population.

In 1953, Isaac Asimov wrote The Caves of Steel, portraying a terrifyingly overpopulated earth with over eight billion people on it. To accommodate the population, huge steel domes have been built around the globe for humans to pile up in vertically as land space has been utterly depleted. Ehrlich’s own predictions sound awfully like this. If growth continues unchecked for 900 years, there would be about 100 persons for each square yard of the Earth’s surface. 104 Ehrlich expands on British Neo-Malthusian physicist J.H. Fremlin’s analogy of a “continuous 2,000-story building covering our entire planet,” invoking Asimov’s narrative. Ehrlich explains:

The upper 1,000 stories would contain only the apparatus for running this gigantic warren. Ducts, pipes, wires, elevator shafts, etc., would occupy about half of the space in the bottom 1,000 stories. This would leave three or four yards of floor space for each person. I will leave to your imagination the physical details of existence in this ant hill, except to point out that all would not be black…entertainment on the worldwide TV should be excellent, for at any time ‘one could expect some ten million Shakespeares and rather more Beatles to be alive.’”105

104 Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 19. 105 Ibid.; J.H. Fremlin, “How Many People Can the World Support?,” New Scientist 415 (1964): 287. Cooperman 36

The 1960s only proved more fruitful for science fiction writers taking a crack at the Malthusian approach to overpopulation. 106 As science fiction novelist Robert

Silverberg explains, the concept “seemed inexhaustible” at the time, a limitless resource for storytelling despite the theme of limited resources.107 James Blish published A

Torrent of Faces, Kurt Vonnegut penned Welcome to the Monkey House, and Harry

Harrison shot Make Room! Make Room! to stardom as perhaps the most well-known population novel in 1966. Even the music industry caught on to the trend. In 1969, the pop pair Zager and Evans topped the charts with “In the Year 2525.” The song laments that “Man has cried a billion tears” and “Now man’s reign is through.”108 While not every tale from the time dealt with the total end of humanity, each involved main characters whose narratives were deeply affected or cut completely by the impacts of an overpopulated world, a microcosm for the utter devastation of something like a nuclear bomb. Science fiction stories crafted a terrifying world where the big, bad monster bringing about the end of humankind was the same as Ehrlich’s: “too many people” drawing us closer to our end.

However, unlike science fiction writers imagining dystopian landscapes, Ehrlich capitalized on his status as scientist to make his predictions read as non-fiction.109 What made Ehrlich’s monster so scary was that he claimed he had the science to back it up.

106 Robert Silverberg, The World Inside (New York: The Macmillan Company, 2010): 8. 107 Ibid. 108 Haberman, “The Unrealized Horrors.” 109 Riley Dunlap, “The evolution of environmental sociology: a brief history and assessment of the American experience,” in The International Handbook of Environmental Sociology, ed. Michael Redclift and Graham Woodgate (Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1997): 31; Steven Yearley, “Science and the environment,” in The International Handbook of Environmental Sociology, ed. Michael Redclift and Graham Woodgate (Northampton Edward Elgar Publishing, 1997): 228. Cooperman 37

Trust him – he had done “all the calculations.” The most frightening of these was that

Earth’s scarcest resource was running out. Aboard our tiny earthly spaceship, we had nothing to do but watch the sand drip down the hourglass.

Cooperman 38

Chapter 2: Paul the Prophet

“Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come.”110 – Paul Ehrlich

The front page of the October 6, 1970 issue of Redlands Daily Facts boasted of Dr.

Paul Ehrlich coming to speak at the University of California Riverside campus. Front and center was a black and white image of Ehrlich in a dark suit, his eyes looking away from the camera as he smiled knowingly. Redlands Daily exclaimed that Ehrlich received “two dozen speaking requests a day” and was booked “a solid year in advance.”111 The nearby

San Bernardino County Sun hailed Ehrlich the “hero of ecology” and implored its readership to go listen to Ehrlich’s “startling predictions for Earth’s future.”112 After all,

Ehrlich acknowledged that the “bland, reassuring rhetoric of many politicians on this subject” no longer “fooled” the American people.113 He knew how to shake up an audience.

Of all the names Ehrlich was called as a result of The Population Bomb’s infamy,

“prophet” and “preacher” stick out the most. Ehrlich’s mentor Charles Birch jokingly started a letter to Ehrlich in 1968 with “Dear Billy,” saying that for a moment he thought he was writing to the evangelical preacher Billy Graham. Birch said to Ehrlich, “Your last letter read just like one of Billy’s sermons with the impending Armageddon

110 Haberman, “The Unrealized Horrors.” 111 “Paul Ehrlich, Outspoken Ecologist, To Speak,” Redlands Daily Facts, October 6, 1970, 3. 112 “Hero of the Ecology Movement to Speak at UCR,” The San Bernardino County Sun, May 6, 1970, 14. 113 Ehrlich and Harriman, How To Be A Survivor, 102. Cooperman 39 approaching and the plea to prepare now while we have time.” In 1971, oceanographer

Roger Revelle proclaimed Ehrlich to be the “New High Priest of Ecotastrophe.”114 These comparisons were not accidental. After The Population Bomb was published, Ehrlich frequently gave Sunday sermons in San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral and at Stanford’s

Memorial Church.115 “The earth is going to hell,” Ehlich would say.116

However, Ehrlich would likely be the first to claim that his conception of the environment was secular. He viewed himself as a Darwinian secularist, a champion of

Charles Darwin’s theories of natural selection in which any role of the traditional Jewish and Christian God is limited – if a role exists at all. 117 Instead of divine design, natural selection emphasizes that humans originated from “chance variation and adaptation.”118

Ehrlich viewed humans like many biologists in the sense that he saw humans as just another animal species.119 Humans were just “breeders.”

This chapter expands my analysis of Ehrlich’s Neo-Malthusian apocalypticism to compare it to Biblical eschatological frameworks where time is similarly linear and finite.

I first discuss the growth of Christian Fundamentalism after World War II and the manifestation of dispensational premillenialism, a fundamentalist belief that recognizes the coming end of time and return of Jesus to earth – and thus relies on a linear start and end of human history. I then compare Ehrlich’s rhetoric to the symbols of catastrophe

114 Roger Revelle, “Review: Paul Ehrlich: The New High Priest of Ecotrastrophe,” Family Planning Perspectives 3, no. 2 (1971): 67, 70. 115 Paul Sabin, The Bet, 54; 116 “Hero of Ecology Movement,” The San Bernardino County Sun. 117 Thomas Robertson, The Malthusian Moment: Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism (Piscataway, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 128. 118 Robertson, The Malthusian Moment, 129. 119 Sabin, The Bet, 26. Cooperman 40 embedded in dispensational premillenialism, focusing on how Ehrlich adopted the

Biblical role of prophet. I consider the irony of that Ehrlich argued against Christian environmental perspectives by using rhetoric that mirrored Christian temporal rhetoric.

Ultimately, linear temporality was much more congruent with a conservative Christian apocalyptic worldview than Paul Ehrlich would probably have ever acknowledged.

The Tales and Tents of Fundamentalist Revival

Christianity was growing immensely in post-World War II society when Neo-

Malthusianism was gaining speed and Paul Ehrlich was entering into the fray. While millions of young Americans were nestling comfortably into suburbia, pews across the nation also began bustling with religious fervor. Church membership and funding increased nationally, and two-thirds of Americans attended church services at least once a month. Nearly half of Americans attended church services once or multiple times every single week. 120 Gospel music flooded radio stations, reflecting the influence of

Christianity on life outside of the pew. During the “Golden Age” of gospel in the decades following World War II, almost “every major city boasted as least one gospel soloist, group or quartet” that recorded regularly.121

Evangelical denominations experienced the greatest growth. Much of this fervor could be attributed to the persuasive talent of charismatic public figures like Billy

Graham, a Southern Baptist minister. Graham catapulted to “religious stardom” after drawing hundreds of thousands of people to his tent church “crusades” across the nation

120 Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988), 99. 121 Horace Clarence Boyer, How Sweet the Sound: The Golden Age of Gospel (Washington, D.C.: Elliot & Clark, 1995), 54. Cooperman 41 in the late 1940s. In 1949, Graham successfully had persuaded 3,000 non-believers in Los

Angeles to commit their lives to Christ in one eight-day tent extravaganza.122 This fervor for evangelism carried on through the 1950s and 1960s. By 1961, 61% of American teenagers believed the bible to be a factual account of the present and future.123

In particular, fundamentalism flourished within evangelical denominations.

Historian George Marsden defines the American fundamentalist as “an evangelical who is angry about something.”124 That “something” is most often a lackadaisical approach to the Bible by more liberal Protestant groups. This conflict of conservatism originally bubbled up in the 1920s when conservative rich, poor, Baptist, and Presbyterian

Christians united against theological liberalism and the decline of Puritan moralism.

Fundamentalists identified together as Christians who believed in the Bible as the only truthful narrative of history, science, and morality.125 Believing in the inerrant word of the Bible was essential to fundamentalist Christianity.126 Fundamentalists were appalled by the materialism and the religious indifference infecting American society after World

War II. By the mid-1950s, over half of the roughly 60 million Protestants in the United

States identified as fundamentalists.127

122 Cecilia Rasmussen, “Billy Graham’s star was born at his 1949 revival in Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Times, September 2, 2007, accessed August 28, 2016. 123 Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 128. 124 George B. Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1991), 1. 125 Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 806. 126 John Butler, Grant Wacker and Randall H. Balmer, Religion in American Life: A Short History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 276. 127 Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, 61. Cooperman 42

Linear eschatological temporality has been an absolutely crucial tenant of fundamentalist Christianity. It neatly packages the Earth’s history into a coherent line, starting with Earth’s creation and ending with the Second Coming of Christ. In particular, the Bible dwells on the Second Coming with terrifying detail, and as a result, fundamentalists fixate on the dimensions of the End Times.128 The belief in the real coming of the apocalypse is called dispensational premillenialism. “Dispensational” refers to the part of fundamentalism that relies on the “absolute verbal inerrancy of the

Bible” as the final, exact word of the “unchanging eternal God.” Biblical history can best be understood by being broken up into segments of time allotted by God, called

“dispensations.” 129 “Premillenialism” requires a bit more Biblical background. The

Biblical character of Jesus played an important sociological role in reframing God as a loving being rather than something fearful. He argued that God had “set a term” to vengeance and punishment that would mark the end of suffering and usher in a world of perfection as well as the “rule of a lord not vengeful but benign.” God’s judgment would come down on those who were morally able to pursue “fulfillment of the law.” 130 The first Christians thus became the first millenialists, believers that Christ would reign on earth for one thousand blissful, perfect years before the final judgment of God.

Premillenialism, then, refers to the belief that Christ will return “pre”-vious to his

“millennial” rule.131 Dispensational premillenialists traditionally do not just believe in the apocalypse. They expect it – and soon.

128 Ahlstrom, A Religious History, 806 129 Ibid., 811. 130 Eugene Weber, Apocalypses: Prophecies, Cults, and Millennial Beliefs Through the Ages (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999): 225. 131 Timothy P. Weber, On the Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals Became Israel’s Cooperman 43

In the United States today, about two-thirds of American evangelicals (which make up roughly 20% of the entire United States population) identify as dispensational premillenialists.132 This is compared to approximately 10% of the American population in the earlier half of the twentieth century, suggesting a growth in apocalyptic thoughts over the duration of the 1900s. 133 Although fundamentalist postmillennialism

(reconstructionism) emerged in the 1970s as a subset of Christian apocalyptic belief among predominantly conservative neo-Pentecostals, premillenialism is still the hegemonic eschatology among conservative American evangelicals today and has been since the onset of Christian fundamentalism nearly 100 years ago. It certainly was the most prominent eschatological belief in the evangelical community during the time Paul

Ehrlich was commenting on overpopulation.134 The rise in this belief system meant that the ancient “Greco-Oriental myth of eternal return” was replaced by the Jewish and

Christian “scheme of cosmic history moving from an origin to a close” in the American environmental imagination.135 The fact that time must eventually end just like it began pervades dispensational premillennialist thought.

Ehrlich’s Dispensational Premillenialism

Despite Ehrlich’s secular approach to the environment, the rhetoric in The

Population Bomb, How to Be a Survivor, and many of his other works from the early

Best Friend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004): 9. 132 “Religious Landscape Study,” Pew Research Center, last modified 2017, accessed August 31, 2016. 133 Jason Dittmer and Tristan Sturm, Mapping the End Times: American Evangelical Geopolitics and Apocalyptic Visions. (Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), 8. 134 Ibid.,10. 135 Lawrence Buell, 299; Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History (Princton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 112-127. Cooperman 44

1970s is strikingly similar to the structure of dispensational premillenialist rhetoric.

Highlighting the similarities between Ehrlich and this framework illuminates the ways temporal linearity works its way into Ehrlich’s perspective. This is not to meant to prove

Ehrlich was purposefully employing what he knew to be dispensational premillenialist rhetoric, but rather, dispensational premillenialism is a tool to unravel an often unspoken about aspect of Ehrlich’s environmental philosophy. Four themes consistently come up in both dispensational premillenialism and Ehrlich’s work:

1. A tipping point

2. A cosmic lens to dignify catastrophe

3. Balancing fear and love

4. A fixation on prophecy

The first is perhaps the most obvious thematic crossover between the two philosophies because it relies on limits. Ehrlich argues that there is a tipping point for humanity in The Population Bomb. Once Earth reaches its absolute capacity for human life (a moment fast approaching), we will reach a tipping point and unleash apocalypse.

Ehrlich even sets a date for this tipping point. In an interview with Look magazine that ran the day before the first Earth Day in 1970, Ehrlich said, “When you reach a point where you realize further efforts will be futile, you may as well look after yourself and your friends and enjoy what little time you have left…that point for me is 1972.”136

Dispensational premillenialism asserts a similar tipping point for the earth’s spiritual capacity for sin and amorality. This framework posits that since Christ’s resurrection, the world has been on a steady moral decline and that we will only continue to see an

136 Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival, 103; see Paul Ehrlich interview in Look Magazine on April 21, 1970. Cooperman 45

“accelerated” rate of “war, famine, pestilence, and strife” until the world has reached its limits and necessitates Christ’s return.137 There is a tipping point in both philosophies where the sin or pollution of man becomes too much for God or the Earth to handle. We have already reached that point, according to Ehrlich, because “three of the four horsemen of the apocalypse” are upon us. The Four Horsemen are four characters from the New Testament Book of Revelations that act as harbingers of the divine apocalypse.

This moment represents the beginning of the end in both dispensational premillenialist and Ehrlichian philosophy, thus relying on a linear understanding of time.

