40 Years Ago and 40 Years From Now

• Pages: 22-23

Page 22 ❧ THE ENVIRONMENTAL FORUM Copyright © 2010, Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, D.C. www.eli.org.

Reprinted by permission from The Environmental Forum®, May/June 2010

noTice & commenT

40 Years Ago and

40 Years From Now

T he past few months have

been a time of important

commemorations. Last Dec-

ember 22 marked the 40th

anniversary of the National

Environmental Policy Act. On the same

day we observed ELI’s 40th birthday.

e 40th anniversary of the Clean Air

Act followed in January, then in April

four decades since the f‌irst Earth Day.

On December 2 we will mark 40 years

since the founding of the Environmen-

tal Protection Agency (which will be

honored for its achievements at the ELI

Annual Dinner on October 19).

e past few months have marked

two relevant anniversaries for me. Forty

years ago, I wrote an article on high

school dress code reform for the Ridge-

wood, New Jersey, Sunday Post, the f‌irst

time I was paid to write on public poli-

cy. And with this issue, I mark 20 years

in this space.

I actually began writing for the Sun-

day Post before my dress code article. I

was hired in October 1969 to cover high

school football. e editor had engaged

me over the telephone, not realizing I

was still a student who had to be driven

to the of‌f‌ice by his mother.

I remember well the f‌irst time I en-

tered the newsroom and was shown to a

desk with an Underwood No. 5 manual

typewriter and given 45 minutes to peck

out a 1,000-word game story. When I

f‌inished, my copy was turned over to

the sports editors, who smoked stubby

cigars and cut and paste with long shears

and pots of rubber cement.

Having survived that initiation, I was

waiting for my mother to pick me up

when Jim Jones, the editor-in-chief, put

a fatherly arm around my shoulder and

took me upstairs to the press. It was a

noisy composing room with clacking

linotype machines containing cauldrons

of smoldering lead that was cast into

type. Playing the mentor, Jim showed

me how stories were made into the page,

with the pieces that didn’t f‌it set to the

side by the compositor for him to cut.

Jim could read the type even though it

was in reverse. I swore to myself that I

would learn how to read mirror-image

type as an f‌irst step in my profession.

As it turned out, I never learned to

read in reverse. When I joined the Daily

Princetonian two years later, the newspa-

per had just switched to what was called

cold type. Keyboardists entered our

copy onto punched ribbons, which were

then fed into a machine that used gears,

lenses, and translucent plastic strips to

etch type onto photographic f‌ilm. We

developed the f‌ilm in a darkroom and

then pasted the long strips onto page

mechanicals. When copy didn’t f‌it, it

was an easy job to cut because the type

wasn’t mirrored.

But learning how to make paste-up

mechanicals didn’t last, thanks to the

personal computer revolution. By the

mid 1980s, desktop publishing started

taking over the industry, another para-

digm shift. And by the mid 1990s, the

internet began to put the printing press

itself into retirement.

Forty years ago, computers were

huge main frames, used by major banks

and universities, and code was entered

into them using punched tape or cards;

output was on wide striped paper with

sprocket holes on the side. e very no-

tion of using a keyboard and monitor

to directly access a computer didn’t ex-

ist until the Apple II went on the mar-

ket in 1976. Applications like spread

sheets and word processing didn’t come

around until later in the 1970s.

Today, equivalent computing power

can be had with a device that f‌its into

your pocket and also can communicate

with anyone in the world, instantly and

for free, with pictures, text, and sound.

High school sports stories are available

on the web within minutes of the f‌inal

gun, with no typesetter (nor newsroom

editor) in the pipeline. e manual

typewriter has been supplanted by the

electric typewriter, then the desktop,

then the laptop, then the netbook, and

now the iPad. And the smoke f‌illed

room is only a memory. I doubt if any

of these paradigm shifts could have been

anticipated.

ank you for indulging me in this

reminiscence, but there is a lesson in the

tale of these last 40 years that is relevant

to environmental law and policy. Forty

years from now is the time horizon envi-

sioned in international agreements and

congressional legislation for the long-

term goals of carbon reduction measures

meant to ameliorate global warming.

By 2050, humanity will need to oper-

ate with only 10 or 20 percent of the

fossil-fuel-based energy input needed

today, a huge reduction especially with

projected increases in population. How

we can do so is anybody’s guess, but it

will have to depend on a paradigm shift

in the economy and the technology that

supports it.

Forty years is a long time, and wheth-

er technology will make the necessary

leaps — and, in particular how — is im-

possible to say. Paradigm shifts are revo-

lutions, and revolutions are notoriously

dif‌f‌icult to predict. Even when they can

be anticipated to some extent, their con-

tours are only visible in retrospect.

During an ELI management retreat

in 1993, we were shown a short f‌ilm

on paradigm shifts in technology. A

main point of the video was the laugh-

able slowness of Swiss watchmakers to

convert to digital models. e Japanese

were taking over the industry.

Today, however, digital watches can

be had for pocket change whereas Swiss

chronometers sell for hundreds if not

thousands of dollars, the more primi-

tive and complicated — watchmakers

actually use the word “complication”

in a positive context to mean an added

feature, like moon phases — the more

expensive. And despite the trend toward

miniaturization in almost everything

else, the most popular watches are larger

and heavier than average. ey need to

be wound daily and have windows so

owners can ogle the archaic mechanism

inside. e lesson here is that whereas

in science paradigm shifts are always

toward simpler models (the principle of

Occam’s Razor) and become accepted

by all, in society and the technology

that enables it, shifts are not necessar-

ily simple, nor obvious, nor linear, nor

publicly supported.

at knowing a revolution is in pros-