When I was in high school in the 1970’s I spent a lot of time in the swamps and forests of Western Oregon. My dad had land in Tillamook County, near Sand Lake about 75 miles south of the Columbia River. We’d go there most weekends and he’d do a little commercial dory fishing with his friends, and I’d head out into the woods and marshes.
The forests on the Oregon Coast are not what most people think of when they think of woods.
It rains a lot in Tillamook County and a wall of vegetation three to five feet tall makes it impossible to stroll among the trees. Old logging roads leave little more than intermittent narrow paths, and game trials are just tunnels through the underbrush. But sometimes they are the only way to get from one place to another, even if a very short distance is involved. I crawled on knees and elbows through those dark wet green tunnels many times, every water covered leaf, fern and bush soaking me a little more.
Something I found fascinating — to this day — is that aside from loggers who came through in the 1920’s and 30’s I was probably the only person to ever spend time in those woods and swamps.
You might think hunters would enter the forests during deer and elk season, but they generally stayed out of the woods. Game animals can hear people long before they get close. The undergrowth is so thick that a person can pass within a few feet of a large animal yet never see them. You very rarely see wild animals except in cow pastures where they feed, and that’s where hunters wait for them.
But I loved being in nature, even though the thick brush, high humidity, and constant drizzle made the experience miserable. The thing that drew me to those dark forests was my conviction that I would probably be one of the last people to be a part of that world. I was very aware that the population of not just Oregon, but the entire world was out of control.
It was something alarming for many people during that era.
Most of the kids at McNary High School in Keizer Oregon were not very far removed from living on farms. Their grandparents, uncles and aunts still worked the land and the businesses and industries closely associated with agriculture. But there was also an influx of upper middle-class kids in my school whose parents worked in Oregon state bureaucracies in the capitol, where I lived.
It was obvious that the future belonged to those urban kids who were contemptuous of farm kids and people who went hunting, fishing or camping.
Californians were flocking to Oregon, flush with cash from the overpriced homes they sold in Los Angeles or San Diego, driving real estate prices out of reach of native Oregonians. Farmland became more valuable as subdivisions than agriculture and places along the Willamette River where I had hunted or hiked were transformed into concrete, asphalt and houses.
What were then called Third World countries usually had fertility rates of 4 or 5 children per woman. Even the United States had a fertility rate far beyond what would simply replace parents. We also gobbled up 30% of the world’s resources, even though we accounted for only 5% of its population. Poverty and starvation were common conditions throughout the world and overpopulation and unrestrained consumption were the causes.
This concerned a lot of people.
The issue was regularly in the news, but more importantly it was a part of the national consciousness of the United States and the world. The twin demons of overpopulation and pollution were seen in the same way that we now see global warming — a threat to the continued existence of humanity.
The top song of 1969 was In the Year 2525, a catchy one hit wonder about technology robbing our descendants of their humanity and exploiting all the earth until it had no more to give.
An iconic commercial featured a buckskin clad Native American paddling a canoe through a disgusting mass of trash and pollution, ending with a full screen close-up of a tear running down the proud natives’ cheek.
One of the nascent environmental organizations contributing to Earth Day in 1970 was Zero Population Growth, a well-funded group that quickly went mainstream urging women to have only enough children to replace themselves and their children’s father.
Environmental awareness hit close to home, too…
The house I grew up in was only two blocks from the Willamette River. In the 1970’s the river was so polluted with human waste that on warm summer nights the stench penetrated the entire house.
In the late 70’s someone in the neighborhood cut a stencil of a salmon –a silhouette any Oregonian would instantly recognize — and used blue spray paint to transfer the image to the curb next to every sewer drain in Northwest Salem. It was a reminder to not pour toxic chemicals like used motor oil, old fertilizers and herbicides into sewers that drained into the nearby river.
At about the same time. Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality went into full gear in an all-out effort to clean up the Willamette.
And it worked!
The Willamette River is a success story. It no longer stinks of filth; it’s clean enough for water skiing, swimming and fishing.
Salmon runs are a work in progress, but there is no longer a fight over who gets to catch the last one. When I was in high school the community of Salem Oregon was forlorn over the prospect of future young children missing out on the chance to catch a chinook salmon in Mill Creek. An ordinance was passed limiting chinook fishing only children under the age of 13 to fish in Mill Creek during salmon runs.
Today the problem is no longer pollution, but water levels and fish friendly detours around dams.
These successes are happening all over the world.
Now the big story is the worldwide drop in fertility. Globally we have decreased births until they are almost at replacement levels — the very thing Zero Population Growth was created to do forty years ago.
We should be celebrating a great victory. But we haven’t noticed what we’ve accomplished.
That is partly because dramatic changes don’t usually happen all at once. Incremental changes spanning long periods of time improve the world.
Like traffic fatalities, cancer deaths and AIDS cases, overpopulation gradually decreased without much notice. It’s only when you compare present numbers with the ones from the 1970’s that the dramatic change becomes obvious.
As of 2019 the global fertility rate was 2.4, half of what it was in 1950 when it stood at 4.7. Global population will reach 8 billion this year, and we haven’t reached zero growth just yet, but we will within the next few years.
There’s something besides a slow rate of change that conceals recognizing good fortune.
There’s a survival adaptation from the days we were barely human that causes us to overlook our accomplishments.
We humans are a lot more interested in bad news than good news. When our ancient ancestors come across a beautiful bed of flowers it was more important for them to look for poisonous snakes than to lean over and revel in the fragrance of the flowers. Early humans who focused on truth and beauty were eliminated by predators more often than their more cynical peers. Their descendants — us — still carry that jaded and pessimistic outlook that passes as caution.