A second similarity between Ehrlich’s brand of Neo-Malthusianism and dispensational premillinialism is the cosmic lens that they approach events with. Both philosophies dignify catastrophe by inserting current trauma into a wider temporal scheme. Historian Eugene Weber mentions this in Apocalypses, explaining that, “by defining human suffering in cosmic terms, as a part of cosmic order […] catastrophe is

[…] endowed with meaning.”138 The rhetoric of dispensational premillenialism equips believers with the tools necessary to fit pain and suffering into the broader story of the earth, telling its believers that they will be saved when the Earth’s linear timeline inevitably comes to an end…if they continue believing.

Paul Ehrlich and co-author Richard Harriman literally use Christian language to dignify the global fight against overpopulation in How To Be A Survivor. The book closes with a benediction delivered by a chaplain at the University of Pacific’s 1970 convocation address. Through Chaplain Larry Meredith’s words, Ehrlich and Harriman imply that we must not give up our fight against unrest, war, and overpopulation “for

137 Dittmer and Sturm, Mapping the End Times, 8. 138 Weber, Apocalypses, 235. Cooperman 46

Zion’s sake” and “for Jerusalem’s sake.” 139 As a movement within protestant fundamentalism, Christian Zionism believes that the return of Jews to the Holy Land and the creation of Israel in 1948 is in fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. In fundamentalism, the acknowledgement of Zion is the acknowledgement that premillennial days are coming and that “believing Christians” are one step closer to their heavenly Rapture from earth.140 By choosing to end their book with a speech saying humanity should work together for the sake of bringing these holy narratives to fruition, the two authors aim to motivate their audiences by identifying overpopulation an obstacle en route to a greater goal.

Ehrlich’s reliance on the image of Spaceship Earth similarly demonstrates his cosmic perspective on global suffering. Spaceship Earth structures the entirety of How

To Be A Survivor. It even graces the cover. A reader sees the entire Earth in a sea of black space, highly reminiscent of the “Blue Marble” picture popularized in 1967. “Blue

Marble” was a major visual cue for environmentalists to understand that the whole earth was a rallying cry, and Spaceship Earth capitalized on that momentum. The image of a spaceship floating through space containing the entire planet’s people and ecosystems is a literal manifestation of a cosmic perspective. Ehrlich talks about people aboard Spaceship

Earth as groups living and suffering together amidst dwindling resources. There are no individuals aboard. There are no “crew members” to maintain the Earth as its passive citizens drift along in space without a care. With so many people all sharing one tiny planet, so small and alone in the universe, how could we not be facing disaster from

139 Ibid.,139. 140 Stephen Spector, Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009): 14. Cooperman 47 overpopulation? Spaceship Earth’s implicit cosmic perspective makes Ehrlich’s argument seem all the more pressing because everything is occurring at a cosmic scale.

Above: The first image of Earth taken from space by an unmanned satellite, circa 1967 (NASA). The image was dubbed “Blue Marble.”

Right: The front cover of the 1971 edition of “How To Be A Survivor,” featuring its own “Blue Marble” (Ballantine Books).

Ehrlich’s cosmic perspective is apparent more subtly – but more consistently throughout his works – through his racist attitudes towards the developing world. Ehrlich articulates a zoomed out perspective on global population as a total number rather than a fine-tuned understanding of the ways individuals (or even countries) differentially contribute to pollution. Ehrlich does not acknowledge that Americans contribute far more to global environmental resource consumption and ensuing environmental degradation than Indians do regardless of population size, and he continues to criticize Indians for Cooperman 48

“breeding” (a term usually associated with non-human life) without control. He does not refer to Americans as “breeding” or “teeming” in his narrative. Ehrlich aims to appall the reader as much as he felt appalled by the Delhi scenes. His anaphoric use of “People…” to start every sentence on the first page of The Population Bomb overwhelms the reader with images of crowds in dirty, loud streets. (It also should be noted that anaphoric rhetoric “People, People, People…” has its root in Biblical psalms, meaning that Ehrlich was invoking Biblical rhetorical devices even before mentioning any kind of apocalyptic prediction.141) He constantly condescends towards countries that he believes to be populating out of control, saying that it would be “impossible” to explain the difference between castration and sterilization to an Indian person.142

Briefly, there is hope that the racist views displayed in Bomb’s argument would not permeate How To Be A Survivor because Ehrlich and Harriman summarily discuss environmental justice in the United States and how “the middle class and wealthy can afford” to move out of “disaster areas” while “nonwhites” are left to suffer.143 Their chapter on developing and underdeveloped countries is titled “Steerage,” for example, and continues to blame crowded poor nations for environmental degradation simply due to population mass rather than discuss the differential consumption rates of poor nations versus wealthy nations like the United States.144 The fact that his argument rests on a mathematical correlation between population and pollution – and not people and pollution - indicates a cosmic lens that ultimately negatively colors his argument. This is not to say that viewing human events and individual experiences as part of a whole

141 Psalm 29:3-9 142 Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 86. 143 Ehrlich and Harriman, How To Be A Survivor, 22. 144 Ibid., 80. Cooperman 49 narrative beyond individual control is inherently racist and that dispensational premillenialists are necessarily racist people. I simply suggest that dispensational premillenialism manifests itself in Ehrlich’s public works in a racially-ignorant way.

Ultimately, the racialization of his argument suggests a linear understanding of time because he sees only the lowest-resolution image of the globe’s ecological crisis by arguing that it is simply a population numbers game.

A third aspect of dispensational premillenialist apocalypticism evident in Ehrlich’s texts is the intersecting relationship between fear and love. In fundamentalism, this relationship is a family affair between a “terrifying father and his tender son” (the son being the Messiah in Judaism or Jesus Christ in Christianity).145 The traits that God and

Jesus each possess are the same traits in tension with each other in The Population Bomb.

Ehrlich toys with instilling fear in his audience while providing tinges of hope. Ehrlich uses a lot of “worst case scenario” rhetoric, describing that a net result of 500 million deaths from famine (one out of every seven people) “is not inconceivable.”146 He describes insects that have grown resistant to DDT as “Frankensteins of their own creation,” using a common symbol of fear to rattle his audience.147 The “horsemen of the apocalypse” are upon us.148 And yet, among all of the doom and gloom that Ehrlich paints, his fifth chapter is titled, “What Can You Do?” Ehrlich suggests to his audience ways to write letters, organize action groups, and positively encourage people already taking action against overpopulation.

145 Weber, Apocalypses, 230. 146 Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 71. 147 Ibid., 51. 148 Ibid., 69. Cooperman 50

How To Be A Survivor plays even more drastically with the relationship between fear and hope three years after The Population Bomb’s publication.149 How To Be A

Survivor is far more hopeful as a work. Even the differences in the titles point to this change – Ehrlich’s operative noun in one is “Bomb” and the other is “Survivor.” Though spending much of the first half of How To Be A Survivor describing the doom awaiting our Spaceship Earth if we do not act, Ehrlich and Harriman include more opportunities for the individual to step in and alter the narrative of humanity’s future. They feature an appendix titled “Tactics for Americans” that specifically addresses what American audiences can do to “pave the way for the emergence of new men, new values, and a new culture.”150 In the main body of their argument, the two authors explain some of the

“hopeful signs in the United States,” like the “crusader Ralph Nader” exposing the automobile industry “in all its glory.” They discuss how 1970 marked an election where some of the candidates with “the worst records on environmental issues were defeated on those issues” while also referring to the empowerment of women and young people as a sign of hope.151 The doom and gloom thus serves as a motivator for the positive invitation for anti-population involvement at the end, but Ehrlich toes the line: how much is too much? There is a tipping point even within his own structure of rhetoric. Some readers hail him a “hero of ecology,” and some call him the “Voice of Doom”152

149 Weber, Apocalypses, 230. 150 Ehrlich and Harriman, How To Be A Survivor, 143. 151 Ibid., 132. 152 Egan, Barry Commoner, 102; Stephen Fox, The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 311. Cooperman 51

Paul Ehrlich, Prophet

The fourth theme of dispensational premillenialism is a fixation on prophecy, and

Ehrlich certainly had no lack of nightmarish prophecies for his audiences. Ehrlich mentioned in a 1974 interview with Mother Earth News that our future was “all but a flip of the coin…a cut of the cards.”153 But nothing in Ehrlich’s work suggested he believed in a random future. He frames apocalypse as the one and only fate of the planet if humanity continues wantonly breeding. Even Ehrlich’s scholarly texts, like 1973’s

“Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions” co-authored with wife Anne and James

Holdren, talk about how humans “will” hit our carrying capacity and “will” run out of resources like food, lumber, energy, and water.154 There is a reason why he was hailed as a “prophet” – he acted like one.

Prophecies about the end of time are among the most essential characteristics of dispensational premillenialist thought, and the prophets who make them are both revered and feared. A Biblical prophet is somebody who speaks “on behalf of God,” and there are several key rhetorical trends pertaining to both the form and content of a true prophecy.155 The first is sheer confidence. The history of apocalyptic projections and millennialism is ultimately “littered” with prophecies that never came to fruition, like predictions about when exactly Christ will return or what events on earth could be possibly signaling the oncoming Rapture. But even when the exact date is wrong, the

153 “Paul Ehrlich Interview: The Population Bomb,” Mother Earth News, July/August 1974, accessed August 2016. 154 Paul Ehrlich, Anne Ehrlich, and John Holdren, Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions (London: W. H. Freeman & Company, 1973), 70. 155 R.W.L. Moberly, Prophecy and Discernment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1. Cooperman 52 certainty that that date will eventually come never falters.156 So although these texts are laden with prophetic predictions that Ehrlich acknowledges may not come true in the exact scenarios he spends hundreds of pages describing, he infallibly believes the end is coming – a staple belief within dispensational premillenialism.

Another key aspect of traditional prophet telling is the strength with which a prophet must convey an argument against a social backdrop likely unwilling to listen.

According to Biblical studies scholar Marshall D. Johnson, the content of most Biblical prophecies comes “as a protest against the prevailing mood of the people,” and that the prophet speaks “words of judgment and disaster” to “a people glutted with self- satisfaction or overconfidence.”157 True prophets thus stepped willingly into the realm of controversy, as evidenced by the social climate of the 1960s and 1970s with regards to overpopulation attitudes. While Ehrlich was a member of the alarmist Neo-Malthusian movement, many Americans were adapting to suburbia and reviving the pews before

Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb became the best-known book on population from the period.158 Ehrlich remained steadfast in his argument amidst the criticism from other scientists and some members of the public who saw him “only as some kind of

‘antipopulation’ spokesman.”159

Paul Ehrlich was so confidently prophet-like while predicting the coming End

Times that historian Michael Egan literally hailed him as “adopting the role of Jeremiah,”

156 Weber, Apocalypses, 235. 157 Marshall D. Johnson, Making Sense of the Bible (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002): 55. 158 David Lam, “How the World Survived the Population Bomb: Lessons from 50 Years of Extraordinary Demographic History,” Demography 48, no. 4 (2011): 1232, doi:10.1007/s13524-011-0070-z. 159 “Paul Ehrlich Interview: The Population Bomb,” Mother Earth News. Cooperman 53 one of the major prophets of the Hebrew bible. 160 Egan wrote how Ehrlich was one prophet in a long line of environmentalists using gloomy rhetoric to convince the public that “human folly had created an environmental crisis, the latter-day flood. The Second

Coming was at hand, and humanity would need to seek redemption.” Prophecy of these

End Times was meant to motivate the audience rather than dissuade them, and most environmentalists did not describe the apocalypse so literally. However, Ehrlich was “the most stringent of Jeremiahs” who believed that “the end of history was indeed at hand.”161 His assuredness in predicting the gritty details of the coming apocalypse made his work all the more captivating for his eager listeners, even despite the critical feedback from many within the scientific community. Becoming the “Voice of Doom,” as journalist Stephen Fox would call him, was Ehrlich’s way of making the end of time feel immediate.162

Comparing Ehrlich’s texts with Fundamentalist writer Hal Lindsey’s texts further reveals the Biblical undertones of Ehrlich’s delivery. Lindsey published his immensely popular The Late Great Planet Earth in 1970 – just before Ehrlich’s How to Be a Survivor arrived on the scene in 1971. Lindsey’s book comments on political and societal movements of the decades post-World War II and describes how they all work to fulfill

Biblical prophecies signaling the Rapture and End Times to come. He specifically focuses on international conflict and how tension in Russia and the Middle East portend the beginning of Armageddon, the ultimate war in the Bible during which Christ’s true followers will be brought to heaven in the Rapture just before its terrifying, earth-ending

160 Egan, Barry Commoner, 103. 161 Ibid., 100-101. 162 Ibid., 102; Fox, The American Conservation Movement, 311. Cooperman 54 climax. Lindsey establishes that the role of a prophet has been one of the most respected roles throughout Biblical history. False prophets, on the other hand, have been among the most punished. A true prophet’s status, as Lindsey explains, lies in whether or not “their prophecies […] all come true. They cannot be ignored. We cannot ignore them.”163 The form of true prophetic speech must reflect this self-assured confidence.

This is exactly the message that Lindsey and Ehrlich both try to send in their respective works – essentially, that they confidently know they are not simply “guessers” of the future.164 Lindsey literally states this, exclaiming that “the important thing is that

[the Rapture] will happen. It will happen!” regardless of the exact details of when.165 He later says, “Will these predictions be fulfilled just as certainly and graphically as those of the first coming [of the Messiah]? This writer says positively, ‘Yes.’”166 The assurance is present, but Lindsey distances himself from this confidence (and thus leaves himself some wiggle room in terms of being completely accurate about the details) by referring to this opinion as that of “this writer” instead of “I.” Lindsey goes on to explain that he “will make a number of forecasts about the future” that are based in “careful study” of “many scholars on the subject.” He continues: “I believe that these forecasts are based upon sound deductions; however, please don’t get the idea that I think that I am infallibly right in the same way that a Biblical prophet speaking under the direct inspiration of God’s

Spirit was.”167 Lindsey thus establishes his legitimacy as a voice commentating on the future thanks to his “careful study” of fellow scholars while still providing room for

163 Hal Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1970), 26. 164 Ibid., 20. 165 Ibid., 137. 166 Ibid., 41 167 Ibid., 181. Cooperman 55 getting the timeline wrong. Lindsey tiptoes around the “massive potential for abuse” within the “concept of prophecy,” which is that it is potentially dangerous for an individual to claim that they speak truly and fully from God and cannot be wrong in any way.168 Ehrlich carefully navigates the potential for being wrong like a true prophet. He includes brief disclaimers for his own “forecasts” of a famished world in The Population

Bomb while still portraying confidence by relying on words like “will” instead of

“might” or “may” throughout his descriptions of the future.169

Ultimately, Ehrlich’s message carried all four elements of what religious scholar

Marshall D. Johnston identifies as the criteria for traditional prophetic content in the

Christian bible:

Components of a prophet’s message included the ethical (what was right, fair, and just), the social (corrupt institutions, concern for the poor and marginalized), the political (the state might be headed in the wrong direction), and what we would call religious (protest against neighboring cults or reliance on the national cult with its priesthood and sacrificial system, without justice).170

Ehrlich talked a lot about social, political, and ethical responsibility. When seeking support from the Ecological Society of America for his organization Zero Population

Growth, Ehrlich pleaded for the scientists to recognize their ethical “responsibility to correct all the ‘uninformed talk’” amongst the ignorant general public breeding beyond control.171 Likewise, The Population Bomb argues that the political state of the U.S. would be headed in the wrong direction if population control is not formalized as a

168 Moberly, Prophecy and Discernment, 12. 169 Ibid. 170 Johnson, Making Sense of the Bible, 55. 171 Sabin, The Bet, 37. Cooperman 56 branch of government. Ehrlich suggests this could be done through the creation of a

Department of Population and Environment that would fund research and develop new birth control technologies.

