1973 iucn yearbook

THE ENVIRONMENT IN 1973
Limits to Growth
The year 1973 will perhaps be remembered as the time when the meaning
of the limits to growth first became obvious to a majority of people in
the industrialized world. For this mixed blessing we have to thank,
ironically enough, the war between Arabs and Israelis which has been in
sporadic progress during the past quarter century. In 1973, in what one
hopes will have been its final flareup, several of the major oil-producing
Arab nations decided to cut off petroleum supplies to countries they
believed to be antagonistic and to reduce the oil flow to the industrialized
world in general. Many of the countries affected were caught in their
usual state of unpreparedness for any crisis, no matter how predictable.
In particular, perhaps, the impact was pronounced among those who had
learned to rely exclusively upon the motor car for transportation and
who felt a sense of disbelief and then of betrayal as their prospects for
obtaining petrol grew dim.
In a time of crisis it is risky to say "I told you so", since there are
those who will believe that anyone with foreknowledge must be, somehow,
to blame. Yet conservationists have been predicting the present
crisis for some decades, most notably during the 25 years since William
Vogt's The Road to Survival and Fairfield Osborn's Our Plundered Planet
were first published. More recently, during the 1960s and early 1970s,
there have been repeated conferences and many books produced by
environmentalists calling for the development of realistic, long-term,
national and international energy policies. Many of these have also
called for a turning to life styles that eschew a reliance on excessive
exploitation of the earth's limited non-renewable resources.
When national policies encourage waste and unnecessary consumption
in the belief that unlimited growth of economies and populations is both
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