Global Climate Change
From Earth Day 1970 to Heat, Need, and Human Greed in 2025
I was prompted to begin this “beat” by this very sad story from drought-stricken Morocco, facing shortages of sheep for use in Eid feasts. As always, I only cover beats on issue which have been of longstanding concern. I do not yet have a database to link to, but will when I get a chance. In 1970, as the first Earth Day approached, I organized a workshop for the first Ann Arbor event, to which I invited Murray Bookchin, who under his pen name of Lewis Herber, had written Our Synthetic Environment, which appeared before Silent Spring. I had gotten to know Murray and his wife Bea Bookchin of the Institute for Social Ecology in Burlington VT, during my brief anarchist phase in 1969-1970, although it was mainly their views on ecology which I liked. I visited them in NYC when I was working on the Liberation News Service/Student Communications Network merger, and got to know one of their followers in Ann Arbor. Somewhere I have some information about that workshop.
But it made me a lifetime environmentalist, at least politically, and I am currently doing theoretical work on human needs that is expanding into the literature on ecosystem wide flourishing. In fact I’m going to do a lecture today on that very topic. I very highly recommend reading Ian Gough’s Heat, Need and Human Greed, more information on his website: https://www.iangough.com/. That’s it for now, but I’m like a bulldog, when I grab onto a new beat, I stick with it and it may or may not lead to letters to the editor, op-eds, essays here, and so forth.