Already in the 1980s, nevertheless, space exploration was overshadowed in many minds by a new uneasiness about man’s interference with nature. Within only a few years of Sputnik I, doubts were being voiced about the ideological roots of so masterful a view of our relationship to the natural world. This uneasiness, too, could now be expressed with a precision based on observed facts not hitherto available or not considered in that light; it was science itself which provided the instrumentation and data that led to dismay about what was going on. A recognition of the possible future damage interference with the environment might bring was beginning to arise.
It was, of course, the recognition that was new, not the phenomena which provoked it. Homo sapiens (and perhaps his predecessors) had always scratched away at the natural world in which he lived, modifying it in many particulars, destroying other species. Millennia later than that, migration southward and the adoption of dryland crops from the Americas had devastated the great forests of south-west China, bringing soil erosion and the consequential silting of the Yangtze drainage system in its train, and so culminating in repeated flooding over wide areas. In the early Middle Ages, Islamic conquest had brought goat-herding and tree-felling to the North African littoral on a scale that destroyed a fertility once able to fill the granaries of Rome. But such sweeping changes, though hardly unnoticed, were not understood. The unprecedented rapidity of ecological interference initiated from the seventeenth century onwards by Europeans, however, was to bring things to a head. The unconsidered power of technology forced the dangers on the attention of mankind in the second half of the twentieth century. People began to reckon up damage as well as achievement, and by the middle of the 1970s it seemed to some of them that even if the story of growing human mastery of the environment was an epic, that epic might well turn out to be a tragic one.
Suspicion of science had never wholly disappeared in western societies, although tending to be confined to a few surviving primitive or reactionary enclaves as the majesty and implication of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century gradually unrolled. History can provide much evidence of uneasiness about interference with nature and attempts to control it, but until recently such uneasiness seemed to rest on non-rational grounds, such as the fear of provoking divine anger or nemesis. As time passed, it was steadily eroded by the palpable advantages and improvements that successful interference with nature brought about, most obviously through the creation of new wealth expressed in all sorts of goods, from better medicine to better clothing and food. In the 1970s, however, it became clear that a new scepticism about science itself was abroad, even though only among a minority and only in rich countries. There, a cynic might have said, the dividends on science had already been drawn. Nonetheless, scepticism manifested itself there first and in the 1980s as ‘green’ political parties sought to promote policies protective of the environment. They were not able to achieve much, but they proliferated; the established political parties and perceptive politicians therefore toyed with ‘green’ themes, too. Environmentalists, as the concerned came to be called, benefited from the new advances in communications, which rapidly broadcast disturbing news even from previously uncommunicative sources. In 1986, an accident occurred at a Ukrainian nuclear power station. Suddenly and horribly, human interdependence was made visible. Grass eaten by lambs in Wales, milk drunk by Poles and Yugoslavs, and air breathed by Swedes, were all contaminated. An incalculable number of Russians, it appeared, were going to die over the years from the slow effects of radiation. The alarming event was brought home to millions by television not long after other millions had watched on their screens an American rocket blow up with the loss of all on board. Chernobyl and Challenger showed to huge numbers of people for the first time both the limitations and the possible dangers of an advanced technological civilization.
Such accidents reinforced and diffused the new concern with the environment. It soon became tangled with much else. Some of the doubts that have recently arisen accept that our civilization has been good at creating material wealth, but note that by itself that does not necessarily make men happy. This is hardly a new idea but its application to society as a whole instead of to individuals is a new emphasis. It led to a wider recognition that improvement of social conditions may not remove all human dissatisfactions and may actually irritate some of them more acutely. Pollution, the oppressive anonymity of crowded cities and the nervous stress and strain of modern work conditions easily erase satisfactions provided by material gain and they are not new problems: 4000 people died of atmospheric pollution in a week in London in 1952, but the word ‘smog’ had been invented nearly half a century before that. Scale, too, has now become a problem in its own right. Some modern cities may even have grown to the point at which they present problems that are, for the moment, insoluble.
Some fear that resources are now so wastefully employed that we confront a new version of the Malthusian peril. Energy has never been used so lavishly as it is today; one calculation suggests that more has been used by humanity during the last century than during the whole of previous history - say, in the last 10,000 years. Yet the best estimates do not suggest that there is an imminent danger of running out of the fossil fuels that have supplied most of this enormous increase. Nor have we by any means reached the end of our capacity to produce food, though there is more land under cultivation than ever before (and its area doubled in the last century), but there would at once be an impossible situation if the whole world sought to consume other goods than food at the level of developed countries today. There is a limit to what a human being can eat, but virtually none to what he or she can consume in terms of a better environment, social services, medicine and the like. We may, too, already have passed the point at which energy consumption is putting unmanageable strains on the environment (for instance, in pollution or damage to the ozone layer), and to further increase those strains would be intolerable. The social and political consequences that might follow from changes that have already occurred have not yet begun to be grasped and we have nothing like the knowledge, technique or consensus over goals such as was available to land men on the moon.
This became much clearer as a new spectre came to haunt the last decades of the century - the possibility of manmade, irreversible climatic change. The year 1990 had hardly ended before it was being pointed out that it had been the hottest year since climatic records began to be kept. Was this, some asked, a sign of ‘global warming’, of the ‘greenhouse effect’ produced by the release into the atmosphere of the immense quantities of carbon dioxide produced by a huge population burning fossil fuels as never before? One estimate is that there is now some 25 per cent more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than in pre-industrial times. It may be so (and as the world’s output of the stuff is now said to be 6000 million tons a year, it is not for laymen to dispute the magnitudes). Not that this was the only contributor to the phenomenon of accumulating gases in the atmosphere whose presence prevents the planet from dissipating heat; methane, nitrous oxide and chlorofluorocarbons all add to the problem. And if global warming is not enough to worry about, then acid rain, ozone depletion leading to ‘holes’ in the ozone layer, and deforestation at unprecedented rates, all provided major grounds for new environmental concern. The consequences, if no effective counter-measures are forthcoming, could be enormous, expressing themselves in fears of climatic change (average surface temperature on the earth might rise by between one and four degrees Celsius over the next century), agricultural transformation, rising sea-levels (six centimetres a year has been suggested as possible and plausible), and major migrations. It was clear by 1990 that if the superpowers could eventually come to co-operate rather than compete, there would be plenty of common concerns for mankind to co-operate about - if they could agree on what had to be done.