Where he diverges is on Johnson’s last point. In The Population Bomb, Ehrlich certainly argues against following a “national cult,” but this national cult is Christianity itself. Ehrlich suggests investing in the “so-called New Age movement” with its

“interests in meditation, Eastern religions, and a vaguely pantheistic harmony with nature” in The Population Bomb, How to Be a Survivor, and the multiple reference volumes he compiled with his wife Anne and his frequent partner John Holdren.172 He disavows Christianity as a possible solution for the future – the exact opposite argument of the Biblical prophets who call for a deepened trust in God’s will. As historian Dave

Hunt explains, any argument to move away from Christianity in the mid-nineteenth century United States was perceived by conservative dispensational premillenialist

Christians as a “part of cosmic conspiracy to instill the Antichrist” in American society.173 It is ironic that Ehrlich’s articulation of his environmental outlook contains so many striking similarities to fundamentalist eschatology and rhetoric, and yet he disavows Christianity’s environmental perspective. He may be a scientist, but he certainly sounds like a fundamentalist. Ultimately, we are quick to secularize Ehrlich's perspective without recognizing the captivating religious traditions he tapped into to make environmental crisis meaningful to the typical American. He may have been a scientist, but he spoke like a fundamentalist prophet - whether he acknowledged it or not.

172 Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 233. 173 Dave Hunt, Peace, Prosperity, and the Coming Holocaust: The New Age Movement in Prophecy (Eugene: Harvest House, 1983), 69. Cooperman 57

What Paul Ehrlich never for a moment seems to doubt in his texts is that the end – whatever that might look like – is coming if humanity does not act. He disavows the concept of a savior coming for us, saying that he simply will not accept a prediction that an alien spaceship will come “bearing CARE packages” because it is unrealistic in its optimism.174 He never disavows the linearity of time and the implications of that time scale on environmental thought. In 2014, Paul Ehrlich said in an interview with The New

York Times’ Retro Report: “I do not think my language was too apocalyptic in The

Population Bomb. My language would be even more apocalyptic today.” He sticks to his guns – as the clock ticks, our urgency should only increase.

174 Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 80. Cooperman 58

Chapter 3: The Commoner Calm

“In circles, there are no sinks.” – Barry Commoner175

As Paul Ehrlich was making his many rounds on “The Tonight Show” as the celebrity “Voice of Doom,” a different ecologist by the name of Barry Commoner published The Closing Circle (1971). Commoner offered a starkly different vision of the future than Ehrlich, defining the environmental crisis as chiefly a technological and sociopolitical problem. Commoner condemned faulty technology and human activities like industrial farming for up to “95 percent” of the increases in “total pollution output since 1946” whereas the increase in population only accounted for “12 to 20 percent of the various increases in pollution.” 176 Commoner further separated the arithmetic relationship between population and pollution that Ehrlich detailed in his writings during a speech at the momentous United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in

Stockholm in 1972. He said that “in the period of time” since World War II, “most pollution emissions have intensified about 10-fold, while the population increased about

45%.”177 Fundamentally, to Barry Commoner, the environmental crisis was not one grounded in the concept that there were “simply too many of us” on the planet.

175 William F. Buckley Jr., “Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.: Is There an Ecological Crisis?,” YouTube video, 38:20, posted by Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr., recorded May 1, 1973, posted January 26, 2017. 176 Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle (New York: Knopf, 1971): 176. 177 Barry Commoner, “The Meaning of the Environmental Crisis,” presented at United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, Stockholm, June 16, 1972. Cooperman 59

Population might have been a factor, but population was not the annihilating bomb

Ehrlich proclaimed it to be. If anything, it was actual bombs that worried Commoner.

Commoner then went on to tell the conference attendees that he did not at all believe humanity to be “a ‘dirty animal, or too greedy for worldly goods, or too aggressive, arrogant, and ambitious.”178 Ehrlich suggested that humans were sinners – that we were fallen, dirty, and animalistic. For Ehrlich, there was no return to Eden. We would simply march onward through history towards the inevitable final reckoning.

Commoner’s statements betrayed Ehrlich’s view of human place in history. Humans were a part of nature and, if we were capable of living sustainably within nature, the earth could heal. To Commoner, environmentalism aimed to restore a balance with nature that was natural and good, a cycle that was capable of self-reinvention unless it was knocked so out of whack that it could not recover.

This chapter explores the alternative to Paul Ehrlich’s apocalyptic perspective by analyzing Barry Commoner’s ecological rhetoric. I first point out Commoner’s circular symbolization of time on Earth and how this imagery sidesteps the apocalypticism embedded in Ehrlich’s linear perspective. I then delve into Commoner’s background and how he came to view technology as the mechanism that interrupted these balanced ecological nets. Commoner was not alone in perpetuating this cyclical understanding of a self-reviving earth, so I close the chapter by discussing where else Commoner’s holistic perspective was represented within the burgeoning environmental movement.

178 Commoner, “The Meaning of the Environmental Crisis,” 3. Cooperman 60

Circles, Cycles, and Time

In a 1973 episode of “The Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.,” Commoner had the following exchange:

Buckley: Nature does provide the opportunity for a certain amount of waste. You can understand that there is an enormous garbage disposal, a vat, available to any society. It’s when it spills over that you’ve got problems. Commoner: Where? Oh, no, no. Did you read my book? Buckley: I read enough of it. Commoner: Ahh. Look, I spent a good deal of time getting across the idea that ecological systems work in cycles - circles. Now in a circle, there is no such thing as waste. There is no vat. Everything moves through. There are no vats. There’s no dumping ground.179

Unlike the Neo-Malthusians and those playing devil’s advocate (like Buckley) who imply that the earth can handle a certain amount of degradation before it becomes a problem, Commoner points towards a cyclical conception of time. These symbols are also rarely talked about, even despite the fact that Commoner’s most famous book is literally titled The Closing Circle. To close a circle indicates an end, but also a return to a beginning. This is what Commoner is largely arguing in his influential book – that we should reevaluate our approach to technologies without simply getting rid of it.

Attempting to “break out of the circle of life” and trying to convert “its endless cycles into man-made, linear events” is “the great fault of the life of man in the ecosphere.”

Commoner creates an image of concentric circles – one large circle representing the ecosphere, and smaller circles for every cycle of life lived by man and the other

179 Buckley Jr., “Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.: Is There an Ecological Crisis?,” 16:30, slightly edited for clarity. Cooperman 61 organisms on earth.180 In particular, Commoner highlights the inherent vulnerability of circles. Commoner explained to an audience at the University of California Berkeley in

1973 that “closed, circular systems will break down and place their living members at mortal risk if they are disrupted or too heavily stressed.”181 Commoner’s earth is thus fragile and prone to distress, much like Ehrlich’s, but the image of a circle closing is far less dramatic than, say, a bomb.

In The Closing Circle, Commoner argues that the earth’s ecosystems are made of complex, non-linear relationships, and he uses the concept of “the Ecosphere” as a way to depict these relationships.182 “Sphere” implies a degree of interconnectedness that the more analytic “ecosystem” does not in “ecosystem’s” implications of a linear, systemic path. Problems arise when supposedly “advanced” humans seem to have “deluded” themselves into thinking they have “at last escaped from the dependence on the natural environment.” 183

Commoner further illustrates ecological interconnectedness through circles in each of his four fundamental laws of ecology, a set of environmental rules that have remained the lasting legacy of The Closing Circle and Commoner’s career. They are:

1. Everything is Connected to Everything Else 2. Everything Must Go Somewhere 3. Nature Knows Best 4. There is No Such Thing as Free Lunch184

Each of these rules toys with interconnectedness and implies that all four characteristics are essential to a proper scientific understanding of ecology. Commoner

180 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 12. 181 Barry Commoner, untitled lecture, University of California Berkeley, March 15, 1973. 182 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 15. 183 Ibid. 184 Ibid., 33, 39, 41, 45. Cooperman 62 explains the first rule as the “single fact that an ecosystem consists of multiple interconnected parts” can have “surprising consequences.” Ecological systems are not maintained “by rigid control, but flexibly.”185 Commoner argues that this flexibility manifests in cycles that are “often obscured by the effects of daily or seasonal variations,” using the size of fur-bearing animal populations as an example of biological fluctuations throughout seasons.186 He explains that “the finely sculptured fit between life and its surroundings [had] began to erode.”187 The environment and its inhabitants

(including humans) represented a puzzle to Commoner - something in which pieces had been sculpted to “fit” together as a “complex organization of compatible parts.”188 He goes on to describe this puzzle as a collection of cyclic nets “in which each knot is connected to others by several strands,” thus better able to withstand collapse just as a fabric can resist breaking better than a “simple, unbranched circle of threads.”189 This updates Rachel Carson’s “web of life” metaphor from her 1962 Silent Spring by implying that the cyclical interconnectedness of nature is not only finely tuned but is also a cause of ecosystem resilience.

Commoner invokes cycles to explain his second rule as well, using the lifecycle of a mercury-containing drycell battery as an example. Humans create, use, and “throw out” the battery without considering where they are depositing this product. They are not putting materials back into the system as reusable, natural objects, but rather offset natural cycles by throwing it out as waste. As a result, we harm ourselves. Mercury

185 Ibid., 34. 186 Ibid., 35 187 Ibid., 11. 188 Ibid., 43. 189 Ibid., 38 Cooperman 63 bioaccumulates in the fish we catch and eat. Nothing truly “goes away,” Commoner argues. Ecological paths do not end simply because we stop paying attention to them at a certain point in an object’s life cycle.190 Thus, the problem implied here is that humans exit the circular balance of ecosystems by extracting materials, converting them to new objects, and discharging them into the environment without considering the impact of that wasted material. This ignorance towards the implication of human actions,

Commoner argues, is “one of the chief reasons for the present environmental crisis.”191

The third rule of ecology outlined by Commoner explicitly relies on the cyclicality of time to argue its central message that “any major man-made change in a natural system is likely to be detrimental to that system.”192 He asks his reader to imagine thrusting a pencil into the back of a watch. The force would harm the intricate design of the watch’s internal workings, thus throwing off the otherwise reliable, steady ticking of the watch face. He says, “Any random change made in the watch is likely to fall into the very large class of inconsistent, or harmful, arrangements which have been tried out in past watch-making experiences and discarded. One might say, as a law of watches, that

‘the watchmaker knows best.’”193 Commoner then applies this analogy to the genetic code of an individual organism and then to the entire biosphere – at each level, a sudden change in its components will throw off a system already designed to work best on its own. The series of analogies mirrors the series of concentric circles of interconnected organisms that Commoner established in the introduction of The Closing Circle. This third rule also advocates against the special status of humans as beings above or at least

190 Ibid., 40. 191 Ibid., 41. 192 Ibid. 193 Ibid., 42. Cooperman 64 outside of the processes of the natural world. Commoner acknowledges this rule is “likely to encounter considerable resistance” because it “appears to contradict a deeply held idea about the unique competence of human beings.”194 Commoner suggests that human attempts to emulate nature through synthetic chemicals, for example, ultimately do more harm than good to the natural world. We cannot see ourselves as immune from the consequences of our natural meddling.

Commoner’s fourth rule adapts an economic idea to the Ecosphere. Every gain is won at some cost. He frames this law as a result of the previous three by stating:

Because the global system is a connected whole, in which nothing can be gained or lost and which is not subject to over-all improvement, anything extracted from it by human effort must be replaced. Payment of this price cannot be avoided. The present environmental crisis is a warning that we have delayed nearly too long.195

Commoner paints a wholly circular world of balance and payback. While we cannot avoid the “payment of this price” for our environmental degradation, he frames the Earth as something that can be replenished – a starkly different understanding than Ehrlich who posits that our resources are dwindling with no hope for renewal. Commoner restates this fourth rule later on in The Closing Circle, saying that “Every environmental decision…involves a balance between benefits and hazards.”196 Commoner argues that we must find a balancing point to help the natural world rejuvenate itself, whereas

Ehrlich sees humanity as long past finding such a balance.

Commoner also personifies the Earth as a living, conscious being, further evidencing his cyclical understanding of time. He refers to “the fragile outer skin of the

194 Ibid., 41 195 Ibid., 46. 196 Ibid., 195. Cooperman 65 planet Earth” in his speech to the United Nations and says that the earth is “breathing” in

The Closing Circle.197 He describes war as “an assault on human bodies and natural landscapes” in both The Closing Circle and in interviews with his biographer, Michael

Egan. The verb “assault” by definition most frequently implies a physical attack from one human or group of humans on another. It is curious then that Commoner chooses this word to describe technology’s legacy on the planet. By saying technology “assaulted” natural landscapes, Commoner continues to characterize natural environments as living beings capable of receiving interpersonal attacks.

Commoner’s invocations of the living earth metaphor continue when he describes the earth as a being that can become sick. For example, he perceives other ecologists and politicians as people all trying to “pronounce a cure” to the planet’s environmental issues.198 In one speech at Berkeley in 1973, Commoner mentioned the need to “cure” the planet of its illnesses three times. He invoked the circular metaphor of life yet again by saying that man had broken the “natural cycles” of the planet and “the cure” was the

“restoration of the ecological link.”199 In the Neo-Malthusian perspective, “disease” is only a mechanism by which populations can be controlled – not something the earth itself is capable of experiencing from the neglect of humans. In “The Tragedy of the

Commons,” Garrett Hardin frames disease as a good thing. He says when describing an ideal society, “…disease keeps the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the

197 Commoner, “The Meaning of the Environmental Crisis,” 1; Commoner, The Closing Circle, 21. 198 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 5. 199 Commoner, untitled lecture, Berkeley, March 15, 1973. Cooperman 66 day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality.”200 The earth cannot get sick because it is not human, or at least it does not have human-like qualities. It is a thing. It cannot be “cured” as Commoner asserts.

