And a lot of the early stuff is long before my time, and maybe....yes, a little arcane given that most of the people I teach have career plans to be game wardens or work at a state agency or go into industrial hygiene. But I think as I've attained the age of 50, I'm allowed to be a tiny bit of a minor-league crank about some things, and this is my thing:
I think people should know stuff tangential to their specific career training. I think there should be some elements of humanities incorporated into STEM classes, and elements of history.
So that's why I have a copy of the painting commonly known as The Oxbow in one of my lectures, and I at least mention the Hudson River School. And I have a couple slides about Transcendentalism, and even Thoreau (even though I admit I think of him as a bit of a poser - perhaps even "the first hipster" and not in the positive sense of wanting authenticity so much as in the "look at me" sense). And I spend some time on John Muir (yes I know he's been declared Problematic in some ways, but my experience is that most of our students are willing to sit with that distinction and not throw the whole person out because of it) and Hetch Hetchy and all of that.
It's when I get into the later stuff that I have weird emotions. I LIVED some of that stuff. Granted, I was a baby with the Cuyahoga River burned (and yes, it freaks people out who are unfamiliar with that fact, but it is absolutely a thing, in fact, it burned more than once, but the 1969 fire is the one that gets all the press) and I wasn't even really a toddler yet when the first Earth Day happened, and yet, and yet....all of that was kind of in the air when I was a kid.
I think I've already mentioned that I have a copy of "Sparrows Don't Drop Candy Wrappers" (a 1971 book that is like an environment primer for kids) that my mom bought for me. (And we had other books like that, some about doing more with less, some about organic gardening).
One thing I remember about the 1970s was that in some ways, they seemed a more optimistic time. For one thing, maybe we weren't aware of the scope of the problems we faced (I think there was awareness of rising CO2 levels, and I remember for a fact talking about the thinning ozone when I was in fifth grade - so about 1979 - but there wasn't the sense of "we're doomed and every time we take a hot shower or turn on the AC we are making it immeasurably worse")
I think there was partly more of a sense we'd somehow innovate our way out of some of the problems. And also, I think, maybe, a sense that individual action DID help....that, for example, picking up litter on your street and encouraging people not to litter and put out trash cans so people could avoid littering would fix things in a very specific way, and our lives would be better....and now sometimes the sense I *almost* get from some quarters is "meh, litter doesn't matter and we deserve to live in an ugly world because we're terrible people" or the endless lawyerballing about how what little things an individual can do don't really matter because multinational corporations are doing so much worse....and I think that maybe does lead to a bit of paralysis in the individual.
(Kind of like the whole "faith left mortally wounded by works that didn't work out" thing I talked about the other day, now I think of it....it is easy to lose optimism and hope when you feel like anything you do is tiny and useless in the face of larger badness. Or like my periodic bleating about how my efforts to individually be a kind and caring person seem not to matter at all in a world where some person can spray bullets from a hotel room window and kill a couple hundred people because...well, some reason we'll never know)
But I am sharing the things I remember, and it makes me feel old.
I remember when billboards were a HUGE fight. We seem to have largely conceded that.
And junk mail: the little book I referenced suggested sending back prepaid envelopes with a note with your address asking to be taken off the list. Or to save up a stack and mail it back to them with a note about the waste they're generating. The idea was that that would do some good. (Now, I don't know. Though for a while I was tearing up and sending back the "preapproved" credit card offers with a note with my address and a request to be taken off the list)
And noise pollution. Again, the little book I have from the 1970s talks about trying to persuade your friends and relatives to ONLY use their horns in emergencies and to get their mufflers checked. (The horn thing makes particular sense to me. I always jump when I hear a car horn because to me it signals "impending accident' and I look around to see if I have to take evasive action). And things like keeping radio or stereo volumes down, especially if you live in an apartment....
