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Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

> we're much more divided now than we were in the early 60s.

I really don't think this is substantially true. I think we're about as divided as we were then.

see my response to swatcoder in this thread. Most of the division came in the mid-to-late 60s. The early 60s was the calm before the storm.

Fair enough. But why quibble over a couple of years? The point is that the amount of division we have going on now isn't unprecedented. Lots of people have the last time in their living memory.

Yes, the amount of division now definitely isn't unprecedented. But Silent Spring wasn't released into that very divisive part of the 60s - it was released just prior to it and that's what probably allowed it to have more of an impact. The media landscape was definitely more uniform then than now, information bubbles were much less of a thing - again, I can't imagine any book or film having that kind of impact now, that's my main point.

Another example would be the ozone layer: When it became clear in the 70s that CFCs were destroying the ozone layer we were able to make changes to stop that from happening over the course of a decade. Can't imagine us being able to do something like that now.

Having grown up in New England in the era, I remember "acid rain" being a big concern too. The polluters fought to keep anything from being done about the problem, but decades later some steps were actually taken by the US government (and others) and apparently there's been a fair amount of success.

I agree, now that "corporations are people" in the US it's hard to imagine being able to successfully battle them and force large-scale, cross-industry environmental-health measures to be taken. That is, unless it so happens that such measures maximize short-term profits in some way.

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