These are “natural cycles” because Earth has the capability to control its own self- repair. In December of 1966, as Commoner was becoming a more popular public figure, he gave a presentation at the National Industrial Conference Board. During this speech,

Commoner explained that:

Many of our new technologies and their resultant industries have been developed without taking into account their cost in damage to the environment or the real value of the essential materials bestowed by environmental life processes…While these costs often remain hidden in the past, now they have become blatantly obvious in the smog which blankets our cities and the pollutants which poison our water supplies. If we choose to allow this huge and growing debt to accumulate further, the environment may eventually be damaged beyond its capacity for self-repair.201

Commoner formed an image of nature’s “life processes” as a single living being that went through cycles of damage and then self-repair, of disturbance and return to equilibrium. This also pointed towards the same understanding of humanity’s place in world history that Commoner described at the United Nations conference a few years later by implying humans could “choose” to help the Earth return to its natural system of self repair. Commoner ended the speech by saying that the environmental crisis simple

200 Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” 1244. 201 Barry Commoner, “A scientist views pollution,” address before the National Industrial Conference Board, Barry Commoner Papers, Library of Congress, Box 493; Michael Egan, “Why Barry Commoner Matters,” SAGE Journals 22, issue 1 (2009), doi: 10.1177/1086026609333421. Cooperman 67 was not another “act of God” as some Christians would like to believe.202 Ehrlich framed the environmental apocalypse as a given where individuals simply must learn to “be a survivor” and hope that we could alter our behavior enough to lengthen the time we had left before the end. Commoner, on the other hand, empowered his audience to take a role in Earth’s narrative rather than be passive in their own destruction.

From a perspective beyond his rhetorical symbols, Commoner’s investment in social justice implied the deeper understanding of sociopolitical environmental implications that Ehrlich missed from his cosmic level of analysis. Commoner believed social justice was a key component of environmental activism and that the vulnerable must be protected against pollution they did not contribute to. His 1966 book, Science and Survival, explains that it is a failure of scientists to be “guided by the idea that it is the scientist’s duty to pursue knowledge of nature […] without regard to social consequences.”203 The scientist’s relationship to the “social problems” that follow in

“[modern pollution’s] wake” is one based on the “balance point” between “benefit and hazard,” based on ideas of “social good, on morality or religion – not on science.”204

Commoner rejects the Neo-Malthusian perspective that fails to take into account what he perceives to be a much bigger sociopolitical issue, which is that empowering the global poor is an essential and just step in solving our ecological crisis. Commoner explains in

The Closing Circle that pressing for population control alone as a solution to

202 Commoner, “The Meaning of the Environmental Crisis,” 14. 203 Barry Commoner, Science and Survival (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966): 104. 204 Barry Commoner, “Scientific Statesmanship,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 19 (1963): 9. Cooperman 68 environmental degradation “is equivalent to attempting to save a leaking ship by lightening the load and forcing passengers overboard.”205

The Commoner Calm

The New York Times recognized in a 1971 review that Commoner’s stance might make the ever-popular Neo-Malthusian environmentalists “displeased” because he was

“soft on population” and that he was “too optimistic about self-regulating mechanisms.”206 But the Times found it refreshing:

‘The Closing Circle’ is appealing first of all for its tone. Most environmentalists speak in one of two voices: a high, thin, hysterical shriek, or a deep, rumbling anticipation of doom. Barry Commoner’s tone is one of near-detachment and great calm. As a result, the book is remarkable for the absence of character assassinations, for its reluctance to set timetables for disaster and for its refusal to adopt bumper-sticker solutions for environmental crises. Those readers who are tired of the usual Sierra Club blend of panic and paranoia will find the sobriety of the book a welcome relief.

The New York Times further explained that Commoner’s book “[tended] to measure the measurable, and to avoid speculation” by using examples from the past and present to illustrate our crisis.207 As The Closing Circle explains, “Confident prediction of future events is usually regarded as beyond the capability of ordinary people.”208

205 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 255. 206 Michael Crichton, “The Closing Circle,” The New York Times, October 21, 1971, web, accessed April 10, 2017. 207 Crichton, “The Closing Circle,” The New York Times. 208 The review jabs at Ehrlich, considering The Population Bomb was initially sponsored and published by the Sierra Club; Commoner, The Closing Circle, 182. Cooperman 69

Literary historian Lawrence Buell describes a few modes of perception” that

“subserve environmental apocalyptic ends,” including interrelatedness, biotic egalitarianism, and magnification. Interrelatedness is obvious in Commoner’s perspective. He also dramatizes biotic egalitarianism. He employs the “myth of personhood of nonliving beings” by personifying the earth as a sick organism.209

Commoner in particular plays with the magnification of scale, as with his expanding analogy of the wristwatch. Each of these “modes of perception” allow for a degree of calm rationality that Ehrlichian texts simply do not project.

But all of these “modes of perception” are grounded in a understanding of time as a cycle, a conclusion that Buell does not make. This cyclical conception of time, I argue, is the chief reason why Commoner was able to speak with “great calm” to his audience in a way the Neo-Malthusians certainly never did. Commoner’s rejection of attention- grabbing doom and gloom came from the fact that time, to him, moved cyclically. If time was cyclical, there was always hope for renewal, redemption, and restarting. A closed circle had no end.

Common Beginnings: 1917-1940

Before Paul Ehrlich was even born, Commoner was already laying down the foundations his environmental philosophy. Born in 1917 to Russian Jews who had immigrated to the United States, Commoner spent most of his childhood growing up in the poorer neighborhoods in Brooklyn amongst a largely anti-Semitic city population.210

His mother was a seamstress and his father a tailor. Both instilled a sense of modesty in

209 Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 304. 210 Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival, 20. Cooperman 70

Commoner that lasted his lifetime.211 Even as an adult, he rarely ironed his shirts to save electricity and used public transportation until he was too elderly to do so.212

Commoner’s Jewish faith served as a roadblock at multiple times in his youth. He had been born as Barry Comenar, but his uncle, Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Anglicized the family name to Commoner. Commoner considered himself “very lucky” that his “rather un-Jewish” name had “helped” him avoid the more destructive anti-Semitic tendencies in

New York City, but he still struggled to be taken seriously throughout his school career.

Despite excelling academically, Commoner was constantly told not to set his hopes too high. Yarmolinsky feared that Commoner would “just be a New York Jew” if he pursued an education at a place like King’s College where talented Jews and Italians were shuffled toward while their Christian peers attended Ivy League schools. 213

Yarmolinsky’s wife, Babette Deutsch, was a poet and lecturer at Columbia and convinced

Columbia to take Commoner on as a student. He enrolled with just enough money to afford one semester and continued to work his way through college. Commoner excelled at Columbia and engaged passionately with the social activism scene, but visual physiologist Selig Hecht – Commoner’s mentor – told him that “even eight years at

Columbia would do him no good” as a Jew in New York City.214 Hecht then applied to

Harvard on Commoner’s behalf after Commoner graduated with a degree in zoology, and

Commoner matriculated there in 1937.215

211 Ibid., 19. 212 Rupert Cornwell, “Barry Commoner: Scientist who forced environmentalism into the world’s consciousness,” The Independent, Oct. 5, 2012, web, accessed April 4, 2017. 213 Michael Egan, interview with Barry Commoner, Nov. 22, 2002, in Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival. 214 Ibid. 215 Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival, 21. Cooperman 71

Commoner went on to study with Harvard’s Kenneth V. Thimann. A plant physiologist who arrived in the United States from England in 1930, Thimann was devoted to “[organizing] scientists concerned about their social role.”216 He was close with K.A.C. Elliott, a chemist at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Elliott founded the

American Association of Scientific Workers, a radical organization of scientists who

“pioneered awareness and involvement of scientists in social concerns and political activity.”217 Through Thimann, Commoner was exposed to the AASW and soon became an active member himself who deeply believed in the guiding principles of the organization: “Scientists must advise the public, make scientific advancements accessible, and undertake research with social needs in mind.”218 After graduating from

Harvard, Commoner quickly became a member of the executive committee of the

Boston-Cambridge branch of the AASW in 1939.219

Technology as the Symbol of Crisis

Soon after Commoner settled into his growing career as an ecologist, America plunged into World War II. Commoner found himself engulfed in the technological optimism that consumed wartime America. Technology and the new, cheap goods it created were an escape from the Great Depression for many Americans, including

Commoner whose parents had lost their life savings during the economic disaster.220

216 Ibid., 20. 217 Elizabeth Hodes, “Precedents for Social Responsibility Among Scientists: The American Association in Scientific Workers and the Federation of American Scientists, 1938-48,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Santa Barbara, 1982, 59. 218 Ibid., 285 219 Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival, 20. 220 Ibid., 19. Cooperman 72

With synthetic fibers, detergents, pesticides, and mass-produced foods beginning to flood

American markets, it seemed that technology was pushing America into a bright future.

Historian Charles A. Bear said in the 1930s that modern technology was hailed as the

“supreme instrument of modern progress” and the “fundamental basis of modern civilization.”221 Commoner himself served in the United States Navy by operating the low-pressure chamber at the air cadet training center in Corpus Christi, Texas. He excelled in the Navy, receiving a letter of commendation for his invention of a breathing technique that allowed high-altitude pilots to function without oxygen.222

However, the dazzle of the war’s new technologies soon made Commoner and a small minority of scientists across the United States grow wary of technological optimism. It was during his tenure in the Navy that Commoner had his first major revelation about the human impact on ecological systems. In 1942, Commoner was selected to lead a team of scientists to design a device that would allow torpedo bombers to spray DDT on beachheads in order to reduce mosquito-borne illnesses among soldiers.

Commoner recounted this experience in a 1963 article in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

He explained his own recognition that human technologies could harm the environment came from some “rude surprises” while testing his device.223 The team was invited to try out their invention on a strip of island beach off of the New Jersey coast where an experimental rocket station was swarmed with flies. DDT seemed to be the most

221 Charles Beard, A Century of Progress (New York: Harper & Bros, 1933): 3-19; See pages 15-16 of Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival for further discussion of Charles Beard’s commentary. 222 Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival, 21. 223 Commoner, “Scientific Statesmanship,” 8. Cooperman 73 appropriate answer.224 After the spraying, the island became a “flyless paradise” and the

“rocketeers went about their work with renewed vigor.” However, they were “on the phone again” within a week of the DDT spraying. A “mysterious epidemic” of dead fish was washing up on the same strip of beach, and it seemed that “all the flies in New

Jersey” were coming back to enjoy the decaying flesh. In Commoner’s own words, this was the moment in which he realized that “We have been massively intervening in the natural world without being aware of the biological consequences until their effects – which are difficult to understand, and sometimes irreversible – are upon us.”225 Humans could not take action in the environment without causing a reaction elsewhere.

This experience helped Commoner piece together what would ultimately become one of his dominant arguments throughout his career as an ecologist and activist: that mass production, technological advancement and militarism without careful control was directly responsible for the environmental decline of the United States and the world. He would go on to explain that production was the “architect” of the “American environmental decline.”226 Commoner stated years later in an interview that he had viewed World War II as an event that “assaulted human bodies as well as natural landscapes.”227

The real problem with technology, however, was the narrow outlook

“technologists” took regarding environmental systems and natural cycles. Commoner condemned the way “technologists” take into their “field of vision” only “one segment of what in nature is an endless cycle that will collapse if stressed anywhere.” Commoner

224 Ibid. 225 Ibid. 226 Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival, 16. 227 Ibid. Cooperman 74 explains in The Closing Circle that “the same fault lies behind every ecological failure of modern technology: attention to a single facet of what in nature is a complex whole.” 228

Technology was symbolic of the problematic reductionist understanding of environmental systems that Commoner believed to be at the root of our ecological crisis.

In pushing against technology, Commoner pushed against a reductionist conception of time that only looked at certain linear segments of the cyclical whole.229

To Commoner, technology symbolized the isolation of what should be interconnected processes. The Closing Circle explains that taking a technologist, reductionist approach to science “tends to isolate scientific disciplines from each other, and all of them from the real world.” Technology was the obstacle preventing true collaboration between the scientific community, the public, and natural ecosystems.

Technology was the fundamental rupture in the ecosphere that we had to repair.

It is no wonder that Commoner’s first step as a scientist-activist was to crusade against nuclear testing and, as a result, America’s technological optimism. Commoner spent the 1950s working with a team to investigate the effects of nuclear fallout on human life, particularly in childhood development. In 1963, his team published preliminary results of the “Baby Tooth Survey” in Science that demonstrated that the levels of Strontium-90 (a cancer-causing radioactive isotope) in baby teeth had risen steadily and significantly throughout children born in the 1950s.230 Children tested post-

1963, analyzed in a later follow-up article, had Strontium-90 levels averaging fifty times higher than children born before the advent of large-scale nuclear testing in the United

228 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 183. 229 Ibid., 189. 230 Louise Zibold Reiss, “Strontium-90 Absorption by Deciduous Teeth” Science 134, issue 3491 (1961): 1669. Cooperman 75

States.231 Commoner helped deliver these results to President John F. Kennedy. The report convinced Kennedy to sign the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet

Union and the United Kingdom in 1963. Commoner called this “the first victorious battle in the campaign to save the environment – and its human inhabitants – from the potential blind assaults of modern technology.”232 This victory proved not only to be a victory for the environment but also for Commoner as a leader. He instantly became a household name in environmental activism and would eventually garner his own star on the St.

Louis Walk of Fame.

One in the Chorus

Of course, Commoner was not alone in his holistic understanding of the environment. Circles, cycles, and the personification of the Earth as one living being appeared in small bursts in many other environmentalist voices in the early 1970s. One important example is French-born American microbiologist René Dubos, who shared a very similar environmental worldview with Commoner. In fact, in The Closing Circle,

Commoner cites Dubos as having done “excellent work in analyzing the interdependence between man and nature.”233 1965’s Man Adapting champions a holistic understanding of natural systems, but barely relies on the circular imagery that Commoner uses in The

Closing Circle. Dubos articulates that humans are just as much a part of the ecosystem as any other species, arguing against “an attitude that tends to place man above and indeed

231 Dennis Hevesi, “Dr. Louise Reiss, Who Helped Ban Atomic Testing, Dies at 90,” The New York Times, January 10, 2011, web, accessed April 1, 2017. 232 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 56. 233 Ibid., 190. Cooperman 76 outside the natural world.”234 He states as a matter-of-fact that “all aspects of human life

[are] interrelated,” following this claim up with multiple examples of symbiosis from the biological world.

