Dotzilla wrote:
all the industrialization related to ww1 and 2 (co2 production, industrial runoff)
It's interesting you're aware of this because it's actually one of the great oversights of history. A lot of Americans and other people are obsessed with WW2, but the ecological side to the war is often overlooked. Not merely a lot of sob stories, quite a bit of it is genuinely interesting, including:
-the mass pollution of the Baltic Sea by the Americans dumping hundreds of thousands of tons of unspent German and Allied ammunition and bombs
-the Japanese had to remove several meters of topsoil from Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order for those cities to now be habitable - the lesson being that it is in fact possible to clean up any nuclear disaster, it's just incredibly expensive
-there are a cycle of interesting stories about Japanese chemical weapons programs; one researcher recounted how the stuff they worked with was so bad that every living thing around the facility died and every member of the staff got sallow fingers followed by long-term illnesses because the toxins went right through gloves and other protective wear
-it was during WW2 that America's toxic waste problem really turned critical due to the vast quantities of petrochemicals and other toxins that had to be prepared in haste for the war effort
-most of WW1 was fought on French soil, in the part of France where most truffle groves are situated, and due to the intense artillery fire and high demand for wood, it was at this point in history that truffles went from a culinary commonplace to an expensive luxury
-because of the destruction of their industrial base, both Germany and Japan had to resort to mass deforestation to procure materials to build glider planes entirely out of wood in the last years of the war; ironically Hitler had previously spearheaded reforestation programs, something continued under the successor governments
-in the years immediately after the war, both Germany and Japan saw a massive increase in air pollution due to people having to burn wood and bituminous coal for fuel, due to monopolization of oil and anthracite supplies by the Allies - the air in postwar Tokyo was completely unbreathable
-the atomic bombs killed thousands of American workers before they were even detonated - because powerful neodymium magnets did not yet exist and it was not known that yellowcake was extremely dangerous to inhale, much of the refining of the materials for the bombs was done by hand, by several hundred uneducated American workers kept deliberately ignorant of exactly what they were doing and why. Within two weeks, all were dead of serious lung conditions. With the war raging, they were simply replaced with more workers, who also died, until finally the researchers figured out what was going on and masks were manufactured. A secret graveyard with unmarked graves was established for the many thousands of workers who died refining uranium for the bombs
....
The more one reads about the 40s and 50s, the more the sordid history of the 60s and 70s comes into focus.
People lionize the Greatest Generation, but what they fail to realize is that the reason the Baby Boomers were such a fucked up bunch of louts was because of the flaws in the former's way of life and inability to overcome those flaws on their own- racism, social regression (by that I mean, do you really think anyone wasn't fucking anyone else's wife or having sex with 12-year-old boys during the 40s and 50s?) and gross disregard for the environment.
Life in the 40s and 50s wasn't socially or environmentally sustainable. Hippies, environmental awareness, and all that other crap is part of it. It will ultimately be our generation, or the next, that creates some sort of synthesis of traditional conservatism and ecological and social awareness that doesn't involve EEOC crap, drugs and "flower power".
I am extremely pessimistic about human nature, but I also do truly believe that a "happy ending" is possible, if unlikely.