And again, it seems we've conceded a lot of these things. And yes, I hate busybodies as much as the next red-blooded American, but.....but.....I think there's something about considering your neighbors to be considered here. I try to keep the noise in my area down - like, if I have to edge the lawn, I do it in the afternoon or evening even if first thing in the morning might be less deadly hot, because I know people don't get up as early as I do and I was kind of taught as a kid that you didn't make a lot of noise outside before 10 am (or, for that matter, after 8 or 9 pm, depending).
And I do wonder if some of it is a loss of community spirit, where we don't know our neighbors as well. (For a while, one of the neighbors I had worked nights and slept by day; he had a sign up on the door asking package delivery companies not to ring the bell. During that time I was extra careful not to be too loud early in the day)
(And yes, yes, I understand it: sometimes the dude with the messed up muffler can't afford to get it fixed. But similarly, the dude with the very loud stereo system on his car who drives around with it blaring late at night - he bought and paid for that and he could choose not to use it then)
And I wonder if maybe we haven't lost some of the cockeyed optimism of those times (and also, it was a time when it seems both political parties at least grudgingly worked together on things, instead of one immediately going "I'm agin' it!" when it hears an idea, no matter how good, was proposed by someone in the other party)
And I think there was maybe optimism in some other areas....a lot of the Americana stuff. I don't think it was so much a "my country, right or wrong*" as it was a "there are good things about us just as there are things we have to work on" in many instances
(*Yeah, probably, in some, but the flavor I got more as a kid was "we're all in this together" and "we can work to make things better" and "we've made some big strides in recent years")
Although one bit of actual optimism, I guess: I remember as a kid being told that bald eagles would probably be extinct by the time I was an adult (DDT had only been banned in, I think, 1973) and they aren't, in fact, they have been taken off the endangered species list.
And Pogo. In my material on the first Earth Day, I included this image:
And I'm guessing most people of my generation or younger are unfamiliar with Pogo (despite the unsuccessful attempt to revive it some years back; I suspect it was both very much a product of its times, and also, a thing whose magic could only be captured by its creator, who had long since died).
The comic strip of Pogo is a *bit* before my time, but my mom was a fan, and she had some of the books that were compilations of the strips, and she gave them to me to read, just like she gave me her Peanuts compilations. I mostly didn't "get" Pogo as a kid (but I liked the funny animals) and I admit I don't "get" a lot of it as an adult because the references it makes are from the 1950s and 1960s, and I am a kid of the 1970s and even my "history" in school kind of ended with World War II. (History classes tend to run out of time).
I don't know, though. With some of this stuff it's really weird to look back and remember some of my childhood experiences, and think about how different attitudes are now, and think about how things have changed. And as I said on Twitter, I almost feel a little bit like the crone living deep in the forest and trying to scream wisdom out to the kids who dare venture close to her house (daring each other to touch the doorpost, or, I suppose, take a selfie while there) and sometimes it's really odd to me to think of how we got HERE from THERE....I doubt there's any going back, though, I don't really see a future path to both parties trying to work together much again, or to people re-forming in-person communities where they maybe do stuff like say to themselves, "You know, maybe throwing this drink cup out of my car isn't a good idea, because it'll ugly up someone's lawn and they'll have to pick it up." (Not that people throw drink cups specifically maliciously most of the time; it's more of a thoughtless - in the literal sense, not thinking of the other person - act)
And yes, I understand that a lot of this is maybe viewed through my very specific growing-up lens: a white, middle-class, suburban kid, where things like "don't litter" were important messages because there was not really a struggle for things like food or shelter, but still.....there are still a lot of middle-class, suburban-type people who maybe could consider some of those things. And also I find myself thinking of this video yet again
And yeah, the vague folk-rock patriotism of that, the optimism (though yeah, without any real solutions offered, and maybe that was the key to the 1970s optimism, I think sadly: the hard work wasn't considered because there weren't concrete solutions suggested beyond things like "pick up litter on your street!" or "don't waste water!")
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