In his 1972 Only One Earth co-authored with Barbara Ward, however, Dubos does use cyclical imagery that parallels Barry Commoner’s rhetoric. The book itself is

“An Unofficial Report Commissioned by the Secretary-General of the United Nations

Conference on the Human Environment.”235 It demonstrates that the perspectives argued at the UN Conference were very much along the lines of Commoner’s philosophy – he was a speaker at the conference himself, after all. The authors refer to the “self-repairing cycles underlying all living systems” and note that the “regenerative powers of life are astonishing.” 236 This leads to their central argument and summarization of the proceedings:

The intimate, inescapable interdependence of living things implies a certain stability, a certain dynamic reciprocity…But behind the interrelationships lies the risk of unpredictable and sometimes destructive consequences if the delicate equilibrium is overturned…disturbances can elicit so violent a response that the system may not be capable of returning, by itself, to a desirable and stable system. If these are indeed the lessons learned in piecing together the infinite history of our universe and of planet Earth, they teach surely one thing above all – a need for extreme caution, a sense of the appalling vastness and complexity of the forces that can be unleashed, and of the egg-shell delicacy of the arrangements that can be upset.237

234 René Dubos, Man Adapting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965): 88. 235 Barbara Ward and René Dubos, Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1972), title page. 236 Ward and Dubos, Only One Earth, 43. 237 Ibid. Cooperman 77

The parallels to Commoner’s rhetoric in The Closing Circle are striking and demonstrate that, even at the global scale represented by the United Nations, the circle was indeed the “dominant ecological symbol” of the time, even more so than Spaceship

Earth.238 This summary hits all of the main themes that Commoner touches upon in The

Closing Circle. The authors imply the earth as a self-sufficient being by describing the way that humans can disturb the earth so much that it cannot return to a stable system like it usually can by itself. The “intimate, inescapable interdependence of all living things” implies humanity is an equal ecological player to other organisms, one puzzle piece of the “egg-shell” delicate system of organisms working together. And of course, the most important, overarching theme of Commoner’s perspective is clear: that the history of “our universe and of planet Earth” is infinite.

The outcome of the United Nations conference summarized in Only One Earth was a list of principles agreed upon by the attendees to prevent further environmental degradation worldwide. While sharing less of the dramatic rhetorical flair that

Commoner, Dubos, and Ward employed, many of these principles reflect themes these previous authors had championed: that social justice is an essential aspect of environmental protection, and that “policies promoting or perpetuating apartheid, racial segregation, discrimination, colonial and other forms of oppression and foreign domination stand condemned and must be eliminated.”239 Another principle discusses the

238 Linda Sargent Wood, A More Perfect Union: Holistic Worldviews and the Transformation of American Culture after World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 11. 239 Report on the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, publication, Stockholm: n.p., 1972, Report on the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, United Nations, PDF, March 27, 2017, 4. Cooperman 78 importance of fairly sharing non-renewable resources between “all mankind.”240 Principle

24 exclaims, “all countries, big and small, are on an equal footing” when it comes to dealing with “international issues concerning the protection and improvement of the environment.”241 Bad news for the Neo-Malthusians!

Thus, Commoner’s camp advocated for a perhaps more globally accepted, holistic understanding of ecological systems compared to the flashy apocalypticism of Paul

Ehrlich and his fellow Neo-Malthusians. But Commoner’s soothing rhetoric certainly does not parallel the Biblical doom and gloom of fundamentalism Christianity. If

Commoner represented an apocalypse-dampening alternative to Ehrlich, where - if at all - was Commoner’s calm language being echoed beyond the ecological community? How was the American spiritual landscape reflected in Commoner’s temporal perspective?

240 Ibid. 241 Ibid., 5. Cooperman 79

Chapter 4: Closing the Circle

“There’s a very interesting difference between the British subway and the American subway. In the American subway, the signs say, ‘Do not interfere with the doors.’ Right? In the British subway, the sign says, “If doors are interfered with, the train will be inoperate.’ One is an admonition, and the other is a piece of intelligence. Now, if you’ll read my book carefully, you’ll see some slips, probably. I make no admonitions whatsoever, and I didn’t make any right here.” – Barry Commoner242

The February 1970 issue of

TIME Magazine hit newsstands with

Barry Commoner’s face on the cover as “The Paul Revere of Ecology.”

TIME described him as a professor with a “class of millions” who had become “a spokesman for the common man.” Commoner was also a spokesman for nature in humanity’s

“war against nature,” exemplifying a new kind of scientist – “concerned, authoritative, and worldly, an iconoclast” who refused to remain

“sheltered in the ivory laboratory.”243 The cover of TIME on February 2, 1970, featuring Commoner as the “Paul Revere of Ecology.” Acrylic painting by Mati Klarwein.

242 Buckley Jr., “The Firing Line,” May 1, 1973, 35:35. 243 “Environment: Paul Revere of Ecology,” TIME Magazine, February 2, 1970. Accessed January 4, 2017, web. Cooperman 80

Many who remember Commoner today (after his death in 2012) similarly describe him as a speaker for ecology silenced by the destructive tendencies of man. The

New York Times recalled him as a “leader among a generation of scientist-activists” who realized the “toxic consequences of America’s post-World War II technology boom.”244

The Times notes that Commoner was far from “the only one sounding alarms,” pointing out the popularity of those like Rachel Carson before him, but The Times claims that he was perhaps the most peripatetic in his efforts to rally the public around the concerns of the scientific community.245 Commoner was notable in “making the science of ecology accessible” to a wide audience of students and activists around the nation. The same year that Commoner was hailed as the “Paul Revere of Ecology,” he gave 32 major speeches, wrote 14 articles, and traveled to numerous college campuses around the United States.246

I argue that Commoner was not simply making science accessible, but rather, he spoke for one conception of time that rejected Jewish and Christian linearity. Whether he intended to or not, Commoner used rhetoric of cyclicality that paralleled that of countercultural religious discourse at the time. Cyclical temporality has its roots in the

Transcendentalist critique of Christianity, so in this chapter, I track how the 1970s counterculture revived these Transcendentalist ideals. These movements used circles to personify Earth’s interconnected, self-sufficient being in the same way Commoner used them in his text. By embodying these facets of nature mysticism, Commoner became a nature mystic of his own. Commoner was not just advocating for getting in touch with the

244 Daniel Lewis, “Scientist, Candidate and Planet Earth’s Lifeguard,” The New York Times, October 1, 2012, web, accessed January 11, 2017. 245 Ibid. 246 “Environment: Paul Revere of Ecology,” TIME, February 2, 1970. Cooperman 81 natural rhythms of nature, but rather, he invoked a circular view of time as a way to avert

Ehrlichian apocalypticism.

The Historical Path to Countercultural Nature Religion

In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson published his famed essay “Nature,” which became one of the landmark publications of the Transcendentalist philosophy. “Nature” suggests that humans should each see themselves as “the whole” rather than “merely another part of a whole.”247 Emerson idealized the potential of humans and constantly attempted to improve man’s self image.248 He explains in Nature that “All the facts in natural history taken by themselves, have no value, but are barren, like a single sex. But marry it to human history, and it is full of life.”249 Nature itself was not sacred to

Emerson, but rather, he found fundamental meaning in the power of the human mind and metaphysical reality.250 Emerson preferred to look above nature rather than deeper into it to find “the divine spark,” thus raising his eyes above “this unsatisfying life” towards a harmonious, immortal serenity.251

Fifteen years younger than Emerson, Henry David Thoreau developed Emerson’s perspectives into one more explicitly grounded in nature worship. Thoreau’s interest in nature sprung from his upbringing in his urbanizing hometown of Concord and other

247 Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 104. 248 Ibid., 107. 249 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in Transcendentalism: A Reader, edited by Joel Myerson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 200), 135. 250 David Landis Barnhill, “The Spiritual Dimension of Nature Writing,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Ecology, edited by Richard Gottlieb (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 427. 251 Emerson, “Nature,” in Transcendentalism: A Reader, 135. Cooperman 82 parts of Massachusetts. Historian Donald Worster describes Thoreau’s transcendental tendencies as a reaction to “the chaos and tensions begat by economic revolution.”252

Behind the agrarian façade of Massachusetts townships was a society growing increasingly capitalistic, industrialized and mobile. Self-sufficiency was becoming rare as railroad corporations like the Fitchburg Railroad brought an insatiable thirst for economic revival to the Massachusetts countryside. In the 1850s, Northeastern America was no longer the nation in which a “pastoral idyll or a cozy sinecure" could be easily realized.253

People who had been farmers for decades became factory hands. Thoreau looked back on

Concord in the mid-nineteenth century and, to his shock, all he saw was a “maimed and imperfect nature.”254 This was the new status quo. Thoreau feared the negative impact technology was having on human-nature relationships. 255 After reading Emerson’s

Nature himself and becoming personally close friends with Transcendentalism’s founding father, Thoreau became a self-educated naturalist and field ecologist. He made it his mission to better understand the natural world and how humans related to it in order to counteract the deleterious effects technology seemed to be having on his pastoral childhood home. He viewed technology as only one piece of a much bigger problem of humans neglecting the environment and each other, just like Barry Commoner.

Thoreau was an arcadian, a tradition that Emerson never quite engaged with in his obsession with idealism. Named after the ancient Greek region called Arcady, whose inhabitants were said to roam at peace with the earth and its creatures, arcadianism

252 Worster, Nature’s Economy, 63. 253 Ibid. 254 Henry David Thoreau, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Journal, Volume 8: 1854, edited by Elizabeth Hall Witherell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 150. 255 Worster, Nature’s Economy, 75-76. Cooperman 83 grounded itself in an ecological ethic of coexistence rather than Jewish or Christian dominionism. Man was a humble part of nature rather than superior to it.256 Unlike

Emerson, Thoreau did find spiritual sustenance in the natural world rather than in the idealized concept of looking inward and upward. Thoreau avoided relying on “the self- inflating rhetoric of power and dominion.”257 Historian Bron Taylor comments that

Thoreau was a naturalist far more “scientifically inclined” than Emerson, which perhaps

“fueled a more naturalistic form of nature spirituality” than Emerson and “most other transcendentalists.”258 Thoreau’s transcendentalism blended two frameworks together that today we may find difficult to balance with one another: the role of a scientific naturalist and the role of a spiritual guide.

Thoreau’s perspective was explicitly non-Christian. Arcadianism believes it is rooted in the Pagan past’s religious tradition of finding spiritual meaning in nature, so it makes sense that Thoreau pushed against Christianity for its inability to comprehend the value of the natural world. He stopped writing about a Jewish or Christian “God,” instead referring to a body of “Universal Intelligence” as the higher order of the universe.259

Thoreau’s journal condemns the way “Christian vandals lay waste the forest temples to build miles of meeting houses and horse-sheds to feed their box stoves,” connecting

Christianity to environmental degradation and viewing nature as merely a resource to use

(which Lynn White would infamously articulate later in 1968, as described in Chapter

256 Ibid., 471. 257 Ibid., 107; see further discussion in Joel Porte, Emerson and Thoreau: Transcendentalists in Conflict (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1966). 258 Bron Taylor, “Religion and Environmentalism in America and Beyond,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Ecology, edited by Richard Gottlieb (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 593. 259 Worster, Nature’s Economy, 87 Cooperman 84

1).260 In Thoreau, spiritual revelation and scientific pursuit mingled. However, as religious studies scholar Catherine Albanese notes, “he never fully got there” in terms of openly admitting to the Pagan tendencies accompanying his romanticized arcadian perspective.261

It would be another 140 years until Thoreau’s cautious Pagan assertions were realized in the American countercultural movements. The counterculture represented a boiling point for discontented Americans. Historian Sydney Ahlstrom suggests that the

“nation’s sense of unity had fallen to its lowest point since 1861 [the start of the

American Civil War].”262 Like the Transcendentalists, the “status quo” was the ultimate countercultural enemy.263 Post-World War II technology in particular represented a careless dependence on the “status quo” to thinkers like Barry Commoner. Commoner was questioning what Thoreau questioned a century earlier: were humans inseparable from our technologies? Had humans simply become “tools of their tools,” as Thoreau remarks in Walden?264 At Brown University in 1970, Barry Commoner answered this. He said that environmental pollution was not an “unfortunate, but incidental, by-product” of something simple like overpopulation or production intensification. Rather, the

260 Henry David Thoreau, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Journal, Volume I: 1837-1844, edited by Elizabeth Hall Witherell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 298. 261 Catherine Albanese, Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 93. 262 Ahlstrom, A Religious History, 1081. 263 I do not use “status quo” as a defined, absolute term because the notion that there must have been a definitive status quo in the 1970s is not historically accurate. However, the “status quo” reflects the general perspective at the time that there was something to rail against in society, that there was a “stick it to the man!” attitude amongst the counterculture even though that enemy was ill-defined between individuals. 264 Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or, Life in the Woods, edited by Robert F. Sayre (New York: Library of America, 2010), 29. Cooperman 85 degradation of nature was an “intrinsic feature of the very technology” we had developed to “enhance productivity.”265 The same “maimed and imperfect nature” resulting from technological advancements that Thoreau lamented was becoming more and more apparent to a new generation threatened by even newer technologies.

However, nothing represented the national status quo in the sixties and seventies more than the Christian church. A 1974 Gallup poll revealed that 52% of California clergymen surveyed agreed that Protestant churches had “become too aligned with the status quo in the United States to become major agents of social reform.”266 Christianity could not answer the question Catherine Albanese poses in Nature Religion in America:

“What happens when the heirs of Puritanism, Platonism, the Enlightenment, and the

Revolution seek answers to religious questions in a world in which traditional religion was unraveling?”267

Amidst a chaotically industrializing world, the Christian Church felt outdated for many young Americans seeking a closer relationship with the natural environment.268 In fact, many countercultural faiths seemed to form as a reaction to this Christian “status quo.” A priest of the Church of All Life (a Pagan organization) by the name of Tom

Williams wrote in 1970 that humans were “basically life-affirming and nature-oriented as opposed to the anti-life, spirit oriented, anti-nature religions of the Jewish or Christian tradition.”269 Another Pagan reinforced this in an interview with Margot Adler, a Wiccan

265 Barry Commoner, untitled lecture, Brown University, April 22, 1970. 266 Harold E. Quinley, The Prophetic Clergy: Social Activism Among Protestant Ministers (New York: Wiley, 1974), 61. 267 Albanese, Nature Religion in America, 80. 268 Wuthnow, After Heaven, 72. 269 Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today (New York: Viking Press, 1979), 279. Cooperman 86 who wrote Drawing Down the Moon as an ethnographic encyclopedia of the Craft in the counterculture. The interviewee lamented the “fascist political Christianity” which had become the “pervading form of Christianity in the world.”270 This trend was true even within families. According to theologian Harvey Cox who wrote about his experiences with Eastern religions in 1977, nearly 70% of young adult Krishna devotees had parents who were members of a Jewish or Christian denomination.

