1975
“The seventies are exploding,” announced the Weatherman collective of young American revolutionary activists in January 1970. “Armed violence is in the air. . . . In Seattle, two kids are stopped on the street for a hippie check, attack the pig, rip off his piece, and blow his head off. It’s happening.” They believed that peaceful defiance of the American state had failed: only the gun and the bomb could topple the war machine. [1]
We’ve been doom-watching for at least fifty years over five generations: Silent, Boomer, GenX, Millennial, GenZ. Pick any year in the 1970s and anyone can begin to connect the dots in myriad ways. For me, it was around 1987.
Doomwatch [2] was a dystopian BBC series about ecological/societal degradation, aired a few years after the Club of Rome [3], an organization formed in the late-60s for the purpose of awareness of limits to growth and environmental catastrophe which had surfaced in the scientific literature. It was a seminal work in some ways because the musicians, including David Bowie (and probably Roger Waters and others), had been watching it, and were probably using it as grist for song ideas about the environment. (Pink Floyd’s Breathe on Dark Side of the Moon was one of them).
I became interested in climate change in the late-1980s when Sting started the Rainforest Foundation and had been watching Godfrey Reggio’s “QATSI” trilogy, first released
in 1975. [4]
It’s an interesting coincidence that Greta Thunberg had joined forces with the band 1975. I was already a musician in 1975 and was listening to all the 1960s music, much of which was on a soapbox of some kind. 1975 is beginning to be an iconic year, but we didn’t see it then. But we have been watching the impending doom for the climate since (at least) that point and the changes are more apparent and not just in the background, or out of range of access. In 1975 if one wanted to know more about global warming you’d have to spend lots of time in a library. (Who was doing that in high school if you didn’t have to?)
Each generation has a different baseline of understanding as it relates to activism: Silents were already middle-aged on the first Earth Day in 1970, now many of them have already died. Boomers were in grade school in 1970, and middle-aged at about the formation of the Rainforest Foundation and Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD.
There’s a difference between being interested in climate change and climate change activism. A good portmanteau is factivism (#factivism) because admittedly, it is not totally removed from its soundalike, fascism--at least as it relates to its literal meaning as a bundle of sticks--a tribal phenomenon.
Activism kind of follows the same arc of global terrorism, with younger generations operating on incomplete histories of how terrorism developed and creates a different kind of narrative for activism going forward, now with hashtags. It is interesting that deforestation began (or landstats of the Rondonia region of Western Brazil) [5] began in 1975 and had already been seen with the naked eye in the various space programs in the 1960s. The first plane hijackings began in September 1970. (Dawson’s Field hijackings) [6]
Activism also runs parallel to politics in the sense that the complexity of climate systems is reduced to simple slogans that people can rally around. In 1975, we primarily relied on science publications for facts, and various productions in the arts, including the QATSI-like documentaries. Per McLuhan, these were a “hot” medium, meaning they were too hot to touch (manipulate and interact with). The Internet made the media cool to the touch with free access to all kinds of resources, and to freely create them as an expression of an open democracy. Alexis de Tocqueville liked the idea that America thrived on its ability to create Associations, and those would be its safety valve. But he also said that having too many of them created confusion about what the core themes should be. It’s easy to get confused because there are equal amounts of skepticism and bad information that pervades the topic. Climate projections are still in the same gray area that they were fifty years ago in the sense that democracy itself contributes to. The amount of information that is on YouTube about the topic is staggering, many with what are supposed to be clear facts--no more clear than they’ve been since 1975, and even murkier because of faked content.
My '75
I recall reading a book on acoustic ecology, where one of the field recorders had made the comment that wherever he went in the wild to record, there was some kind of machine running in the background, or the sound of traffic. Modernity has been encroaching on nature since the beginning of the industrial age. (If climate change, in fact, began over 100 years ago, then the 1935 Labor Day Category 5 hurricane in Florida could have been affected by global warming).
In 1992, I made a sound collage titled Terrestrial Episode [7], which included bits of dialog from one of the environmental documentaries I had been watching--as well as material I recorded from news broadcasts. (No Internet yet). The music is inspired by all the world music I was listening to then, inspired by all the musicians I admired: Sting, Peter Gabriel, and all the WOMAD artists. It is all performed mostly on acoustic guitar, set against found sounds, Indian drones, odd meters and backward looping, done on tape by flipping the tape over.
“Rondonia Brazil--transforming the wilderness with deadly efficiency”, “An ancient rain forest is becoming fields and pastures”, Rondonia gone up in smoke”, “What splendid creatures lived here we will never know...”, “will our journey come to an untimely end...only a moment to cut down a tree...”
Another piece of music I wrote, titled Hot New Earth in 1997 [8], have the following lyric lines:
The raising of the sea
Take away the trees
The means for recovery
Poison pills for a feverish child
Cure the ills
Before it dies
The 90s were my 70s in terms of climate change awareness.
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2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x62v922C-IM
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome
4. https://www.koyaanisqatsi.org/films/koyaanisqatsi.php
5. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/world-of-change/Deforestation
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawson%27s_Field_hijackings
7. https://youtu.be/1nP_O3yPrJE
8. https://youtu.be/aVXdvgBDcHY
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