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Aqua Net, a beloved 1980s hairspray brand, was one of the products that was correlated to the ozone hole because of chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, a chemical compound that was present in everything from aerosol cans to refrigerators.

“Projections suggested that the ozone layer would collapse by 2050,” the Future of Life Institute’s Georgiana Gilgallon told me. “We’d have collapsing ecosystems, agriculture, genetic defects.” The sudden plunge in atmospheric ozone heralded a coming disaster.

But the world responded. With consumer boycotts, political action, a major international treaty called the Montreal Protocol, and a huge investment in new technologies to replace CFCs in all their commercial and industrial uses, new CFC production was brought effectively to a halt over the 1990s and early 2000s. It took a while to phase out existing devices that used CFCs, but CFC emissions have been steadily falling since the protocol went into effect.

“We see this as potentially the first instance in which humanity recognized and addressed a global catastrophic risk,” Gilgallon told me. There is still much to be done and some new problems to contend with, but measurements from the present day make it clear that the process of healing the ozone layer is well underway.

The ozone “hole,” explained

Ozone is a molecule made up of three oxygen atoms. (The oxygen we breathe is made up of just two.) There’s not much ozone floating around in the layer of atmosphere that we breathe — a good thing, since it’s actually a lung irritant and linked with respiratory disease.

But there’s a lot of it in the stratosphere (comparatively speaking, at least; it’s still only a tiny fraction of the overall air). It’s that layer of ozone that absorbs ultraviolet (UV) radiation, especially the specific wavelengths called UV-B.

UV-B radiation is what causes sunburns, and in high concentrations it causes more problems than that. It can lead to many kinds of cancer by damaging our DNA; most plants and animals also suffer when growing in a high-UV-radiation environment.

In the 1970s, researchers noticed that the ozone layer had started thinning, especially around the poles. (With the ozone layer constituting only about three in a million atoms in the stratosphere in the first place, “hole” is technically a misnomer — the “ozone hole” was really just an area where ozone levels had dropped by more than 30 percent in a decade.)

By the time the thinning of the ozone layer was measured, researchers Mario Molina and Sherry Rowland had already established the probable cause: CFCs.

CFCs were everywhere, and as far as everyone knew, they were the perfect chemical: nonreactive, cheap, and highly effective in a wide variety of manufacturing applications. They were building up in the atmosphere, but it was thought that since they were nonreactive, it couldn’t be a problem.

A graphic showing the relative size of the ozone hole in years from 1979 to 2019.

Molina and Rowland realized that that assumption was wrong. There’s a (possibly apocryphal) story of Rowland’s wife asking him how his work was going, and Rowland responding, “Well, the work is fantastic, but I think the Earth is ending.”

The problem was that CFCs break down in the upper atmosphere. And the chlorine in CFCs was actually reactive, binding with ozone to make oxygen and chlorine monoxide.

Molina and Rowland’s 1974 paper in Nature laying out the problem prompted discussion and debate, and environmental activists started pushing for change. But it didn’t move governments to coordinated international action. At the time, the exact implications of Molina and Rowland’s theory were hotly contested. Many researchers believed that ozone depletion would be a problem only on a time scale of centuries. There were some early worrying measurements that were dismissed as flukes.

What the measurements in the Antarctic taken a decade later showed definitively is that it was happening much, much faster than that. “Sometime around the late ’70s, it started dropping like a rock — [there] was more ozone depletion than Molina and Rowland had ever imagined,” Solomon said.

From diagnosis to global action

The fight in the 1980s against the depletion of the ozone layer had several stages that might seem familiar to those trying to unite the world to combat other problems.

First, there was the challenge of determining that there was in fact a threat and that CFCs were the cause. The initial work there was done by Molina and Rowland. But from the 1985 measurements taken by Joseph Farman — a geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey — and his colleagues, it looked like the ozone layer was vanishing much faster than their models predicted.

Susan Solomon was the lead researcher on the team that figured out how the chlorine from CFCs was breaking down so much ozone. In 1986 and 1987, she led the National Ozone Expedition to Antarctica to collect the evidence that would confirm her theory. Scientists had originally thought that, while chlorine would interact with ozone, the process was naturally limited — after all, there weren’t that many atoms of chlorine loose.

