I saw this spectacle from a suburban home in the outer suburbs of Melbourne. The house was built by my father on a hill of vacant paddocks in 1950 – a decisive moment in the history of the world, as it turned out. My parents were among those who, after the war, built with earnest commitment the homes that signified their return to family and security. Building materials were scarce and skilled labour was in demand. The housing shortage was described as Victoria’s most ‘acute social problem’. Many homes were built in stages by the owners themselves. At the weekend, across Melbourne’s burgeoning outer suburbs, working bees busied themselves around timber frames and humble small-roomed dwellings. The Age ran special articles for these austere and determined home-makers, with helpful titles such as ‘Making One Room into Two or Three’. Through the newspaper’s ‘Small Homes Service’, a weekly feature established in 1947, Robin Boyd tutored home buyers and builders in good taste. The first photographs in our family album show the timber frame rising alone against the sky from amid the grass on the hill, awaiting its brick veneer. Dad queued up each week at the hardware store for a pound of nails, his building ration in hard times, and sometimes enlisted workmates to collect a quota of nails on his behalf so that work on the house could proceed at the weekend.

I grew up on this frontier, in Balwyn, a middle-class eastern suburb of Melbourne, stultifyingly suburban, privatised into houses on blocks behind fences, inhabited by nuclear families in the nuclear age, with daily deliveries of milk and bread by horse and cart. The library was a bus that came once a week. The public spaces were desolate. An overgrown ‘easement’ (and it was called just that: ‘The Easement’) provided my only casual access to ‘wild nature’, which meant a linear paddock of untamed grass. This was clearly different to ‘the Nature Strip’, which was the common lawn (expected to be mown) at the front of each home. Public transport was poor; the key to freedom was petroleum and the private car, and the yawning double garage began to take pride of place in newly built homes. The car shaped the suburb. Melbourne’s first traffic roundabout was built near us, and it was such an innovation in a linear, rectangular streetscape that the whole neighbourhood became known simply as ‘The Roundabout’.

The suburban frontier, Balwyn, 1950 (photograph by Ray Griffiths)

Our house was heated by an open fire where we burned mallee roots that had been grubbed out of Victoria’s north-western plains to convert them to wheatlands. Red dust blew hundreds of kilometres each summer from those exposed and eroding paddocks, coating our drying clothes on the backyard hills hoist. Eventually, the open fire in our lounge room was replaced by an oil heater; we moved from wood to fossil fuel and thus progressed further into the Industrial Revolution. It was no ordinary heater. It was a space heater. It had a blue flame. The Vulcan Hydra-flame oil heater brought the idea of convection-radiation into home heating and had a Twin Heat Exchanger. Vulcan advertised that its ‘short-term and long-term developmental goals [were] part of a rapidly growing nation on the threshold of unprecedented expansion’. It was the dying embers of our dying open fire that kept me warm as I watched the Saturn V explode out of the stratosphere that winter night in 1969.

When, much later, I read The Cream Brick Frontier: Histories of Australian Suburbia (1995), edited by Graeme Davison, Tony Dingle, and Seamus O’Hanlon, it was with a shock of recognition that I learned that in places like Balwyn was to be found perhaps the last fitful expression of the Australian ‘pioneer legend’: ‘on the fringes of the great cities …’, the book argued, ‘in the years after the depression and the Second World War, a new generation of suburban pioneers did battle with the elements, subduing the land, creating little oases of domestic safety and comfort in a dangerous world.’ I hadn’t realised how adventurous and exciting my unremarkable childhood was.

A replica of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite in the world to be put into outer space: the replica is stored in the National Air and Space Museum.

But something even more astonishing was going on. The point of sharing this ordinary story with you is to reflect on how extraordinary it really was. Often, in history, we don’t recognise the most significant events or movements until after they have happened, or until their long-term effects have become manifest. There, in quiet, suburban Melbourne in the 1950s and 1960s, I was growing up in a favoured corner of a First World nation, a ‘lucky country’ living off its wool-cheques from stolen pastoral lands and busy converting paddocks to suburbs as it became one of the most urban countries in the world. I was also, we now know, being hurtled into space.

I should have felt vertiginous, for I was being propelled into the future at high speed on the apex of a demographic explosion and an energy revolution. I was coming of age in perhaps the most rapidly transforming years in human history. We now call this ‘The Great Acceleration’, a sudden and dramatic growth of the human enterprise after World War II. Population, petrol consumption, loss of species, atmospheric greenhouse gases, fertiliser and water use all sky-rocketed. All the graphs of exponential growth show that the launch pad for this explosion was 1950.¹

The American environmental historian J.R. McNeill, in his history of the twentieth century called Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (2000), writes about ‘the screeching acceleration’ of so many things in that prodigal century that brought about ecological change – and most of those changes happened in the second half of the century. The world’s population quadrupled in the twentieth century, energy use increased sixteen times, carbon dioxide emissions went up thirteen-fold, water use rose nine times. McNeill argues that ‘humankind has begun to play dice with the planet, without knowing all the rules of the game’. ‘The human race,’ continues McNeill, ‘without intending anything of the sort, has undertaken a gigantic uncontrolled experiment on the earth. In time, this will appear as the most important aspect of twentieth-century history, more so than World War II, the communist enterprise, the rise of mass literacy, the spread of democracy, or the growing emancipation of women.’

Sputnik and the launch of the Saturn V are potent symbols of ‘The Great Acceleration’. Powered by the burning of fossil fuels, they exploded out of our biosphere. Sitting at the tip of the military-industrial complex, they erupted beyond the planetary boundaries. The idea of planetary boundaries has recently been developed in a more formal, ecological sense by scientists aiming to ‘define a safe operating space for humanity within the dynamics of the Earth System’.² We are now exceeding many of those biophysical measures of sustainable planetary boundaries, such as the loss of biodiversity and the increasing level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The link between my suburban home and the launch pad at Cape Canaveral was not just via the television in my lounge room. The two were mobilised by the same unsustainable energy systems. I can’t even say it’s not rocket science.

