Common Earth

Images of America in Crisis in the 1970s β€” In Focus β€” The Atlantic

DOCUMERICA: Images of America in Crisis in the 1970s β€” In Focus β€” The Atlantic

As the 1960s came to an end, the rapid development of the American postwar decades began to take a noticeable toll on the environment, and the public called for action. In November 1971, the newly created Environmental Protection Agency announced a massive photo documentary project, called DOCUMERICA, to record the adverse effects of modern life on the environment. More than 100 photographers were hired not only to document specific issues, but to capture images showing how we interacted with the environment. By 1974, more than 80,000 photographs had been produced. The National Archives recently made 15,000 of these images available, and I've spent much of the past week combing through those to bring you these 46 glimpses of America in the early 1970s, with an eye toward our then-ailing environmen

If we weren’t the first industrial civilization on Earth, would we ever know?

If we weren’t the first industrial civilization on Earth, would we ever know?

"In any case, say Schmidt and Frank, the fraction of life that gets fossilized is tiny. Dinosaurs roamed Earth for some 180 million years, and yet only a few thousand near-complete specimens exist. Modern humans have existed for just a few tens of thousands of years. β€œSpecies as short-lived as homo sapiens (so far) might not be represented in the existing fossil record at all,” say Schmidt and Frank. What of human artifactsβ€”roads, buildings, baked-bean tins, and silicon chips? These, too, are unlikely to survive long, or to be found even if they do. β€œThe current area of urbanization is less than 1% of the Earth’s surface,” point out the researchers. β€œWe conclude that for potential civilizations older than about 4 million years, the chances of finding direct evidence of their existence via objects or fossilized examples of their population is small,” they say."