Issue 99: Since Earth Day 1970

If environmental problems appear far more complex today than they did on the first Earth Day, reflections on them—at least at Resources for the Future—have remained fairly consistent. A perusal of some issues of Resources from 1970 reveals a remarkable similarity between the themes sounded then and contemporary meditations on the environment. For instance, the kinds of environmental problems we face today were certainly within the realm of the imaginable two decades ago. In a June 1970 article in Resources, RFF's Hans H. Landsberg argued that the disposal of nuclear fission products and the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, with its long-run potential for climatic change, would be among the most serious environmental issues to be faced in the future.

One contributor to Resources in 1970 already spoke of "global" environmental problems. He noted that processes of weather and climate formation were ill-understood, necessitating a greater allocation of monetary and intellectual resources to monitoring and analysis. He might have uttered the same words today with respect to global warming.

Perhaps more important than their prognostications, those earlier contributors to Resources diagnosed a fundamental flaw in the traditional strategy for confronting environmental problems. As Landsberg remarked in 1970, environmental problems resist "swift and simple solutions." Because each derives from multiple causes, there is no single cure. The tendency to speculate about single determinants of environmental deterioration, he warned, is likely to deflect attention from a complex of factors, some of which may be of critical immediacy.

This theme of the complexity of environmental problems and the inappropriateness of quick and easy fixes is touched on by all the contributors to this issue of Resources as they reflect on developments in the environmental arena since the first Earth Day. Thus Paul R. Portney asserts that after two decades of environmental legislation it is time to make benefit-cost analysis one of the bases of regulatory and other decisions concerning the environment. Hans Landsberg sheds light on why energy policy goals and mechanisms have often met with unexpected results, particularly with respect to environmental protection. Peter M. Morrisette identifies the uncertainties surrounding global warming that will make international agreement on this issue difficult to achieve. In examining the federal government's involvement in outdoor recreation, Marion Clawson reveals how acknowledgment of the inaccuracy of one assumption concerning recreation trends is forcing a reevaluation of recreation funding. Finally, Allen V. Kneese explores three major environmental problems that we will have to grapple with in the future. Not surprisingly, they are the same ones envisioned in Resources in 1970.