The Space Race delivered two stunning new views of Earth. The first was the view through deep space of the blue planet, whole, beautiful, vulnerable, contingent, historical, finite, and lonely. This revolutionary new image underpinned the environmentalism and radical ecological consciousness that emerged after 1969. The other, equally revolutionary perspective was of Earth through deep time.

This is the first full face color portrait of the earth taken by the DODGE satellite in 1967. It was taken 18'100 miles into space.  The image was taken with a black an white TV camera which took three photos with a red, green and a blue filter to create the color image. The small disc in front of the picture is a colour match card. (Department of Defense Gravitational Experiment, August 1967)

I began by saying that Sputnik took the Cold War into space and became a symbol of superpower rivalry. But it is equally important to remember that, in the clear skies over the continent of ice that is Antarctica, Sputnik was welcomed as the culmination of a huge, cooperative human endeavour. Sputnik was the most visible efflorescence of what was called the International Geophysical Year of 1957–58 (known as IGY) – and IGY was the single biggest cooperative scientific enterprise ever undertaken. Nearly 30,000 scientists from sixty-six nations took part in geophysical observations across the globe. In Antarctica, which was a focus of the year, twelve countries including Australia were involved. The great southern ice cap – where ninety per cent of the world’s land ice is to be found – was explored and interrogated like never before.

In the 1950s, scientists began to measure not just the vastness of the ice sheet, but also its depth. At first they thought the ice cap was no more than a few hundred metres thick, and so they were stunned to find that it was actually kilometres deep. They doubted their own arithmetic. They checked and rechecked their measurements in disbelief. Men in tractors crossing the ice cap found that the driest of all continents was actually a vast elevated plateau of frozen water. This startling discovery just over half a century ago revealed that the world sea level is principally controlled by the state of the Antarctic ice sheet. And it also began to reveal that the greatest archive of climate history was trapped in the bubbles of air in those layers of ice.

It was the Cold War, a notable stimulant to science and now truly cold, which generated the world’s first palaeo-climate data from an ice core. The core was 1,390 metres deep, 100,000 years long, and drilled in 1966 at Camp Century, a secret American military base embedded in the northern Greenland ice cap. Thirty years later, a 400,000-year-old Antarctic ice core drilled near the Russian station, Vostok, charted four full cycles of glacial and interglacial periods, and established that the carbon dioxide and methane concentration in the atmosphere had moved in lockstep with the ice sheets and the temperature, and that present-day levels of these greenhouse gases were unprecedented in that period.3 Australian climate scientist Will Steffen has described this steady, sawtooth graph as Earth’s heartbeat – and he observes that it is now going off the chart. The Vostok core demanded recognition of the role of biology in a system that had previously been analysed largely in geophysical terms. Thus, in the final two decades of the twentieth century, ice cores from both Antarctica and Greenland delivered a sense of urgency and crisis about global warming.

An artist's cross-section of Lake Vostok, the largest known subglacial lake in Antarctica. Liquid water is thought to take thousands of years to pass through the lake, which is the size of North America's Lake Ontario. (image by Nicolle Rager-Fuller / US National Science Foundation, 2007)

For Steffen, it was the 1999 publication of the findings of the Vostok core that was the moment when climate issues crystallised for him. We all, I think, have a moment – or will have a moment – when we finally get this issue, when the penny drops, when our everyday habits of doublethink fall away and we realise what the climate crisis really means for humanity. For many people, that disturbing revelation has been delivered by those ice cores, the holy scripts, the sacred scrolls of our age.

Earlier scientific revolutions – such as the Copernican, the Darwinian, and the discovery of deep time – decentred and diminished the power and significance of humanity. By contrast, the scientific revolution of anthropogenic climate change reveals the cumulative, insidious, and all-pervading power of people on this planet.⁴ The contemporary influence of humans on the global atmosphere is so pervasive, powerful, and enduring that many argue that we have initiated a new geological age called ‘the Anthropocene’.

In the early twenty-first century, we are standing on the brink of a precipice, but at least we know that we are. We surely don’t understand all the dangers and opportunities ahead of us, but we are now roughly aware of our predicament. That at least is an achievement. The revolutionary perspectives of the floating Earth and its heartbeat were delivered to us by the same runaway fossil-fuel economy and military-industrial capitalism that have endangered us. The unleashing of carbon has given us a planetary consciousness and an understanding of deep history that enable us to comprehend the magnitude of the challenge we now face. The Great Acceleration has propelled us well beyond the planetary boundaries. The question now is – can we return safely to Earth?

Endnotes

1.        Will Steffen, Paul J Crutzen and John McNeill, ‘The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?’, Ambio Vol 36, No. 8 (December 2007): 614–21

2.        Will Steffen and Mark Stafford Smith, ‘Planetary Boundaries, Equity and Global Sustainability: Why Wealthy Countries Could Benefit from More Equity’, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability Vol 5, Issues 3-4 (2013): 1–6

3.        Tom Griffiths, ‘Commentary’ on Wallace S. Broecker, ‘Unpleasant Surprises in the Greenhouse?’ (1987) and J.R. Petit et al., ‘Climate and Atmospheric History’ (1999), in Libby Robin, Sverker Sörlin, and Paul Warde (eds), The Future of Nature: Documents of Global Change (Yale University Press, 2013), 337–62

4.       David Archer, The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate (Princeton University Press, 2009), 1–2