The Changing Mood

As the recession deepens, more people are being hurt. But it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and among the people to get hurt may be the environmental fanatics. Something tells us that the unemployed worker, the inflation-squeezed housewife or the failing businessman may not take kindly to the proposition that what is wrong with the world is the threat of thermal pollution replacing one species of fish with another.

There may be a few straws in the wind already. Not so long ago, Norman Cousins wrote in the Saturday Review, "Population is swelling. The food supply is shrinking. Oxygen is being depleted. The sky has become an open sewer. The conditions of life on this planet are running down." But now that things have begun to turn sour, Norman Cousins is bubbling over with optimism. He has just published a double issue called "An Inventory of Hope", and this recent foe of overgrown technology has now called on the world to use a little imagination, spend a few billions on an antenna array covering a few square miles and send signals of a few gigawatts on a 24,000 year journey to possible civilizations out there in the universe. Time, which used to gobble up The Limits to Growth and similar swill to spew back at its readers, has suddenly remembered to count the world's blessings and to consider how much worse things could be.

The other half of the clobbering may well be self-administered. Ignoring all costs and benefits, EPA bureaucrats will continue to antagonize people by prohibiting everything that is not compulsory. The lie that nuclear power is less safe or less reliable than fossil-generated power will be more easily perceived when consumers are asked to pay the sixfold difference in the cost of fossils and uranium; but Nader can be relied on to continue his anti-nuclear hysteria. Barry Commoner will continue to advocate not only the prohibition of orthodox nuclear power, but to ''keep fusion on the sun." McClosky and Brower will continue urging the country to subsidize their ego trips by banning surface mining and offshore drilling. And there is no stopping of fanatics like Paul Ehrlich, who started screaming about a population explosion long after the US birth rate had started sliding into all-time record lows, with no end in sight yet; he, too, will be a party to the self-clobbering.

If the environmentalists had any sense, they would cool it now.

But, fortunately, they don't have any.