College campuses were hubs for religious experimentation, which trickled down from liberal professors to the cohorts of college students under their care. Countercultural religions like Neo-Paganism, Goddess Worship and Zen Buddhism were framed as solutions to the social woes of the turbulent sixties among academics. Cox said that

“dereligioning” was a good thing in how it freed civilians from “oppressive moralities.”271 Sociologist Robert Bellah exclaimed to a lecture hall at Harvard Divinity

School, “the biblical tradition provides insufficient resources to meet the desperate problems that beset us.” He suggested that his audience experiment with Zen Buddhism, indigenous religion, and Pagan ideologies.272 Further inspiration for young Americans came from sources as popular as The Beatles, whose publicist lamented in 1964 that they were “so anti-Christ they shock me, which isn’t an easy thing.”273

Gary Snyder exemplifies the way nature religions incorporated the growing ecology movement. Snyder was a Buddhist and scholar of Asian Studies who became an influential countercultural leader. His fears for American society permeated letters he

270 Adler, Drawing Down the Moon, 139. 271 Wuthnow, After Heaven, 73. 272 Robert Bellah, "No Direction Home: Religious Aspects of the American Crisis," in Search for the Sacred: The New Spiritual Quest, edited by Myron B. Bloy, Jr. (New York: Seabury Press, 1972), 74. 273Anthony Scaduto, The Beatles (New York: New American Library, 1968), 27. Cooperman 87 wrote to his close friend, poet Allen Ginsberg (a fellow ecologically and politically liberal figure). In 1968, he noted that “America may go all shit to hell” due to the “a fascist takeover, or a major economic depression, or total decay of the cities into violence.”274 He exclaimed how “staggered” he was by the “immorality of fat careless affluence everywhere,” and how this alone made him pursue the essence of the Hindu

“naked sadhu” (saint) that lived by minimalism. In 1969, Snyder attended the bi-annual

Sierra Club Wilderness Conference. He wrote to Ginsberg that he “heard numerous scary facts from sharp young scientists – knowledge of approaching horror far outstrips any imagination to deal with it – beginnings of some talk about radical conservation tactics. A strong feeling for all this is beginning in the young around here – but they’re ignorant.

Should push for radical ‘GREEN STUDIES’ courses on every campus.” He vowed later that year in a different letter that he would “really sharpen [his] push down to American

Indian soul/Ecology knowledge/Buddhist wisdom” to better understand the environment and spirituality.275 His correspondent Ginsberg became similarly interested in ecology, sharing with Snyder in one letter that a ““[Jacques] Cousteau says 40% of ocean life gone in the last 20 years! NY Times editorial says world’s oceans be dead as Lake Erie by

2000.”276 (Barry Commoner, in fact, wrote the original report of the destruction of Lake

Erie that was picked up in The New York Times article Ginsberg spoke of.) By October of

1969, Snyder reported excitedly to Allen that he was “doing a big ecology benefit reading at Berkeley.”277 Over two years, he transitioned from identifying environmental issues

274 Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, The Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, edited by Bill Morgan (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008), 99. 275 Snyder and Ginsberg, The Selected Letters, 112 and 116. 276 Ibid., 123. 277 Ibid., 117. Cooperman 88 without naming them as such to becoming an active member of the ecology movement himself.

Snyder was picking up on a national trend of non-Christian faiths identifying with the environmental movement. Neo-Pagan Goddess Worshipper and writer Starhawk remarked in the late seventies that “Witchcraft can be seen as a religion of ecology.”278

Margot Adler found that most Neo-Pagans saw ecology as an ingrained aspect of their faith. Adler interviewed one Pagan who stated as a matter-of-fact that “If you’re not into ecology, you really can’t be into Paganism.”279

The first Earth Day on April 22, 1970 exemplified the close relationship between

Paganism and the ecology movement. Over 20 million Americans took to the streets and classrooms in 13,000 events nationally to protest environmental degradation and celebrate the worth of our planet. Commoner himself spoke at four different universities on Earth Day 1970.280 Largely perceived as a political demonstration, it had an effect on the White House. Richard Nixon’s State of the Union speech in 1970 exclaimed that “the great question” of the seventies was: “shall we surrender to our surroundings or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water?”281 Earth Day 1970 marked an important transition in environmentalism as the public debut of countercultural religions, the spiritual movements not featured in the State of the Union Address or on the front page of

278 Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: a Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 10. 279 Adler, Drawing Down the Moon, 367. 280 Egan, Barry Commoner, 79.; Adam Rome, The Greening of Earth Day (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013), 116. 281 Richard Nixon, “9 – Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union,” January 22, 1970, published online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, University of California Santa Barbara, web. Cooperman 89

TIME but which now prove just as relevant to understanding Commoner’s perspective on environmental issues. One reporter for Newsweek lamented that “the whole demonstration seemed to lack the necessary passion,” implying a lack of seriousness amongst protesters as the day appeared to some onlookers as a party for the planet rather than a wake for it. Newsweek called the event “a bizarre nationwide rain dance” and “the biggest street festival since the Japanese surrendered in 1945.” 282 Who was doing the celebrating? TIME Magazine answers this question in their 1970 report on Earth Day by describing the day as feeling like a “pagan holiday.”283

Historian Samuel P. Hays comments that Earth Day 1970 was “as much a result as a cause,” and he is right.284 Earth Day resulted from the upswing in environmental activism in the mid-twentieth century, but history’s largest celebration of Planet Earth would not have been possible without the seeds planted by eighteenth century

Transcendentalists concerned about America’s dangerous dependence on the status quo.

Circles and Interconnectedness

Commoner published The Closing Circle the year after Earth Day 1970, and in the book, he relies on two main symbols of circularity to define his temporal environmental philosophy: interconnectedness and the anthropomorphization of Earth as a living being. Commoner’s arguments are reflected in both Transcendentalist nature

282 “A Giant Step – Or a Springtime Skip?” Newsweek 75, May 4, 1970, 27. 283 “The Dawning of Earth Day,” TIME Magazine, April 27, 1970, web, accessed March 28, 2017. 284 Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-85 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 52. Cooperman 90 mysticism and revived nature religions in the counterculture, where cyclical imagery is used to depict an interconnected, living planet that exists in a continuous cycle of time.

Transcendentalist descriptions of natural systems mirror Commoner’s incredulity at the puzzle-like workings of ecosystems. In his 1841 essay fittingly titled “Circles,”

Emerson describes that the “natural world may be conceived as a system of concentric circles” and acknowledges that “there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning.”

He dwells on the “imperceptibly small” ring of the “self-evolving” life cycle of man as well as the “new and larger circles…without end” that represent the natural world around humans.285 To Emerson, neither human life nor natural systems had a start or end.286

Thoreau, too, viewed nature as a “system of necessary relationships” that could not be disturbed in “even the most inconspicuous way without changing, perhaps destroying, the equilibrium of the whole.”287 Thoreau recorded in his journal one late spring day in 1857 that he had stumbled upon a vernal pool full of toads that leapt back and forth in great excitement. He felt deeply connected to the natural world in this moment, recognizing that without these intimate experiences with nature, humans were alien to their own world. When he felt stifled by Concord, all he had to do was relocate this pool of toads, so to speak.288 Then, all life would once again become “organized, or a kosmos, which before was inorganic and lumpish.”289

285 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Circles,” 1841, published online by Texas A&M University, accessed January 12, 2017. 286 Sargent Wood, A More Perfect Union, 67. 287 Worster, Nature’s Economy, 82 288 Ibid., 80. 289 Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 1857, in True Harvest: Readings from Henry David Thoreau for Every Day of the Year, edited by Barry Andrews (Boston: Skinner House Books, 2007); Henry David Thoreau, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: The Maine Cooperman 91

The counterculture revived this language of perfect interconnectedness. In 1969,

Gary Snyder published Earth House Hold, a book that expanded on the relationship between Eastern religions and the environmentalist movement. He writes, “Buddhism holds that the universe and all creatures in it are intrinsically…acting in natural response and mutual interdependence.”290 Additionally, the flexibility that lends a circle so well to adjusting to the “currents in an ever-changing sea,” as Starhawk writes, also makes it vulnerable to breaking if pushed too far. Starhawk explains, “Together, they [the life force and death force] hold each other in the harmony that sustains life, in the perfect orbit that can be seen in the changing cycle of the seasons, in the ecological balance of the natural world.” When this “perfect balance” is disrupted, “the life force is cancer” and

“the death force is war and genocide.” 291 With the “ecological apocalypse” dawning on

America in the 1960s and 1970s, the Transcendentalist idealization of earth’s perfect interconnectedness needed updating to one that recognized the threat humans had to this otherwise fragile, beautiful sense of continued time.

Ultimately, the countercultural nature religions, particularly Neo-Pagans, expanded on this Transcendentalist perspective of interconnectedness by framing the cyclical nature of time as a crucial puzzle piece in Earth’s environmental schematic.

Starhawk notes in 1979’s The Spiral Dance that the “Wheel of the Year” is the time structure that Goddess Worshippers live by. Every year is cyclic, but not in the Jewish or

Christian sense that a year ends and another one of the same length begins. For Goddess

Worshippers, the Wheel of the Year represents the tension between the God and the

Woods, edited by Elizabeth Hall Witherell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 69-71. 290 Gary Snyder, Earth House Hold (New York: New Directions, 1969), 90. 291 Starhawk, The Spiral Dance, 27. Cooperman 92

Goddess and how, if the God were to “cling to any point of the wheel and refuse to give way to change, the cycle would stop; He would fall out of orbit and lose all. Harmony would be destroyed.”292 Not only is the actual year itself a cycle completely reliant on the balance of gods in orbit, but the Goddess Worshipper’s understanding of natural systems on earth relies on harmonious, cyclical conceptions of time. Starhawk writes,

“Underlying the appearance of separateness, of fixed objects within a linear stream of time, reality is a field of energies that congeal, temporarily, into forms. In time, all ‘fixed’ things dissolve, only to coalesce again into new forms, new vehicles.”293 Time was not

“fixed” in this religion – in fact, Wiccan prayer circles today remain a space in which

“the rules of ordinary existence” do not apply, including an “ordinary waking consciousness” that views the world “as fixed.” 294 To Starhawk and her hundreds of thousands of Witchcraft-practicing followers, death was “not an end.” Rather, it was “a stage in the cycle that leads to rebirth.”295 Although Commoner said nothing about countercultural nature religion in The Closing Circle, his view of nature was strikingly similar.

The Earth as a Living Symbol

Thoreau’s own descriptions of the Earth as a living being set the stage for the

Neo-Pagan revival to come. He once was walking in the woods alone at night when he witnessed a “white and slumbering light” through the trees. He “rejoiced in that light as if

292 Ibid., 30. 293 Ibid., 18. 294 Ibid.; James R. Lewis, Witchcraft Today: An Encyclopedia of Wiccan and Neo-Pagan Traditions (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1999), 59. 295 Starhawk, The Spiral Dance, 27. Cooperman 93 it had been a fellow creature” and declared his belief that the “woods were not tenantless, but choke-full of honest spirits.”296 In a different personal journal, he wrote that he saw the “one life” of an animate earth from his experience of wandering into a pond full of energetic toads.297 His Mother Nature imagery is more explicit, referring to “Nature” with a capitalized N as a “she” and discussing nature as “our great-grandmother” in his famed 1854 Walden.298 Thoreau notes in awe that “…this vast, howling mother of ours,

Nature” is a “personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features.”299 Not only does Thoreau mirror descriptions of a Mother Earth who is universal, but he implies she has a face – a uniquely human feature. Thoreau implores the necessity of getting to know earth as if it were a person, of submersing himself in the

“most dismal swamp” where “the strength, the marrow of Nature” can be found.300

Thoreau’s feminine personified Nature was revived in the mid-twentieth century as Gaia in both countercultural nature religions and science. As Donald Worster describes in Nature’s Economy, Gaia became the “most widely discussed scientific metaphor of the

Age of Ecology, overshadowing…Spaceship Earth.”301 However, Worster is referring to the Gaia of the Gaia Hypothesis, the 1960s brainchild of chemist James Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Margulis who suggested that the “biota and its environment constitute a single homeostatic system that opposes changes unfavorable for life.”302 The

296 Thoreau, The Maine Woods, 181. 297 Worster, Nature’s Economy, 80. 298 Thoreau, Walden, 138. 299 Ibid., 214. 300 Ibid., 190. 301 Worster, Nature’s Economy, 279. 302 James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, “Gaia and Geognosy,” in Global Ecology: Towards a Science of the Biosphere, edited by Mitchell B. Rambler, Lynn Margulis, and Rene Fester (San Diego: Academic Press, Inc., 1989), 6. Cooperman 94 most fundamental principle of life to these Gaia hypothesizers was not individualistic competition but rather, cooperation and symbiosis. Gaia demonstrated to its scientific followers that organisms relied on one another to survive, and that even the highest organisms – like humans – needed the tiniest bacterium.303 Commoner took on this scientific approach to Gaia by arguing a very similar point about co-dependency between species.

However, Commoner played with Neo-Pagan approaches to Gaia through his suggestions that earth itself had personhood, something that Lovelock and Margulis shied away from in their scientific approach. Before the Gaia Hypothesis, Gaia was a Pagan symbol for Earth’s personhood. The Neo-Pagan Church of All Worlds (CAW), for example, began evolving its central philosophy in the early 1970s around the “planet

Earth as a deity, as a single living organism.”304 CAW pastor Oberon Zell-Ravenheart described the “common viewpoints” of nearly all Pagan faiths as a “veneration of a

Earth-Mother Goddess; animism and pantheism;…love, respect, awe and veneration for

Nature and Her mysteries;…and the sense of Man being a microcosm corresponding to the macrocosm of all Nature.”305 The Earth Mother was the same between Pagan faiths, and “like all living Beings” she was “a real living Being.” In The Spiral Dance, Starhawk similarly describes the personhood granted to Earth in Neo-Paganism: “The Goddess does not rule the world; She is the world. Manifest in each of us, She can be known internally by every individual, in all her magnificent diversity.”306 Adler notes that Neo-

303 Worster, Nature’s Economy, 381-82. 304 Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon, 280. 305 Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, “TheaGenesis: The Birth of The Goddess,” Green Egg 5, no. 40, July 1, 1971, published online by the Church of All Worlds, accessed April 3, 2017. 306 Starhawk, The Spiral Dance, 9. Cooperman 95

Paganism demands “the cherishing of a much wider range of things. If you are a monotheist and your particular god is not life-oriented, it is easy to destroy the biosphere you depend on for sustenance – witness where we are right now.”307 Margot Adler implies that animistic conceptions of the Mother Earth are a reaction to “where we are right now” in the ecological crisis of the 1970s. Even American practitioners of Eastern religions admired the animism that pervaded Pagan beliefs. Gary Snyder wrote in 1972 that “maybe, living creatures create and regulate ozone layer – as one whole organism- permitting life of cells on earth out of the water ‘The Goddess’ a more-than-viable notion.”308

Commoner describes the Earth’s living, breathing skin, but more importantly, he taps into one of the most common Pagan manifestations of Gaia: the Earth as sick.