Solomon and her team claimed that the process by which chlorine broke down ozone actually wasn’t as limited as initially thought and that the ozone breakdown could quickly spiral out of control: The chlorine monoxide that formed from chlorine’s interaction with ozone would then break down, releasing the chlorine atom to go break down more ozone.

“You can destroy hundreds of thousands of ozone molecules with one chlorine atom from a CFC molecule in the timescale that this stuff is in the stratosphere,” Solomon said.

The next stage of the fight was then convincing the world to do something about the problem. In 1986, UN negotiations began on a treaty to ban substances that reacted with ozone in the upper atmosphere, mainly CFCs. Stephen Andersen, at the time an official in the US Environmental Protection Agency, was a major figure in the negotiations. “He really made it happen,” the Future of Life Institute program director David Nicholson says.

AFP via Getty Images

MIT Professor Mario Molina, left, with his wife, chemist Luisa Molina, after winning the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his research on the effects of man-made chemicals on the ozone layer. Molina was a co-recipient along with Frank “Sherry” Rowland.

The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer was agreed upon and opened for signature in 1987. It went into force in 1989. Countries gradually began phasing out CFCs. Andersen’s team, Nicholson says, “systematically identified hundreds of solutions for phasing out CFCs from hundreds of industry sectors,” making it possible to shift manufacturing processes worldwide to chemicals that weren’t ozone-depleting.

Those chemicals in some cases have presented their own problems. For refrigerants, the world shifted to hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which endanger the ozone layer much less. Like the CFCs they replaced, though, HFCs are potent greenhouse gases — thousands of times more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in our atmosphere. Twenty years ago, HFCs were an environmental step forward, allowing us to phase out CFCs. Today, policymakers and scientists are trying to phase out HFCs as well. Human ingenuity can solve our problems, but it can also create new ones as it does.

But in terms of the primary goal — healing the ozone layer — the worldwide effort was a huge success. CFC consumption declined from over 800,000 metric tons in the 1980s to an estimated 156 metric tons in 2014. Experts estimate that by 2050, the ozone layer will be back to the state it was in 1980.

Our World In Data
Falling consumption of CFCs (blue) and other ozone-depleting substances, which were also restricted by the Montreal Protocol in a worldwide effort to save the ozone layer.

And keeping the ozone intact buys us time in the fight against climate change. Yes, HFCs are a potent greenhouse gas. But CFCs contributed to global warming as well: They were powerful greenhouse gases in their own right, and by destroying the ozone layer, they contributed to warming by allowing more energy to reach the planet’s surface. One study found that ozone-depleting chemicals drove half of Arctic warming in the 20th century.

With that said, HFCs are still a big climate problem. In recent years, governments have been working to extend the hugely successful Montreal Protocol to phase them out too. It’s fair to say that, in some ways, the global fight against the ozone crisis was a complicated story, one that continues to be written.

But in other ways, it does offer some bracing clarity. The sheer speed with which the world went to work and enacted a global treaty to address a pressing environmental problem is, to contemporary eyes, downright bewildering. To a public accustomed to decades- long stalemates over climate policy, hearing how countries quickly lined up to sign an accord to save the planet may feel almost like a rebuke of our failures.

In many ways, the international community of the 1980s had an easier problem. CFCs were industrially useful, but there were substitutes; cost-effective substitutes for fossil fuels are coming into production now, decades into the climate crisis, but they certainly didn’t exist when we first started addressing it.

Politicians were more united in addressing the ozone layer than they’ve proven in addressing climate change. The Senate ratified the Montreal Protocol 83–0. Margaret Thatcher, not generally known for her friendliness to regulation, was a leader in the push for the Montreal Protocol and the effort to enable compliance by poor countries.

By contrast, politicians today (especially in the US) are fiercely divided over the proper government role in ending climate change, and the public is divided along partisan lines as well.

The picture we’re left with by the fight to heal the ozone layer is that specific individuals played a huge role in changing humanity’s trajectory but they did that mostly by enabling public activism, international diplomacy, and collective action. In the fight to improve the world, we can’t do without individuals and we can’t do without coordination mechanisms. But we should keep in mind how much we can do when we have both.

