Coronavirus’s Earth Day Threat

In 1970 I helped organize the first Earth Day at Indiana University.  The initial Earth Day was a “youth quake”.  Working out of the University of Wisconsin, a staff of 85 people mobilized some ten million American college students.  The event mixed protest and celebration.  

Good intentions mingled with error and naivete.  Prosperity and productivity were condemned as destructive.   Scholars, political, and media leaders assured us that human populations would soon starve on a massive scale and that people would soon exhaust all-natural resources.  

Paul and Anne Ehrlich wrote in The Population Bomb:  

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...

We’ll run out of every commodity and live miserable, impoverished lives in a heavily polluted world.  Quite the opposite occurred.  Throughout the developed world a combination of legal reforms and individual motivations greatly reduced pollution.  Our culture evolved and changed standards of “proper” behavior.  Today, no respectable person would litter and deliberately, flagrantly pollute.  

Concurrent with this progress, entrepreneurship and innovation generated prosperity and material plenty.  Food eaten at home today cost about half as much as in 1970.  Meanwhile, the size of new homes has nearly doubled while the price per square foot remained constant in inflation adjusted prices.   In mid-April of 2020, the futures price of petroleum fell to under $6.00 per barrel.  On the first Earth Day, it was $22.50 in. today’s dollars.  Increased scarcity was trumped by bounty.  

Until the coronavirus struck, the vast majority of Americans suffered only relative deprivation.  Few could afford a second (or third) home at Big Sky, but the genuine poverty and deprivations of the Great Depression and WWII were long gone.    Instead of the predicted doom, the five decades following the first Earth Day produced a cornucopia of wealth and material well being.  

And this prosperity was widely spread.  Of course, people in high professions and technology have high incomes, their talents are scarce and productive.  Likewise, for skilled tradesmen.  Today there’s a help-wanted billboard on Gallatin Highway offering jobs with full benefits for HVAC, sheet metal, plumbing, pipe fitting and welding at $30 to $55 per hour.  Unskilled labor starts at $22.50 and after six weeks goes to $28.00, again with full benefits.  

Americans, and the developed world generally, can live wholesome and happy lives.  Many in the middle class felt problems of stagnating or declining incomes—but not due to the resource scarcities deemed certain to come on Earth Day.