The Boomers and the world

Environmental devastation was caused by the boomer generation

In 1945, the world changed. World War Two had officially ended, the ink of the politicians’ signatures had dried. Dozens of cities lay smouldering. Two were nuclear wastes.  The United States had emerged as a superpower and the Soviet Union was readying as a foil. Sixty million people were dead who should not have died.  

Between 1945 and 1965, there was a huge spike in births worldwide. Soldiers returned home, got married, and began to reproduce in rapid numbers. The global population skyrocketed, and the children who represented this rise grew up, grew old, and took over the world while they were doing it. For decades, the Boomers have had undue influence in the world, mostly because of their demographic power. Even when most other Boomers have retired or are close to retirement, the current American president—the so-called “leader of the free world”—is one of them. 

In the 50 years since they came of age at 18 in the United States, they’ve consistently exploited the world’s resources for their own benefit. In the 1960s, they created disposable culture to reduce the need to clean; plastic plates, napkins, packaging, clothes, and industrial parts were produced under the guise of efficiency. Now, 50 years later, over a million people in India live in landfills while a plastic island the size of Texas floats in the Pacific Ocean. This attitude of disposability was so seductive that they even applied it to our planet, falsely convincing themselves that the same factory manufacturing model could work on Earth’s resources. Lawmakers from the Boomer generation passed legislation in the U.S. Congress that irresponsibly used more and more fossil fuels while simultaneously claiming that the science behind climate change “wasn’t in yet.” Furthermore, the American Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 provided $25 billion to create the Interstate Highway System—that’s $25 billion to promote the use of cars and, by extension, fossil fuels. Pesticides and herbicides were sprinkled onto global farmland like seasons of monsoon rain and they had the audacity to call it “agricultural progress.” The runoff seeped into wild terrain where plants drank the chemicals as if they were water; the birds then ate those plants and died from the harmful substances they had inadvertently consumed. DDT alone decimated entire populations of bald eagles, pelicans, falcons, and ospreys. The slow decay of biodiversity and natural resources was a major side effect of the Boomers’ “agricultural progress” that ignored any semblance of sustainable practices. Whole forests were razed and when the soil washed away, this was a mystery and a problem for someone else to fix. All of the Boomers’ problems are for someone else to fix. 

Now that the consequences of their actions have moved into the public eye, the Boomers are conspicuously absent. They are retired, dead, or just “too old for this.” If none of those excuses work, they can always say that they didn’t know, or that no one could have known. They could have known. It should have been glaringly obvious that the plastic was not just a mere production fad, and obvious that soaking the ground in industrial strength chemicals would result in irreparable damages. Obvious that once there were no longer plants to hold it in place, the soil would just wash away. They just didn’t want to know.   

Collectively, the Boomer generation is a powerful force of destruction. The era of their childhood was one of hope and prosperity; the Allies had won the war, and they were invincible. The Boomer generation could not adjust to a world in which they could be fallible human beings, and that was their downfall. As Earth’s temperatures and seas rise, resulting in an increased amount of natural disasters and creating whirlpools of devastating storms and societal chaos, we will want someone to blame. As birds fall from the sky because their food and lungs have been poisoned by pesticides and herbicides, we will want someone to blame. As the surges of refugees fleeing environmental catastrophes come knocking at our borders, because the Boomers cultivated a post-war, saviour-like image in themselves, we will want someone to blame. As we ourselves become refugees fighting over the last scraps of land and food, we will want someone to blame. As the world inevitably and irreversibly changes around and within us, we will know who is to blame. They will be long gone by then.