A while back I was listening to a tea bagger wax nostalgic about the good old days: “The air was clean, the water was clean, not so much traffic or noise……not like today” This guy is about my age, early 60s. He was talking about the 1950s and 60s when pollution was much worse in many respects than today and the natural world was being despoiled with practically no effective opposition. The Golden Age myth is a constant of human perception (or mis-perception) but when we combine it with historical illiteracy and a large industry devoted to mis-information about the past, it becomes a serious problem.