It’s clearly an untestable hypothesis, but perhaps one reason why older generations seem so relatively cynical about the imminence of global warming is the number of unfulfilled apocalyptical prophecies they’ve previously been exposed to. The local papers of 1972 often seem to be saturated in forecasts of annihilation which appear to insist that the end really is nigh. And many, many ends were apparently nigh too. It was an age in which many of the oft-illicit pleasures of the end-of-the-world novel could be accessed in short, concentrated, and – I know this from personal experience of the age – cumulatively terrifying bursts from the news pages of reputable newspapers. It wasn’t enough that bombers flew high above us at all hours of the day carrying nuclear weapons to deliver at a moment’s notice. Inconceivably terrible as that was, it was only one of the many catastrophes awaiting us. It wasn’t that the constant references to The End Of Everything was a new phenomenon. In The Listener of May 3rd 1960, H. E. Holthusen wrote:
“In all languages the word ‘apocalypse’ crops up nowadays with probably too high a degree of smoothness and even lightheartedness.”
But what was true in 1960 was even more so in 1970s, and to a degree that can seem excessive even in the context of our own crude, gullible, hysterical, and yet undeniably blighted age.
Some of the UK’s press were evidently keen to run with the worst possible readings of the stories that came their way. Take the interpretations of Dr Lyall Watson’s Omnivore: Our Evolution In The Eating Game. On June 27th, the Huddersfield Daily Examiner, for example, ran a sober, restrained piece on the book by one “B.H.”, which concentrated solely on Watson’s “witty, intelligent” account of how everyday human behaviour is frequently the result of genetic imperatives that assist, or not, our access to food. Not a word of Armageddon or any of its terrifying cousins appeared therein. But in the Grimsby Evening Telegraph of June 22nd, “P.M.O.” ran with the news the very same Watson had predicted that, at best, humankind had less than a thousand years left as a species. With a pure Malthusian interpretation of the world to come, the population would, P.M.O. wrote, inevitably spiral out of control and the world’s resources be irretrievably and catastrophically depleted. Homo sapiens will be reduced to growing and consuming algae and naught else. Huge orbital mirrors will light every nook and cranny of the globe so that humankind’s sole source of food could be raised everywhere. Yet, as if that was all far too distant into the future to truly shake the reader, we were also told that Watson expected “hundreds of millions (to) die (from starvation) in the next twelve years”. It was as if there were two completely different versions of Omnivore.
Speculation and rumour and flat-out fantasy was frequently written up as fact. In the likes of the Cambridge Evening News of May 26th, readers were soberly informed that a “former U.S. defence expert today claimed the United States had superseded the atomic bomb by inventing a science fiction- type weapon called the ‘matter-energy scrambler’. It would, explained Mr Lowell Ponte, that very same “former defence expert”, make the atom bomb as redundant as the atomic bomb itself had made dynamite obsolete. (This in itself was a comparison that made less and less sense the more it was considered.) At the height of a Cold War which had already dragged on terrifyingly for decades, here was news that even more frightening weapons of mass destruction were upon us. The exact same story, with a few small edits, could be in Stoke-on-Trent’s Evening Sentinel:
“Mr Ponte said the most frightening application of the (matter-energy) scrambler was that it could be used to trigger off miniature hydrogen bombs that had been carried by hand by foreign agents … We may finally be on the doorstep of the era of the suitcase H-bomb – light and having so little dangerous radiation that it could be hand-carried by a tourist or a terrorist.'”
(Or, one presumes, a terrorist who went in for a bit of tourism first.)
None of the journalists and/or editors who ran with this story apparently thought to fact check it, or to quote other authorities in an attempt to add qualification, balance and, quite frankly, sanity. Nor did the story, as far as I can find, reappear after these brief few May days. It was dead and buried, it appears, within two days. But the terror of it all had, by then, been delivered.
To take just one further example, the Liverpool Echo ran several substantial “news” stories in the year that were nothing but undiluted, and indeed characteristically raving, pseudoscience. Tellingly, these articles went unattributed. But, for example, on May 8th, a piece appeared on the matter of disappearing sea-craft and ‘ghost ships’. There had been, readers were assured with absolute authority, 800 ships which had simply vanished from the world’s oceans without any adequate explanation. Scarifying enough, you might imagine. Yet the article’s explanation was even more sinister and disturbing;
“A lot of weighty evidence could point to visitors from outer space swallowing multi-ton ships quick as a snap of your fingers … It sounds preposterous, but scientists these days are telling each other not to laugh at the idea”.
No sources, no experts, no challenges to the idea of ship-thieving aliens: it was the kind of complete insanity that we sometimes delude ourselves is particular to the 21st century. Yet in 1972, the fantastical could be found in the everyday press, passed off as truth and framed frequently in as disturbing a fashion as possible. It was an age of terror, much of which was justified by fact, and much more ignited and maintained by stupidity and cupidity.
The Almanac Of The Fantastical 