I had thought that a night early next month would mark the 50th anniversary of a totally life-changing event. However, a couple of days ago I discovered that said event was actually 50 years and two weeks ago.
Had no idea where it would lead but on that night it became very clear to me, in the first year of working on a Ph. D, that it was almost inevitable that unlike most of my then colleagues I would not end up as a researcher/academic in the physical sciences. Equally, I had no idea really what I might become when I grew up, but over the next few years it emerged that I would become a non- or lowly-remunerated “so called environmentalist”. That was not even a thing in the early 1970s, but by the end of that decade it was a common-enough repeated phrase among opponents of environmentalism with a limited capacity for originality – and for a long time now there has rarely been a shortage of them.
According to the dissing unoriginal commentary from many vested interests at the time (and ever since) environmentalists are (i) not very bright and (ii) don’t deal in facts.
From the perspective of a 23yo student who was part of a small research group at the University of WA who were by far the heaviest users of that State’s biggest mainframe (inverting matrices of up to rank 47 in hours’-long least squares cycles was enormously grunt-laden for those times!) I was struck by two things about attempting to deal with human-environmental interactions:
- A strongly-felt moral imperative to work on these issues (whatever that might mean); and
- How extremely complex and intellectually-challenging these issues were – far more so than my Ph D studies.
Some “popular” stories are often told a bit inaccurately by people who were nearby (or are secondary sourcing) but weren’t there – these can then get “Chinese whispered” into “established truths”. This was the subject of a letter about the Monday Conference show on 9 August 1971 that I wrote to Crikey a bit over seven years ago:
“On fingering climate deniers
“Dr Bro Sheffield-Brotherton writes: Re. “The Dirty Dozen: Australia’s biggest climate foes, part 1” (yesterday). As with much of his writings, I enjoyed Clive Hamilton’s first instalment of the Dirty Dozen. However, Hamilton is mistaken in his assertion regarding Tony Abbott that “environmentalism was not around when his spiritual mentor was wielding his influence, but Bob Santamaria would have feared and hated it”.
“Two people from a group of three chemistry PhD students in Perth had their life’s work changed fundamentally by viewing from opposite sides of the continent (one was on his honeymoon) a 1971 Monday Conference debate on growth/limits between Paul Ehrlich and rather stolid “Catholic” economist Colin Clark; Ehrlich won hands down. Neither of those two students really envisaged a lifetime in chemistry beyond that point.
“I tend to remember significant dates in my life but did not remember this one. Honeymoon dates would be a great assistance in jogging memory, so years later when I had cause to attempt to discover the date of that broadcast I sought my colleague’s help. Alas, he helped me zero in on the date but we couldn’t be sure.
“But I can tell you with confidence (not that anyone else might necessarily give a bugger!) that the definitive, seminal debate went to air on Monday 9, August 1971. How do I know? Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria told me so (and that’s the interesting thing)!
Many years later Santa wrote a piece about the great evil to which Australians were exposed on that night and what a great bloke Colin Clark (who favoured of a world population of 157 billion, most Catholic rather than Muslim no doubt) was. So clearly BA was keeping tabs on the “evils of environmentalism” from the early ’70s at least and had bizarrely meticulous records on parts of the subject since the early 1970s.
aviewfromhoppers 