At a time of looming, heartbreaking famine, the government in #Ethiopia shockingly just expelled a @UNICEF officer & 6 other @UN personnel. Millions of people face desperate need in northern Ethiopia, and the government keeps taking steps to ensure aid won’t reach them. https://t.co/C84pWfr5Dy

— Samantha Power (@PowerUSAID) September 30, 2021

Abiy’s government has justified the expulsion order by accusing UN officials of “meddling” in Ethiopia’s affairs, but it comes just two days after the head of the UN’s Organization for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, raised concerns about famine in Tigray, home to about 6 million people. The official directive from the Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs came Thursday, the same day the OCHA released a report finding that 79 percent of pregnant or breastfeeding women in Tigray are malnourished, and that fuel and medicine haven’t reached the region since July.

According to the UN, 5.2 million people in Tigray — about 90 percent of its population — are in need of humanitarian assistance in order to survive, necessitating a flow of about 100 supply-laden trucks into the region per day. Yet only 606 such vehicles have made it into the state since July 12, the New York Times reports.

This is not the first time the government has forced a humanitarian group out of Tigray for opposing the official government narrative on conditions there.

The Dutch arm of Médecins Sans Frontières — MSF, or Doctors Without Borders — suspended its activities in west and northwest Tigray for three months starting in early September after the Ethiopian Agency for Civil Society Organizations directed them to do so in late July. The Norwegian Refugee Council was issued the same order July 30 and suspended its Ethiopia operations in early August; Ethiopian authorities had accused the groups of backing the Tigrayan political cause, even claiming that aid workers armed members of the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF.

Ethiopia ended one war and started another

The dismissal of the UN officials is the latest development in the Ethiopian government’s ongoing war in the Tigray region. For the past 11 months, since Abiy sent in the Ethiopian National Defense Forces, or ENDF, into Tigray to retaliate against a TPLF attack on a ENDF base there, Tigray has slid further toward disaster.

That initial skirmish, as Vox’s Jen Kirby explained in April, was widely seen as a pretext for the national government to invade the Tigray region.

Conflict between the Tigray, which is an ethnic group as well as a region of the country, and the Abiy administration seemed inevitable almost since Abiy took power in 2018. Abiy’s rise to power ended nearly 30 years of domination by the Tigrayan wing of the Ethio­pian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, or EPRDF.

Prior to Abiy, protests against government corruption and human rights abuses were mounting in Ethiopia; in particular, Kirby says, the Omoro and Amhara ethnic groups were frustrated by the Tigray grip on positions of power in the government and military, even though only 6 percent of Ethiopians are Tigray.

In 2018, Abiy — a member of the Omoro group and a relative political newcomer — was elected head of the EPRDF and assumed the role of prime minister. He came into the power promising democratic elections and the freeing of political prisoners, and even brokered peace with neighboring Eritrea, ending a 20-year war. The following year, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for ending that conflict — only to precipitate a brutal civil war a year later.

“This is man-made, this can be remedied by the act of government”

Now, as Ethiopia’s civil war approaches the one-year mark, international aid groups say the Tigray state’s deadly famine is poised to get worse.

“We predicted that there were 400,000 people in famine-like conditions, at risk of famine, and the supposition was that if no aid got to them adequately they would slip into famine,” Martin Griffiths, the OCHA head, told Reuters this week, citing a June UN assessment. Since June, Abiy’s administration has imposed what Griffiths called a “de-facto blockade,” with only about 10 percent of the urgently needed supplies getting into Tigray.

The crisis has been made even worse by another factor: In addition to civil war, a plague of desert locusts disrupted the region’s growing season over the last two years, with Ethiopia and neighboring Somalia and Kenya bearing the brunt of the invasion of the crop-eating pests. A 2019 report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN specifically points to Ethiopia’s Tigray, Somali, Orowia, and Amhara states as suffering the worst of the swarm’s damage.

But despite the swarms of locusts and consecutive seasons of low rainfall and crop yield, the UN says the primary driver of Tigray’s looming famine is still Ethiopia’s federal government.

