Abundance

by Ezra Klein

It is hard, now, to imagine how quickly the built environment of America changed in these years. In 1900, there were scarcely 8,000 cars in the entire country.62 By 1970, 118 million cars sluiced through a nearly completed Interstate Highway System. In 1900, no one had ever flown in an airplane. By 1970, millions of passengers boarded wide-body jetliners like the Boeing 747 to travel across the oceans to thousands of airports around the world. To a previous generation, this technology would have been indistinguishable from sorcery. As every reader of fantasy novels knows, great magic carries a terrible price. In 1943, Los Angeles residents woke up to air so dark and noxious that they feared the Japanese had launched a gas attack.63 Five years later, a lethal smog in Donora, Pennsylvania, caused by industrial pollutants from zinc-smelting plants and a temperature inversion that trapped toxins in the air64 killed twenty people and sickened thousands.65 In New Hampshire, the Merrimack River, lined with textile mills in Manchester and Nashua, ran in different colors by the day, as dyes and chemicals dumped into the river tinged the water red, then green, then yellow.66 In Cleveland, Ohio, on June 22, 1969, oily waste and debris were ignited, possibly by a flare thrown onto the Cuyahoga River, sparking a fire as tall as a four-story building.67 In Pittsburgh, midcentury drivers had to use their windshield wipers to clear away the soot so they could see the road.68 America in th...