Distress Call: Not With a Bang but a Whimper

• Author: Oliver Houck
• Pages: 56-60

56 Best of the Books: Ref‌lections on Recent Literature

Distress Call:

Not With a Bang

but a Whimper

By Oliver Houck

Collapse, by Jared Diamond. Vik ing Books. 592 pages.

From the January/ February 2008 issue of The Environment al Forum.

When I was growing up in the late

l940s we knew how the world would

end. First would come a big a sh,

then the roar of the bomb and we would all dis-

appear into thin air. Unless of course we took

refuge beneath our school desks, which we were

told to do but which seemed a little question-

able to those of us in the back row. Few of us

gured that we would live to old age.

Two decades later, as fears of the bomb

abated, along came Silent Spring, Jacques Cous-

teau, and warnings of a new endgame. e

world might not die in a ery chaos af ter all,

but in the gradual destruction of its natural sys-

tems, which was apparently already underway.

is was of course the news that propelled environmental law from nowhere

to more than twenty major national programs in the short space of six years.

As monumental, and unnished, as this response ha s been, the question

remains whether it is adequate to meet the threat, even assuming that the

threat was real in the rst place, a point yet to be conceded by all.

e pole stars of t his debate go back nea rly to the dawn of t he new envi-

ronmentalism itself, with the studies of Paul Ehrlich and others labeled

“futurists,” which gave t hem the aura of being out on the fringe with the

UFO crowd, and culminating in a report called Limits to Growth by an inter-

national group of scientists convened in Rome in l972. is Club of Rome

report was an audacious docu ment, tracking out scenarios of pollution and