“This is man-made, this can be remedied by the act of government,” Griffiths said.

It’s unclear, however, whether there is any end in sight to the conflict. The war in Tigray has already spilled over into neighboring states in Ethiopia and displaced more than 1.7 million people from their homes; as the conflict wears on, those problems only stand to worsen.

The UN Security Council discussed the situation in a Friday meeting, with some member nations expressing grave concerns over Ethiopia’s behavior, both present and future.

“As a major new military offensive looms, this seems like Ethiopia’s attempt to test if the international community is prepared to respond with more than words to an unfolding famine,” an unnamed Western official told Reuters.

“We’re worried it may be a precursor to other activity,” Geraldine Byrne Nason, Ireland’s ambassador to the UN, said Friday.

Michael Gandolfini — son of the late James Gandolfini — as young Tony Soprano, and Alessandro Nivola as Dickie Moltisanti in The Many Saints of Newark.

Another clear possibility could be the looming release of The Many Saints of Newark, which after a long pandemic delay finally hit theaters and HBO Max simultaneously on October 1. The film follows in the footsteps of movies that revisit characters from golden age TV shows, like El Camino, a sequel to Breaking Bad, and Deadwood: The Movie, both of which came out in 2019.

Given that James Gandolfini, the star of The Sopranos, passed away in 2013, the film isn’t a sequel; it’s a prequel. And in truth, it leaves a lot to be desired. The Many Saints of Newark is unwieldy and marred by a number of performances that feel more like impressions of Sopranos’ characters than actual acting. Series creator David Chase wrote the story, which centers on Dickie Moltisanti (played by an excellent Alessandro Nivola), who will one day be the father of The Sopranos’ Christopher. The film follows Dickie as he navigates the twisty connections of his many relatives and mentors his nephew, young Tony Soprano (played by Michael Gandolfini, son of James).

And for Sopranos fans yearning for more, it will undoubtedly hit the spot in spite of its flaws.

Furthermore, as Chase noted in an interview in 2020, the series had already started to gain new traction around the 20th anniversary of its debut, before anyone knew the pandemic was coming. “From last summer, fall of 2019, I kept hearing this — that young people were discovering the show and these podcasts started,” he told Variety. “And that was sort of puzzling and wonderful to me.”

In 2019, the first-ever SopranosCon — a fan convention — was held at the Meadowlands Exposition Center in Secaucus, New Jersey, not too far from the North Jersey locations where much of the show is set. It was an unofficial event that proceeded with blessings from HBO, attracting thousands of fans (some in costume) and featuring replicas of Dr. Melfi’s office (where Tony had therapy sessions) and the Bada Bing! strip club as well as memorials to the late Gandolfini and other cast members who have died since the show’s 2007 finale.

Fans’ enduring love for the series is predictable. The Sopranos has, on the whole, aged quite well. The notion of an antihero as the protagonist of a TV drama is no longer remarkable, and the notion of a mob boss going to therapy, while still inherently comical, isn’t quite as startling or weird. But the show’s explorations of dangerous masculinity (and, often, the kind of “femininity” that enables it) were ahead of their time, especially compared with sitcoms or many traditional dramas from the same era. Even though many great shows that have followed it, The Sopranos still stands out, with acting and writing that rival most anything you can watch on a screen.

Tony, Carmela, and AJ Soprano at a table in a diner. HBO
It’s still hard to beat The Sopranos.

So it stands to reason that the show’s recent popularity isn’t really linked, or at least not solely, to pandemic-prompted binge-watching and malaise. Many commentators have suggested that The Sopranos’ newest fans — many of whom are millennials or Gen Z, people under 40 who were mostly too young to watch the show when it was first airing — probably also relate to one of its main themes, which might be termed “the end of history.”

You have to read that phrase with a little bit of self-conscious pretension in mind, because every generation kind of thinks it’s the last one. Apocalyptic thinking is by no means new. (It’s not like Gen X, who would have been just the right age for the show when it was on, is some fount of optimism.)

