Image from 1990 Newsweek issue on the family

I was doing some research at the public library the other day, paging through LIFE magazines from 1970. Ecology — as in acid rain, etc. — was an issue of great public concern at the time, with predictions that within a decade people would be wearing gas masks to survive pollution. Even more urgent, though, was “population pollution.”

I remember this, of course, and know that my generation was profoundly shaped by it. But I had forgotten the details, and now I saw them again. A biologist saying, for example, “Each American baby represents 50 times as great a threat to the planet as each Indian baby.” Continue reading →