According to Graham Harvey in Contemporary Paganism, “Pagans frequently express the idea that the Earth is sick, and in their belief that it is a living autonomous subject, they take this as more than a metaphor for pollution or habitat destruction. They also view some landscapes as sick: the digging of quarries, the diverting or polluting of rivers, the destruction of forests, woods, and hedges, the industrialization of agriculture with its monocultural fields and its chemical sprays and the building of super-highways.”309 A

Witch interviewed by Adler stated that “the Earth is the Great Mother and has been raped, pillaged, and plundered and once again must be celebrated if we are to survive.”310

Commoner similarly described how the earth had been “assaulted” time and time again

307 Adler, Drawing Down the Moon, 34. 308 Snyder and Ginsberg, The Selected Letters, 170. 309 Graham Harvey, Contemporary Paganism: Religions of the Earth from Druids and Witches to Heathens and Ecofeminists (New York; New York University Press, 2011), 156. 310 Adler, Drawing Down the Moon, 367. Cooperman 96 by humans.311 Penny Novack, leader of Philadelphia’s Pagan Way, wrote in 1974 that the

“devouring cancer which is humanity” was ruining the “living flesh of our world biosis.”312 A Gardnerian princess (a participant in the Gardnerian sect of Wicca) from

Long Island also described the earth as a being needing “rest and replenishment” if it were to recover from environmental degradation, just as a human needs rest and replenishment when sick with the flu.313 Commoner likewise emphasized how the earth’s capacity for self-repair and recovery was threatened by humans poisoning its water and air.

While the underlying rhetorical similarities to the countercultural nature religions are evident in how Commoner personifies the earth beyond the scientific perspective of

Gaia, Commoner never steps outside the appropriate realm of scientific rationality – similar to Thoreau’s own cautiousness in proclaiming Pagan beliefs as a naturalist bound to logic and reason in a Christian landscape. Thoreau was anchored to empiricism throughout his musings on environmental consciousness.314 He lamented in a letter to his sister that science prevented his spiritual imagination from flourishing fully, stating “I have sadly become scientific.”315 Worster suggests that the arcadian transcendentalists like Thoreau attempted to introduce qualities of Pagan animism to scientific observation.

However, it was “breasting the current of opinion” to promote animism as valid scientific

311 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 57. 312 Penny Novack, “Pagan Way—Where Now?” Earth Religion News I, no. 4 (1974), 36. 313 Adler, Drawing Down the Moon, 369 314 Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, Ecology and Religion (Washington D.C.: Island Press, 2014), 56. 315 Henry David Thoreau, The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, edited by Walter Harding and Carl Bode (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 1958), 283. Cooperman 97 theory.316 With Commoner’s reputation riding on his legitimacy as a scientist, perhaps this current was similarly too much to breast even in the 1960s and 1970s when Paganism was making its own waves. Oberon Zell-Ravenheart lamented in 1971 – the year The

Closing Circle was published – that “science had not yet progressed to the point of being able to provide objective validation for what must have seemed, to outsiders, to be mere superstition.”317 For a religion that even practitioners understood to be perceived as

“irrational” to the public, Commoner translated Pagan attitudes into something scientifically legitimate.318

The Mysticism of “Seeking”

In a way, Commoner validates mysticism, the belief in a hidden order of interconnections that tie the planet together. Once those cyclical relationships are acknowledged to exist, one must seek out those connections to access true spiritual and universal knowledge. Seeking itself, according to Robert Wuthnow in After Heaven, is

“illustrated by people’s insistence that the sacred cannot be known fully and that they are mortals whose lives are constantly in transition.”319 To Commoner, it was not enough to know that the earth worked in cycles – he aimed to understand how that was true. While

Paul Ehrlich spoke like an evangelist, Commoner spoke like a nature mystic.

Mysticism permeated the works of Emerson and Thoreau and became a common feature of the American environmental imagination. Across liberal nature religions in the mid nineteenth century, the “mystical experience had become a hallmark of religion at its

316 Worster, Nature’s Economy, 92. 317 Zell, “Theagenesis,” 1971. 318 Adler, Drawing Down the Moon, 5. 319 Wuthnow, After Heaven, 6. Cooperman 98 most awesome, profound, and desirable.”320 Thoreau, for example, considered himself a

“seeker of the primitive forest” in an effort to escape the realm of humans and “transcend this trivial world.”321 Emerson called himself “an endless seeker” because of how he experimented with facts.322 The spirit of seeking was not limited to explicit uses of the word “seeking,” but it extended to references of higher truths, deeper meanings, and looking beyond surface level facts for the root causes. Emerson’s “Circles” argues that it is essential for a human being to search for “the deeper law,” implying that naturalists or chemists who have “explored the gravity of atoms and the elective affinities” are not actually stretching beyond the simple facts of science.323 He explains that the “one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle.”324 Circles, to Emerson, represented a vehicle by which to experiment and seek higher meaning within the natural world.

The countercultural movement in the 1970s – across religions – continued to seek societal truths beyond scientific and real world experiences in a variety of ways. For

Buddhists and practitioners of adapted Eastern religions, this meant intense self- reflection. Gary Snyder described in 1971 that “doing a zen reading returned me in a way to my own best and central practice…that of Zen, ‘Seeing into your own nature.’”325 He explained: “One can prove it for himself by taking a good look at his own nature through

320 Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2005), 28. 321 Worster, Nature’s Economy, 99. 322 Emerson, “Circles,” 1841. 323 Ibid. 324 Ibid. 325 Snyder and Ginsberg, The Selected Letters, 136. Cooperman 99 meditation. Once a person has this much faith and insight, he must be led to a deep concern with the need for radical social change through a variety of hopefully non-violent means.”326 In fact, one of the impacts of the growing “American encounter with Asian religions,” motivated by thinkers like Snyder, was a “heightened emphasis on the practice of meditation and the value of the concentrated mind.”327 Neo-Pagans similarly called for understanding the natural world through connecting with the environment on a personal level. A Witch echoed Thoreau when he said in a mid-1970s interview with Margot

Adler that “A Pagan is a believer in the values of self-survival, of literally sitting down in the swamp, knee deep in mud, and becoming part of it, letting it become a part of one.”328

Commoner’s recommendations for his audience in his texts closely align with these countercultural prescriptions for understanding the unknowable questions of the natural world, and in the process, his mystical rhetoric averts the panic encouraged by

Neo-Malthusian voices. A 1972 piece for Science describes Commoner as “sort of mystical about the balance of nature and somehow absolves the role of population growth.”329 Commoner discusses how humans should experience nature both personally and through scientists. Rather than reading textbooks or watching the news, Commoner argues the best way to “understand the natural world” can be “gained by personal experience.” He suggests to his readers to explore “the woods around Walden Pond” or the “reaches of the Mississippi,” alluding to Thoreau and Mark Twain’s mystical

326 Snyder, Earth House Hold, 91. 327 Schmidt, Restless Souls, 16. 328 Adler, Drawing Down the Moon, 363. 329 Constance Holden, “Ehrlich versus Commoner: An Environmental Fallout,” Science, 245. Cooperman 100 tendencies in their own works as well as the modern countercultural movements encouraging this same quiet, calm contemplation in the natural world.

Rather than dwell on the future to come, Commoner publically looked for answers as to why the planet worked in such coherent cycles in the first place and how we could restore balance to our world. At a talk in Berkeley, California in 1973, Commoner explained to his audience that “man, as a terrestrial animal, ought to fit into the appropriate natural ecosystem.” But he searched for more. He told his audience that we must “not merely accept that this statement is true, but seek to discover why it is true, and what bearing that might have on social action.” He diagnosed the public with “ecological myopia – a failing to look beyond the most immediate simple” facts toward the “far richer realm of its cause and alternative cures.”330 He desired to seek out deeper meanings of the root causes of the ecological crisis. Comparatively, Neo-Malthusians only used seeking as a literal term. In “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Hardin uses a metaphor to illustrate the woes of resource management by saying that “each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain” by adding animals to his herd.331 He claims that people seek resources for the sake of utility. Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, and Richard Holm published a compilation of readings from Scientific American in 1971 that includes an entire section devoted to the limits of resources on the planet titled “Limits Rarely Perceived.” In it, they discuss the insatiable need for humans to seek water, soil, food resources, money, and other material resources.332 The fact that seeking is constrained to the arithmetic rules

330 Commoner, untitled lecture, Berkeley, 1973. 331 Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, 1244. 332 “Limits Rarely Perceived,” in Man and the Ecosphere: Readings from “Scientific American,” edited by Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, and Richard Holm (London: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1971). Cooperman 101 of resource limits in the Neo-Malthusian perspective while taking on a much wider, philosophical meanings in Commoner’s rhetoric points towards a fundamental clash in perspective on human nature. In Neo-Malthusianism, humans do not have the potential to

(nor do they deserve to) understand our relationship with the planet beyond the basic logic of resource consumption. Commoner’s perspective is far more hopeful about what humans can gain from connecting with nature beyond a simple consumption-based relationship.

Ultimately, Commoner’s development from nuclear fallout researcher to public nature mystic was grounded in his conception of cyclical temporality. In Earth House

Hold, Snyder states that “It is my own view that the coming revolution [in spirituality] will close the circle and link us in many ways with the most creative aspects of our archaic past.”333 He uses the image of closing a circle to connect modern humanity with spiritual traditions of the past. In encouraging his own readers to think like Thoreau (and like countercultural voices) in The Closing Circle, Commoner advocates for a mode of environmentalism guided by the nature mystics of the past rather than the apocalyptic prophets of the future.

333 Snyder, Earth House Hold, 93. Cooperman 102

Conclusion

This project began with my interest in mid-twentieth century environmentalist rhetoric, but I found myself constantly pulled back to the conflict between Paul Ehrlich and Barry Commoner in the 1970s. I could see why each writer compelled so many

Americans. Ehrlich’s dramatic prophecies scared me as much as Commoner’s rationalizations calmed me. After all, as a college student concerned about the planet, I was the very audience they had targeted forty years ago. What I could not understand was why the two so fiercely disagreed. If they had the same end goal of helping Earth, why could there be no middle ground, no reluctant admittance that the other had something right? Because environmentalism today is similarly full of strong disagreements over what to do and when to do it, I aimed to figure out what was contributing to the stubborn ideological divide between two of the most vocal and clashing environmentalists in

American history.

To answer this question, I spent the majority of this essay diving into how each was speaking to the American people in the 1970s. Their debate did not occur in a vacuum. As I explained, the battle between Paul Ehrlich and Barry Commoner in the

1970s represented the direct clash of two different temporal perspectives that had been growing within strains of environmentalism for decades. Each argument was partly rooted in a greater societal conflict over how time worked, and we see that difference at play most clearly in the religions of the time period.

Paul Ehrlich spent the late 1960s and 1970s pleading with his audience to act immediately because tomorrow was not guaranteed. Armed with scientific facts, elaborate scenarios describing our coming demise, and an impressively confident Cooperman 103 delivery, he left little up to question. We were hurtling forward to our inevitable, Biblical end if we did not take extreme measures to curb population growth.

Many Americans were ready for his message. The growing fundamentalist

Christian population had accepted apocalypticism as a normal aspect of their philosophical outlook. Dispensational premillenialism validated the End Times for Bible- believing Christians, and thinkers like Billy Graham were hard at work evangelizing

Americans years before Ehrlich became a figure in the mainstream environmental imagination. The pieces were in place for The Population Bomb to make waves, and indeed it did. The book represented a triumph of both secular Neo-Malthusian ideals and, although Ehrlich would never admit it, Christian convictions of the apocalypse.

Amidst all the Ehrlichian doom and gloom, Barry Commoner offered an alternative. Painting the planet’s ecosystems as a series of intertwining cycles rather than a finite array of resources, Commoner pulled from a circular temporal philosophy that avoided Ehrlich’s fatalism. Strains of both nineteenth-century Thoreauvian transcendentalism and twentieth-century nature religion revivals are evident in

Commoner’s calm explanations of an interconnected planet. To Commoner, as to

Thoreau and Neo-Pagans and Buddhist converts, time worked in balanced, resilient cycles instead of a bounded path.

Lines and circles did not fit together, and temporality continued to haunt this debate – whether they admitted to it or not. Forty years later, it seems that these strains still persist in the dialogue about climate change. It had not yet been named when

Commoner and Ehrlich were duking it out, but climate change has become the

“Ecological Crisis” of the modern era. Debates abound over how to actually prevent Cooperman 104 climate change. Do we stop what we are doing? Do we seek techno-fixes? Do we hinder economic development elsewhere in the world? Do we empower developing nations?

These are questions that modern environmentalists grapple with, and differing conceptions of time emerge from this debate even if we do not realize we are engaging with them. My thesis worked to expose these underlying assumptions about temporality by studying religious imagery, where those conceptions of time are so overwhelmingly clear. But the religious metaphors that clarified these temporal symbols 40 years ago have certainly shifted. Today, diverging perceptions of time still pervade environmental discourse and ultimately prevent effective collaboration.

Take the current debate between environmental thought leaders Bill McKibben and Ted Nordhaus. While McKibben represents the “traditional environmentalist” who boasts of being arrested for protesting the Keystone XL Pipeline, Nordhaus identifies as an ecomodernist.334 Ecomodernism came to the forefront of environmentalism in 2015 with the publication of “An Ecomodernist Manifesto,” a joint effort of 19 different environmental scientists, writers and activists, including Nordhaus and his frequent writing partner Michael Shellenberger. Ecomodernism urges for accelerated technological progress as the only viable solution for outsmarting climate change.335 Bill

McKibben’s “traditional” views that we need to change our immoral social and economic attitudes of human exceptionalism contrast sharply with the ecomodernist understanding that we must rapidly harness “humankind’s extraordinary powers.” When Nordhaus and

334 Jeanna Bryner, “NASA Climate Scientist Arrested in Pipeline Protest,” Live Science, February 13, 2013, accessed April 27, 2017, web; Brendan FD Barrett, “Eco-Modernists versus Eco-Radicals,” Our World, United Nations University, April 28, 2014, accessed April 27, 2017, web. 335 Multiple authors, “An Ecomodernist Manifesto,” Ecomodernism.org (2015), accessed April 28, 2017. Cooperman 105

Shellenberger published their first environmental work, an essay called “The Death of

Environmentalism” in 2004, McKibben called them “the bad boys of American environmentalism.” 336 It was not long before their friendly relationship became something irreconcilable, and I argue that much of this has to do with their clashing temporal perspectives.