But there’s something to the idea that the Soprano family provides a proxy for viewers who feel like they were born too late to have experienced the “good life.” One of Tony’s most-quoted lines comes in Dr.  Melfi’s office during a therapy session. “It’s good to be in something from the ground floor,” he says. “I came too late for that and I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.” He’s basically stating one of the show’s great recurring motifs, in which the mobsters lament the passing of their fathers’ generation, when things were better and the men, in their memory, were “saints.”

They’re remembering the past through Vaseline-rubbed lenses, something The Many Saints of Newark makes clear. Times weren’t better back then; they were different, and for many, far more dangerous. The men weren’t saints, and they certainly didn’t treat their families any better. But the sentiment and its attendant ironies appealed to viewers at the turn of the millennium, and it rings true decades later too. The kind of overt nostalgia that’s surfaced in our political and cultural discourse — from yearning for a formerly “great” America to mythologizing the kinds of movies they don’t make anymore — is exactly what the characters on the show often pine for.

Yet I still find this explanation for The Sopranos’ resurgence unsatisfying. I was midway through high school when the show premiered, and I never watched it. And though I’ve watched, and loved, virtually every other prestige show that aired during the early 2000s “golden age,” I kept putting off The Sopranos. I thought it would be a tough sit, as dense and dark as its cousins.

The impending launch of The Many Saints of Newark finally got me to start. To my delight, I quickly realized that The Sopranos is extremely funny, frequently feeling more like a family sitcom than a straightforward drama. I definitely noticed all the same things critics had pointed out about the show — its terrific characters, its innovative storytelling, its ability to tap into a pessimistic zeitgeist that hasn’t abated in the years since it aired.

A scene from “The Many Saints of Newark” showing a large family around a dinner table. HBO
It’s about family.

But there was something else, too — something I couldn’t put my finger on until recently. Several people, including some of my friends, told me that watching The Sopranos made them feel connected to their own families and hometowns. It was like coming home. Annabel, who’s 22, told me via Twitter that she’d started watching the show with her partner this year. “I really miss my heavily New York and New Jersey family, who I don’t get to see much because of the pandemic and distance,” she said. “I get a kick out of seeing them eat stuff like the sfogliatelle that we had at holidays, and making jokes about the college that my mom went to.”

“As the first person in my family who was born not in New Jersey or New York, it also felt like a little bit of a glimpse — not the mobsters, but the set dressing! — of a huge chapter of my family’s life before I was born that I’ve always heard about,” she said. “Our lore.”

I get that. My family isn’t Italian at all, but I did grow up in New York state, and somehow northeastern foodways mean that Italian-American food was what we were always eating at family gatherings. The baked ziti and manicotti and huge piles of bread and charcuterie — excuse me, gabagool — were and still are fixtures on my family’s holiday tables. Watching the Soprano family’s holidays or the men eating in Artie Bucco’s restaurant, I felt a little homesick in a way TV never makes me feel.

For me and many people like Annabel, The Sopranos provides a way to feel connected to history, whether or not we’re at the end of it. Actually, I suspect that’s true for most millennials and Gen Z viewers of the series, Italian-American or New Jersey natives or not. After all, The Sopranos represents, for us, the mythic starting point of something that has ruled our adult lives: an explosively crowded TV landscape telling stories that frequently focus on bad men wrestling with their demons. Even shows that do just the opposite often seem to be operating near the antiheroes’ spotlight, trying to innovate on or entirely subvert these larger-than-life figures.

Watching The Sopranos inducts us into that history, which represents for many our grander cultural history, for better or worse. As the entertainment world grows more niche and diverse, and fewer and fewer shows are capable of capturing mass attention and driving cultural dialogue, watching The Sopranos is a trip into another part of our past — one where a show like this could cause breathless next- day discussions and become a bona fide cultural event.

While I think the death of the monoculture has been greatly exaggerated, it’s easy to feel like we’re at the end of something, an age of mass art that we’ll never return to. The guys on The Sopranos, forever quoting The Godfather and reminiscing about the good old days, felt just the same. The more things change, the more they stay, ever and always, the same.

The Many Saints of Newark is playing in theaters and streaming on HBO Max. The Sopranos is streaming on HBO Max.

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