That trait also blinds us to the good fortune that happens all around us…
Just today I said to an acquaintance, “It sure is a beautiful day, isn’t it?” “No”, she said right away and started complaining about the humidity. I didn’t tell her that I had just checked the temperature and humidity at our location. It was 99 degrees, which might have been hot, except for the fact that the humidity was only 22%. When the thunderstorms roll in this evening it will be a different story, but for now it’s what I love about living in Arizona. (But even the thunderstorms have their own majestic charms.)
She might have been able to enjoy a beautiful day but instead focused on questionable humidity and was miserable. That’s living out your negative expectations instead of living out your life affirming experiences.
In his wonderfully optimistic book Factfulness, medical statistician Hans Rosling takes us on an uplifting narrative of how we escaped the threat of overpopulation. First, he reminds us of our inherent human flaw of pessimism:
“Uncontrolled, our appetite for the dramatic goes too far, prevents us from seeing the world as it is, and leads us terribly astray…Step-by-step, year-by-year, the world is improving. Not on every single measure every single year, but as a rule. Though the world faces huge challenges, we have made tremendous progress”
We still have challenges, of course…
Our population may have stabilized, but it leaves us with plenty of catching up to do.
My beautiful desert is still being covered in asphalt, concrete and huge homes that are expensive to heat and cool. Like my youth in Oregon, places where I once hiked and reveled in the night sky are sterile suburban outposts, the first of many I’m sure will stretch into the distance like networked alien nodes.
You need to apply for a permit to camp in the national forests in Central Arizona now. The days of slinging a backpack over your shoulder packed with your temporary home and escaping civilization for a few days are over.
But what about the future…
Those houses people are leaving in California will someday become vacant. The cities of Silicon Valley will not escape the fate of Steel Belt cities like Detroit, Gary Indiana, or Youngstown, Ohio. Those cities tore down entire neighborhoods and reverted them to parks and pastures…Imagine…Middle class suburbs that had once been vibrant homes for steel and auto workers, the heart of a local culture and national economy, are nothing but a memory now.
Like the Steel Boom the Technology Boom will someday fade. Technology centers in California will certainly face a similar fate someday, although with very different dynamics.
We still manage to over consume, but now on a global scale.
And all that consumption creates waste. Waste that we sometimes have no idea we are creating.
PFAS are called “forever chemicals” because they take a very long time to dissolve into their constituent parts. Until they do, they are toxic to living creatures. We’ve known about these chemicals for decades, and the more we find out about them the more terrifying they become. The latest news is that PFAS is now detected in rainwater all over the world, and we’ve learned that they are toxic in smaller and smaller amounts.
Where do PFAS come from?
Just about everywhere:
“The Environmental Working Group (EWG) has identified 41,828 industrial and municipal sites in the U.S. that are known or suspected of using PFAS. …petroleum stations and terminals, chemical manufacturers, commercial printers, plastics and resin manufacturing sites, paint and coating manufacturers, semiconductor manufacturers, makers of metal products and electrical components, and electroplating and polishing.”
We need a billion new cell phones every year because, well, our old ones aren’t new anymore and the new improved version is on the market. It costs resources to make all those phones, just as it takes resources to dispose of the ones from last year.
Have you noticed how many big screen TVs there are? I walked through the community college where I used to teach and couldn’t help but see a big screen TV no matter where I looked. Big screen TVs are replacing billboards and business hallmarks on city streets now. There’s a huge one on I-10 entering Phoenix that’s been there for years. It makes me want to blow right past Phoenix.
I think they are eyesores, but that’s not the worst of it.
Those big screen TVs — the ones in people’s living rooms and malls, schools and on the streets — use tremendous amounts of energy.
Speaking of energy to run out technologies… by 2025 about 20% of the energy produced globally will go to power our internet related gadgets, gizmos, pretend lovers and Kardashian updates.
That energy must be generated somewhere.
In Europe coal is making a comeback due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Here in the United States, it’s natural gas. Everybody talks about going green but given our ever-increasing appetite for energy we will likely return to nuclear power someday soon.
Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima are all cautionary disaster epics, but at least they were natural. Currently Russia and Ukraine are blaming one another for shelling the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station in southern Ukraine. It’s the biggest nuclear power station in Europe.
So, energy production can be weaponized. Think about that the next time you read about Chinese plans to build an orbiting solar collector.
So, yes, the future looks awfully bleak. But it always does. We humans have an innate trait that predisposes us to look on the negative side. We are inherently pessimistic.
The global threats of the 1970’s — global nuclear conflagration, mass starvation, overpopulation, disease, a new Ice Age to name just a few — have been largely overcome. We had the same pessimistic view of the world then as we do today. But humanity has a knack for overcoming the challenges it faces and improving itself along the way.
We’ve been making progress since we evolved into Homo Sapiens, 300,000 years ago.
Believing in humanity opens up an entirely new way to see the world. Simply making a conscious effort to view the world with new eyes and acknowledge its beautiful and wondrous aspects makes our lives beautiful and wondrous, too.
Developing that habit draws us to seek out positivity. Books like Rosling’s Factfulness or Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now document the many ways in which the present is unfolding into a glorious future.
The first step is to let go of our intrinsic bias towards negativity and pessimism. Try it.
Like What You’re Reading?
Read more at VicNapier.com and my Medium.com page.
Links may lead to sites where the author has an affiliate relationship