‘Due to lack of interest, tomorrow has been cancelled’  was the title of a famous 1971 TV documentary about how the world was walking towards ecological disaster with its eyes shut. In this, the fourth installment of our series Seeing is Believing: the Politics of the Visual, Rod Stoneman remembers the impact of the images of that programme  and how it echos today in the growing concern about climate change.

To listen to other podcasts in the series, which is presented and produced by Esther Gaytan Fuertes, click on the links below:

• Podcast 1 on Fashion images
• Podcast 2 on graffiti
• Podcast 3 on music videos

Rod Stoneman: This photograph [above] is a picture of Los Angeles under smog, a problem that’s been addressed in recent years but for a long time, the inhabitants of Los Angeles were living through a self-inflicted ecological disaster. This came in focus for me personally when I saw a BBC science programme, Horizon in fact, in 1971 when I was in college. The title of this Horizon programme was, ‘Due to lack of interest, tomorrow has been cancelled’. And for 45 minutes the programme assembled a case of the danger to the planet, talking about the Colorado Dust Bowl, the overuse of DDT pesticides killing species, the smog in Los Angeles for sure, and a lake in Russia which had been eliminated by factory pollution. And the television programme ended with the memorable phrase of an American scientist saying “Maybe Man is like a dinosaur shot in the back brain —maybe already dead, but it doesn’t know it”.

What I can’t help but reflecting on now is the way in which such a strong warning, if you like, in a BBC programme was something that I was able to ignore for the following 30-40 years and like most other people in Western countries the issue of ecology was set aside. As it began to emerge onto political agendas in 2005, 2006 —even the urgency was beginning to be brought home— the media found it very difficult to foreground the ecological questions because they don’t fit within most news agendas, most criteria for coverage. And there’s really never really been a strong, iconic image —I mean, perhaps at other point, when the hippies being a subculture taking ecology more seriously, when the hippies were active the famous picture from the NASA spacecraft of the blue planet tried to have that effect. But really there is been no equivalent to —if you take the historical example of the Lisbon earthquake, which was devastating when it happened, which was in 1755, and a had a subsequent effect on the Enlightenment, on Voltaire and other European philosophers thereafter. Something like the tsunami in Indonesia in 2004 and the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, there are not directly linked to the human abuse of the planet and therefore have not shifted perception in an effective way.

Trying to understand and explain how the ecological crisis has really had little impact over the years, because there were scientists from previous centuries, the Scandinavian Svante Arrhenius in 1896 or GS Callendar in the 1930s were warning about the dangers of climate change and of global warning but in a very optimistic way, they seemed to think that, as the planet got warmer, it would be good for agriculture and there’d be more crops for a larger population. And that’s symptomatic of a kind of anthropocentric ego, which means we, mankind, are the centre of all things and our ego is expansive and it’ll work out ok for us.

The pathetic fallacy in literature —‘it rains in the town, it cries in my heart’, would be an example— is another version of human self-centeredness, the sense that it’s got to work out for us because the centre of all the things.  And maybe the smog in Los Angeles is somewhat better now, but the general attitude about the urgency of the catastrophe we face has not really taken it on board, has not come to the point where… Well, I hope it’s not true and that we are not a dinosaur that’s been shot in the back brain.

As Rod Stoneman says, let’s hope that the pessimistic prophecy of one of the scientists interviewed for that 70s BBC Horizon programme doesn’t turn out to be true and we still time to change our way of living before it’s too late for the environment and for ourselves.

Documentary extract: I think the chances of scientific and political bodies implementing the kind of changes we need are relatively small, at least as these bodies are currently constituted. They spend enormous amount of time and energy trying to show that everything is going to be alright, that no changes are really needed –basically holding on to the status quo. I’m vey gloomy about the future not because I think we can’t do anything about it but because I’m afraid we won’t do anything about  it. I see no real sign that at least at the political level, or really among the great majority of people, that there is real understanding of what’s required or the urgency of the problem and that makes me quite pessimistic. If you had to ask me now what are the chances are of civilisation reaching the turn of the century I’d have to say, 1% or 2% if we’re lucky.