With his pleas for social equality and harmonization with the planet, McKibben’s arguments might sound like Commoner’s, but his delivery is far from the Commoner calm. He speaks like the direct ideological descendent of Paul Ehrlich with his focus on the apocalypse and his attempt to use the End Times as a way to motivate his audience to step in and halt the linear progression of climate change. He wrote arguably the first book for the public about climate change, titled The End of Nature, in 1989. Since then, he has become one of the most prominent environmental journalists and activists as founder of

350.org, an organization encouraging grassroots movements around the globe. The week

I was writing this conclusion was the same week that McKibben came to Williams to give a talk celebrating Earth Week. I was struck by his presentation because the apocalyptic modes of persuasion Ehrlich relied on forty years ago were streaming from

McKibben’s mouth with the same Biblical sense of drama. He began with what felt like just a list of terrifying facts about climate change and how they signify the way we are running out of time. In just ten minutes, McKibben managed to warn about:

1. The way climate change is a “hell of a lot” faster-paced and higher-stakes than

anybody had thought in the 1980s.

336 “The Death of Environmentalism,” The Breakthrough Institute, last modified June 10, 2010, accessed April 28, 2017, web. Cooperman 106

2. We have raised the temperature of the earth 1 degree Celsius, which means

that “every day, the carbon we’ve put into the atmosphere traps the equivalent

of about 400,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs.”

3. March 2017 set a record all-time low for the amount of Arctic sea ice present.

4. Temperatures in the North Pole being 50 degrees higher in the Arctic than the

normal temperature one day when McKibben was visiting.

5. A Yukon river changing course to flow south into the Pacific instead of north

into the Arctic ocean like it had “for thousands of years.”

6. How “an iceberg the size of Wales” is going to break off the Larsen ice shelf

in the Antarctic “sometime in the next few months.”

7. The decimation of South Pacific coral reefs “that have been there for as long

as anybody has any knowledge of.”

8. How sad it is for the “several hundred million people who depend on fish that

are on reefs” and for the people who “depend on coral to break the waves

before it washes ashore on their low-lying islands.”

9. How the drought deepening across Somalia and the surrounding territory

“may turn into the biggest humanitarian crisis since the end of World War II.”

10. How we watch “in horror” as people “stream out of the Middle East because

of the Syrian civil war, a war that the academics now assure was caused in

large part by the deepest drought in what we used to call the fertile crescent.”

11. The refugees “dying on the beaches in Greece” are some of the world’s first

climate refugees and are “the harbinger of many, many millions that will

follow in the course of this century even if we get our act together quickly, Cooperman 107

and if we don’t, that’s the picture of what our world will be like for a very

long time.”337

Much else about his presentation struck me as wildly Ehrlichian, including his reliance on reputable but vague sources like “the academics” and “the scientists” to validate his perspective. But what struck me the most was at one point during his list of gloomy prophecies, he paused and, with a hint of irony, he asked: “Is this Biblical enough for you?” McKibben assumes that his audience understands time as linear and finite to the same degree he does. At the end of this ten minute introduction, he explains, “there’s not a scientist I’ve ever met who thinks we can have anything like the civilizations we’re used to, much less the ecosystems we’re used to.” We are meant to fear the unknown as an abnormal sign that the end is coming – unless we act now.

Ecomodernism, on the other hand, rejects McKibben’s apocalypticism in favor of a technological, nearly utopian vision of a new normal to come. By reducing how much we rely on natural resources, thus “decoupling” human civilizations from nature, we can evade some of the environmental problems that plague our modern society. The ecomodernists who wrote 2015’s “An Ecomodernist Manifesto” came from incredibly different ideological and professional backgrounds, but a central message rings clear in their argument: apocalyptic gloom is a useless tactic. The Manifesto is full of hope for humanity. They advocate for dense urbanization because “cities both drive and symbolize the decoupling of humanity from nature, performing far better than rural economies in providing efficiently for material needs while reducing environmental impact.” They paint a planet where innovation benefits all, whether it’s “a local indigenous community

337 Bill McKibben, “Outside the Comfort Zone,” lecture at Williams College, April 2017. Cooperman 108 or a foreign corporation.” Notably, the ecomodernists are pragmatic in their approach to environmental issues. Climate change may appear as the greatest threat to humanity from where affluent people sit, and McKibben emphasizes this by gathering citizens from developing nations (oftentimes poor people of color) for 350.org photoshoots. The ecomodernists, on the other hand, believe that “climate change and other global ecological challenges are not the most important immediate concerns for the majority of the world's people. Nor should they be. A new coal-fired power station in Bangladesh may bring air pollution and rising carbon dioxide emissions but will also save lives.”338

To the ecomodernists, “meaningful climate mitigation is fundamentally a technological challenge” rather than just a change in social attitudes that McKibben suggests.339 This is something we have heard before in Barry Commoner, who feared America’s blind technological optimism and advocated for the use of responsible, “appropriate” technology to help us limit environmental degradation and solve global social injustices.340 The way ecomodernists like Nordhaus frame their arguments represents a similar understanding of time to Commoner’s – not necessarily as a perfect cycle, but as a system that has been resilient to pressure and in which recalibrating our out-of-whack relationship with the future planet is possible.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger were both relatively unknown environmental strategists before publishing their infamous essay, “The Death of Environmentalism.”

This essay articulated many of the ecomodernist critiques of American environmentalism

338 “An Ecomodernist Manifesto.” 339 Ibid. 340 Commoner, untitled lecture, Berkeley, March 15, 1973. Cooperman 109 as a non-pragmatic system that fails to establish “the marriage between vision, values, and policy.”341

Nordhaus and Shellenberger explain that most Americans view environmentalism as “just another special interest” in our modern society.342

What ties Nordhaus and his ecomodernist cohorts to an inherently different conception of time than McKibben is their insistence that we are in a new normal and that we must recognize it as such. In Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s 2007 book titled Break

Through, they explain that “global warming demands unleashing human power, creating a new economy, and remaking nature as we prepare for the future.”343 The ecomodernists normalize the unknown as a new nature, a new chapter in Earth’s history rather than an oncoming Biblically-scaled catastrophe. The future is something we can “prepare for” by acting now rather than a death sentence if we do not act now.

Further, Nordhaus and Shellenberger are two of the nineteen authors that penned

“An Ecomodernist Manifesto,” which firmly establishes that climate change is something we can adapt to and outsmart through human technology. Rather than demonize humanity, the ecomodernists describe the “extraordinary” capacity of humankind to techno-fix itself out of environmental crises like the “impacts of infectious disease” and how we have “become more resilient to extreme weather and natural disasters.” Instead of fearing the term “Anthropocene,” the much-debated name for what some scientists claim is a new geological age brought on by humans, ecomodernists reclaim it as

341 Ted Norhaus and Michael Shellenberger, “The Death of Environmentalism,” The Breakthrough Institute (2004), PDF, 26. 342 Ibid., 8. 343 Mark Horowitz, “Two Environmentalists Anger Their Brethren,” Wired, September 25, 2007, accessed April 29, 2017, web. Cooperman 110 something to be proud of since we may use technological advancements as “keys to achieving a great Anthropocene.” They recognize that human flourishing has “taken a serious toll on the natural, nonhuman environments and wildlife,” but they aim at

Ehrlichians and McKibbenites by saying that “there is still remarkably little evidence that human population and economic expansion will outstrip the capacity to grow food or procure critical material resources in the foreseeable future.” Humanity faces no “fixed physical boundaries.” Ultimately, they argue that “the total human impact on the environment, including land-use change, overexploitation, and pollution, can peak and decline in this century. By understanding and promoting these emergent processes, humans have the opportunity to re-wild and re-green the Earth” through rapid and pragmatic technological development. 344 Despite arguing for a decoupling of humanity from nature (far from Commoner’s understanding of closely intertwined human-nature relationships), terms like “re-wild,” “re-green,” “remaking nature,” and “a great

Anthropocene” indicate an understanding that humans have certainly altered our balance with the environment but are within reach of restoring some kind of sustainable, new normal.

Fellow ecomodernist journalist Andrew Revkin summarized this perspective in

2017 by saying that facing climate change requires “an embracing of the reality” that any kind of future ecosystem will be unlike the ones we deemed as “normal” in the past –

“Period. Get over that.”345 To avoid wallowing in the “doom and gloom” that pervades so much of modern climate discourse from prominent figures like Bill McKibben, we must

344 “An Ecomodernist Manifesto.” 345Andy Revkin, Jacquelyn Gill, Phoebe Cohen and Nicolas Howe, “Communicating Science in a Post-Fact World,” panel discussion at Williams College, April 2017, 1:13:30. Cooperman 111

“get comfortable with that reality” that we are entering a new era of environmental conditions and must pragmatically adapt to and mitigate them.346 Ecomodernists thus frame the environment as a system that needs recalibrating, but not one that is utterly doomed.

To Paul Ehrlich and Bill McKibben, nothing about our modern world is normal.

To Commoner and to the ecomodernists like Nordhaus, Shellenberger, and Revkin, finding a homeostatic new normal is possible because that is just the way the world has always worked and will continue to work. While McKibben sounds the alarm for every new environmental development as radically unprecedented, Nordhaus is a perennialist.

Humans have faced global crises before – from plagues to natural disasters to oppressive political regimes – and we have managed to solve them as they have periodically arisen.

Climate change is a new kind of challenge, for sure, but we can find a way to adapt just like humans have continuously done in waves throughout history.

This clash came to a head in 2012 when McKibben and Nordhaus were pitted against one another at a South by Southwest panel on modern environmentalism, and their different perspectives on time subtly guided the discussion. At the conference,

McKibben begins by saying, “Truth be told, we’re losing. And we’re losing badly.” He lists a few apocalyptic facts and speculations: “We have physically broken one of the four or five physically largest features on earth [the arctic ice shelves], and the rest are close behind.” Nordhaus looks bored, leaning casually on the table placed between him and

McKibben with a slight smirk on his face. He chimes in by explaining that climate change is a “generative challenge” for humankind, and that it’s “very easy when looking

346 Ibid., 1:14:50. Cooperman 112 at these problems to become very apocalyptic, and I would just remind us that we have risen, not fallen. Everyone sitting in this room – you are the most remarkable human beings who have ever lived on this planet. You live lives of extraordinary opportunity, affluence, freedom.” When Nordhaus condemns the “fatalism” that pervades climate change rhetoric, McKibben looks down at his watch and clasps his hands together.347

The discussion becomes a debate when Nordhaus brings up fracking for natural gas and how quickly some environmentalists reject it as a viable solution – to which

McKibben puts his head in his hands, sniffles, and starts tapping his leg.

Nordhaus: Here’s another example, even more controversial these days. U.S. emissions are declining faster than any country’s in the world, largely in part because of fracking, and not just because we’ve got a lot of cheap gas and airports displacing coal and a market system, but because it puts the wind at the backs of a whole lot of activist efforts. The fact that we have lots of cheap gas makes it lots easier to convince communities, utilities, others to close down coal plants. There’s a bunch of problems with fracking, but when you compare those problems to a set of the problems we have scaling things like renewable, they’re pretty solvable. It’s mostly plugging leaks. McKibben: There’s lots of reasons that people are against fracking. Most of them having to do with the immediate effects and they’re really horrible on the landscapes where people live. It’s a fad diet that will put us on a permanent, slightly reduced plane of carbon emissions instead of allowing a blocking any of the transformative breakthroughs that we need, and that’s assuming that Ted’s right and it’s going to be an easy matter of blocking up the methane leaks into the atmosphere…if we converted the entire planet to gas on an absolute critical time scale, what happens to the planet? What happens is 660 parts per million carbon dioxide and a temperature increase of almost 4 degrees centigrade…

McKibben then claims that most of the “people who were excited about [fracking] for climate reasons have changed their minds” because “the numbers aren’t right.” He

347 South by Southwest Eco, “SXSW Eco 2012: The New Environmentalists,” YouTube video, filmed Fall 2012, uploaded November 7, 2012, 9:00. Cooperman 113 cites a couple of different studies that show that fracking accounts for just 10% of

American carbon emission reductions whereas most people believe, in McKibben’s words, “oh, [fracking is] the reason our carbon emissions are dropping.” Nordhaus begins to argue with McKibben, explaining that “you can’t run a system on wind without backing it up.” Nordhaus accuses McKibben of misinterpreting scientific publications and cherry-picking arguments before McKibben retorts:

I don’t think there’s much difference here [between our perspectives]. I think it’s pretty clear at this point that fracking, that cheap gas isn’t a kind of bridge to the future which is the rhetoric that people kept using. That instead it’s sort of building a rickety pier further out into the hydrocarbon lake. Nordhaus: Bill cites a lot of studies, and there’s a bunch of studies out there, and it’s just what my colleagues would call an excess of objectivity…When we react to these things in the immediate – it’s a gas, it’s a fossil, so it’s bad – and then we go and we find the evidence that supports that, and if we want to break up the polarization which was [the moderator’s] original question, I think we are really well served to question some of those instincts.348

For the rest of the panel, McKibben stops looking at Nordhaus when he speaks.

Nordhaus sits with his hands clasped together, fidgeting with him thumbs or his foot position and leaning away from McKibben. When McKibben cracks his crowd-pleasing jokes, Nordhaus adjusts his glasses and stares unsmiling at the ground. What started as a pleasant discussion among environmentalists ends as what sounds and looks like a deeply personal conflict.

The basic disagreement here is about whether natural gas is a decent solution for climate change and if it actually does help reduce carbon emissions. But more significantly, the two fundamentally clash on their understandings of immediacy,

348 Ibid., 12:00. Cooperman 114 something that McKibben perhaps does not grasp when he claims not to see “much of a difference” in their viewpoint. McKibben views using natural gas as “building a rickety pier further out into the hydrocarbon lake.” Fracking is a problem for McKibben because it is a “rickety” solution for a crisis where we do not have time for subpar fixes, whereas

Nordhaus sees fracking as the “pier” connecting us to environmental-saving innovations to come. He subverts McKibben’s attempts to make the worst-case scenario seem plausible. Their disagreement over immediacy is thus rooted in a fundamental disagreement over the very nature of time and the human capacity to solve environmental problems. For McKibben, immediacy is necessary because time is finite – the longer we sit idly, the greater the risk we take. Nordhaus is cushioned from McKibben’s urgency because, to him and his fellow ecomodernists, time is unending and operates in perennial waves of crisis and human ingenuity.

Temporal perceptions are thus just as much of an obstacle to productive environmental discourse today as they were 40 years ago when Barry Commoner called

Paul Ehrlich a “copout of the worst kind.” The divisions do not exist as clearly as they did in the 1970s, but the conceptions of time that Ehrlich and Commoner perhaps unknowingly grappled with are still being expressed today in new forms in the most tense environmental debates. Environmentalists cannot simply walk into a debate hall and assume that their understanding of time will be shared by their fellow panelists – or by their audiences. Temporality was a defining and yet unspoken-about aspect of one of the most public and lasting debates in American environmentalism. Even if our future holds

Ehrlich’s apocalypse or Commoner’s unbalanced ecosystems, we can find no meaningful Cooperman 115 solution until we address the clashing assumptions about time that we bring to the conversation but never speak about.

Cooperman 116

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