Utah

What is the use of a house if you haven't a healthy planet to put it on?
Henry David Thoreau

"Never have a people spent so much money on so many expensive things as Americans are doing today." With this simple but prophetic statement in the 1950's, Fortune Magazine proclaimed the modern era of consumerism. Later Life, Look, and others followed suit, and advertised ad nauseum to fan the "material" flames.

The postwar years witnessed other sweeping changes to our lives as well, with booms in housing construction and road building. A new problem called traffic congestion was making the news in our cities. It was suggested that one day it might lead to traffic controls, or even "stop" lights. The summer vacation became affordable for many Americans and they sped in record numbers to our national parks. Federal agencies engaged in massive reshaping of the land with dam building, wetland drainage, and river dredging, which fueled the greatest economic growth in world history. It seemed the more we conquered nature the richer we got. A popular advertising slogan of the times was "Progress is our most important product." Indeed life in the USA was "progress" in the fast lane. Boom, boom, boom.

But there was a catch to all this progress. Seems whenever we play we have to pay, and in the 1950s we were playing with atomic bombs like they were toys, "testing" (a nice word for exploding) in the Nevada desert, on uninhabited South Pacific islands, and other places that didn't matter much. Or so we thought. Come to find out we had riddled the atmosphere with radioactive fallout that didn't vanish into thin air after all. Rather it floated around the globe and settled, not just over there, but here, in our own backyards. The experts seemed to have overlooked this possibility. Oops. When Strontium 90 was found in cow's milk, a staple in baby formulas, we began to talk test-ban treaty with Russia. President Kennedy signed the treaty in 1962 and considered it the high point of his presidency. That treaty is still in effect.

The concept of urban sprawl was "invented" in the postwar years too, on the potato fields of Long Island, New York, of all places. Today that potato field is Levittown, population 60,000!

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What is the use of a house if you haven't a healthy planet to put it on? Henry David Thoreau "Never have a people spent so much money on so many expensive things as Americans are doing today." With this simple but prophetic statement in the 1950's, Fortune Magazine proclaimed the modern era of consumerism. Later Life, Look, and others followed suit, and advertised ad nauseum to fan the "material" flames. The postwar years witnessed other sweeping changes to our lives as well, with booms in housing construction and road building. A new problem called traffic congestion was making the news in our cities. It was suggested that one day it might lead to traffic controls, or even "stop" lights. The summer vacation became affordable for many Americans and they sped in record numbers to our national parks. Federal agencies engaged in massive reshaping of the land with dam building, wetland drainage, and river dredging, which fueled the greatest economic growth in world history. It seemed the more we conquered nature the richer we got. A popular advertising slogan of the times was "Progress is our most important product." Indeed life in the USA was "progress" in the fast lane. Boom, boom, boom. But there was a catch to all this progress. Seems whenever we play we have to pay, and in the 1950s we were playing with atomic bombs like they were toys, "testing" (a nice word for exploding) in the Nevada desert, on uninhabited South Pacific islands, and other places that didn't matter much. Or so we thought. Come to find out we had riddled the atmosphere with radioactive fallout that didn't vanish into thin air after all. Rather it floated around the globe and settled, not just over there, but here, in our own backyards. The experts seemed to have overlooked this possibility. Oops. When Strontium 90 was found in cow's milk, a staple in baby formulas, we began to talk test-ban treaty with Russia. President Kennedy signed the treaty in 1962 and considered it the high point of his presidency. That treaty is still in effect. The concept of urban sprawl was "invented" in the postwar years too, on the potato fields of Long Island, New York, of all places. Today that potato field is Levittown, population 60,000!

© Danny Kimberlin 2015