Seeing is believing

: new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.” A generation later, he was proven right. The first photograph of the earth from space came as part of the Apollo project in November 1967. One of the Apollo astronauts, James B. Irwin, who landed on the moon in 1971, said of his view of the earth, “It was so far away... a little ball in the blackness of space. That does something to your soul...We all came back humanitarians....We saw how fragile our planet is and yet how beautiful. We saw how we must learn to work together, to love each other.”

Let’s not discount that statement. That image of the earth from space had a profound psychological effect, and we all saw it. Maybe that image was at least part of the reason why people became so worried in the 1970’s about population running ahead of resources.

The Club of Rome’s monumental book The Limits to Growth came out in 1972, with a picture of the earth on its cover. The book, written by a team of scientists, predicted disastrous shortages and mass starvation due to population pressure. Despite scientific critics of the Club of Rome’s methods, the public was ready to believe the dire forecast.

The great population scare led to various birth-control efforts around the world, notably to the “one-child policy” instituted in China in 1979. Partly due to such efforts, as well as to a change in family values, the rate of growth of the world’s population, began a long decline, to 1.1 per cent in 2005. That gradual decline led to gradual loss of concern about limits to growth. Commodity prices fell, too.

Try searching YouTube, for example, on Greenland ice. More generally, the Internet gives a sense of vastness to the world’s economic activity that was never available before. The ability to communicate via email to everyone in the world creates a sense of the world’s smallness relative to the abundance of people in it.

We have seen photographs of hurricane and typhoon activity due to global warming,...