Volume 14, Number 8 · April 23, 1970
Ecological Armageddon
By Robert L. Heilbroner
Population, Resources, Environment
by Paul Ehrlich, by Anne Ehrlich
W.H. Freeman, 400 pp., $8.95 (to be published in May)
Ecology has become the Thing. There are ecological politics, ecological jokes, ecological bookstores, advertisements, seminars, teach-ins, buttons. The automobile, symbol of ecological abuse, has been tried, sentenced to death, and formally executed in at least two universities (replete with burial of one victim). Publishing companies are fattening on books on the sonic boom, poisons in the things we eat, perils loose in the garden, the dangers of breathing. The Saturday Review has appended a regular monthly Ecological Supplement. In short, the ecological issue has assumed the dimensions of a vast popular fad, for which one can predict with reasonable assurance the trajectory of all such fads—a period of intense general involvement, followed by growing boredom and gradual extinction, save for a die-hard remnant of the faithful.
Review, 4776 words
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