Robert Kennedy Warned Us About the Environment
Environmental concerns were just starting to be raised in the US in 1968 - it was still two years before millions would march in the streets on the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970 - but Kennedy was ready to act to pre-empt serious problems.
He did not talk about pollution and ecology. Rather, he talked about pollution and people, about the environment and economics.
Here was potentially the most powerful person in the world telling us that it was our incessant demand for ever more goods and chattels that was leading to disaster. Our demands on nature were too great and would not be sustainable in the long term.
This is what Kennedy had to say: “We will find neither national purpose nor personal satisfaction in a continuation of an endless amassing of worldly goods.”
Worth contemplating just after the Christmas splurge. He went on to point out that we are duped into irrational and unsustainable behaviour by our method of measuring economic wellbeing. “We cannot measure national achievement by the Gross National Product. For the Gross National Product includes air pollution, and ambulances to clear our highways from carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and jails for people who break them, the destruction of redwoods, the death of Lake Superior. It grows with the production of napalm and mines and nuclear warheads. It includes the broadcasting of television programs which glorify violence to sell goods to our children.”
All these destructive things are supposed to add to our wellbeing.
Kennedy went on to point out that many of the things that make us healthier and happier are excluded from our measure of wellbeing, for example: the safety of our children in the streets; the quality of their education; the integrity of our politicians; the strength of our relationships.
He summed up the situation thus: “GDP measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”
