[HN Gopher] Silent Running: 1970s Environmental Fable Remains De...
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Silent Running: 1970s Environmental Fable Remains Depressingly All
Too Relevant
Author : colinprince
Score : 43 points
Date : 2024-03-21 17:35 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (reactormag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (reactormag.com)
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > Silent Spring had a huge and immediate impact on the American
| public, which Carson and her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, had
| very much expected and prepared for.
|
| A couple of things here: 1. Could a book come
| out now that would have this kind of effect on the public and
| spur us to action? I suspect not because we're much more divided
| now than we were in the *early* 60s. (Yes, the divisions would
| grow quite large in the mid-to-late 60s, but the early 60s was
| the calm before the storm) 2. They expected that it
| would have the impact it did? I guess that goes back to #1.
| swatcoder wrote:
| Critical reflections about the ecological impact/carelessness
| of modern society was an already booming genre during that
| time, so the response they were preparing for was surely part
| of HM's decision to publish in the first place, not just some
| insight gleaned from how convincing the work felt or whatever.
|
| And these books were consistently controversial and politicized
| _at the time_ , which is why sales and discussion were high yet
| still lead to our 2020's society being only marginally more
| ecologically responsible than the that of 1960's (if that).
|
| Nothing much has changed. In the way you're referencing, the US
| was _extremely_ divided in the 1960 's and is _extremely_
| divided again now. Practiced media companies know how to
| "prepare" for that by exploiting it for sales, and today's
| publishers do it just the same -- sometimes on ecological
| topics like this, sometimes on other controversial topics du
| jour.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > Nothing much has changed. In the way you're referencing,
| the US was extremely divided in the 1960's and is extremely
| divided again now.
|
| The deep divisions mostly came later in the 60s. The early
| 60s was the calm before the storm. The Vietnam war was barely
| on anyone's radar in 1962 - there were only ~9,000 US troops
| there in '62 and these were being referred to as 'advisors' -
| the vast majority of Americans didn't even know where Vietnam
| was or that we had any troops there at that point. Kennedy
| had not yet been assassinated. The Civil Rights movement was
| in progress, but again, not on the radar for most Americans
| yet. Most Americans felt that the Soviet Union was _the_
| existential threat - not a lot of division about that at the
| time.
|
| Silent Spring certainly seems to have had some major impact
| at the time it came out - by 1970, eight years later, we had
| the EPA and Earth Day. Again, it's hard to imagine any kind
| of book or film coming out today that would have a similar
| impact on the culture at large since we now have a collection
| of subcultures each with their own preferred media outlets.
| In '62 you got your news from your local newspaper and the
| networks (mostly CBS & NBC at that point, with ABC as sort of
| the upstart) - while newspapers did often have a political
| slant, broadcasters mostly all had the same political slant
| (or lack of one) due to the fairness doctrine.
|
| > discussion were high yet still lead to our 2020's society
| being only marginally more ecologically responsible than the
| that of 1960's (if that).
|
| I think this has more to do with Reagan and the rise of the
| right wing in the 80s and into the current era. That led to
| backsliding on ecological progress that was made in the 60s
| through the 70s. Jimmy Carter was probably our most
| ecologically-minded president - he even began to sound the
| alarm on climate change towards the end of his
| administration.
| swatcoder wrote:
| McCarthy's red scare, rising resistance to the oppressive
| Hollywood production code, Beat and motorcycle culture,
| Brown v Board of Education, the pre-1962 NY Times
| bestseller lists, etc all suggest deep division through the
| 1950's that would only _crescendo_ during the Vietnam War
| and disperse for a while afterwards.
|
| Because TV was ripe and widespread at that point, you can
| also personally survey talk show and comedy/variety show
| material of the 1950's and early 1960's to experience the
| state of the culture. While the fairness doctrine did
| constrain what could stated by whom and with what kind of
| counterpoint, capitalists and comedians found plenty of
| ways to reflect the actual cultural tensions, which (like
| today) were not small and (like today) were on track to get
| further heightened.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| McCarthy was roundly discredited by about 56. He was out
| of office by 57. By the early 60s he was largely viewed
| as an extremist.
|
| The election of 1964 (LBJ vs Goldwater) was very
| conclusive: Goldwater was easy to paint as an extremist -
| he only got 38% of the vote, it was a landslide for LBJ.
| (In reality, Goldwater, or at least the Goldwater he
| evolved into, was nowhere near as extreme as many in his
| party today - he was more of a libertarian and warned
| against having religious extremists control the party -
| the GOP did not heed his warnings)
| JohnFen wrote:
| > we're much more divided now than we were in the early 60s.
|
| I really don't think this is substantially true. I think we're
| about as divided as we were then.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| see my response to swatcoder in this thread. Most of the
| division came in the mid-to-late 60s. The early 60s was the
| calm before the storm.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Fair enough. But why quibble over a couple of years? The
| point is that the amount of division we have going on now
| isn't unprecedented. Lots of people have the last time in
| their living memory.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Yes, the amount of division now definitely isn't
| unprecedented. But Silent Spring wasn't released into
| that very divisive part of the 60s - it was released just
| prior to it and that's what probably allowed it to have
| more of an impact. The media landscape was definitely
| more uniform then than now, information bubbles were much
| less of a thing - again, I can't imagine any book or film
| having that kind of impact now, that's my main point.
| xnx wrote:
| Previously: Silent Running: The sci-fi that predicted modern
| crises
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26212975
|
| 3 years ago | 60 comments
| xnx wrote:
| Reading the plot to Silent Running makes me think it had some
| influence on WALL-E and Interstellar.
| milleramp wrote:
| Got to spend a day with Douglas Trumbull in the Mojave desert, so
| many interesting stories, what an amazing person.
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