The title is that of a popular novel published in the 1950s and of a 1959 movie starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner. The plot is that a nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere sets forth a radioactive cloud that will, eventually, destroy all life on earth. As the movie begins, survivors are centered in Australia waiting to die.

The story made a big splash when it came out, and Wisconsin Public Television aired the movie a few days ago.

What struck me as I watched it again was a question the Ava Gardner character asked Gregory Peck: "Didn 't they know this would happen? "

It seemed like a powerful question at the time. It seemed even more powerful in 1962 -- that was just three years after the movie 's release -- when the Cuban missile crisis threatened to engulf the world in just such a nuclear war.

That didn 't happen. We do worry about nuclear proliferation today -- hence our concerns about Iraq, Iran and North Korea -- but we aren 't so paralyzed with fear as we were then.

The closest analogy to Gardner 's question, "Didn 't they know this would happen? " today may lie with global pollution rather than worldwide war.

We tut tut about pollution, but nothing really changes.

In February, Madison was under an "orange alert " because our air was so polluted. That meant people with heart or lung disease, older adults and children were supposed to refrain from strenuous exercise.

I know about air pollution. I 've lived in New York City and Chicago. One reason I chose to return to Madison is because we don 't have to deal with that kind of thing.

Except we do have to deal with air pollution. The last time our air was as polluted as it was in February was . . . in December, when we had a "red alert. "

Didn 't we know this would happen? Of course we knew. Environmentalists have been warning us for years that spewing particles in the air from power plants and motor vehicles would wreck our air quality. We just did nothing about it.

A week ago, we read about the collapse of the Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctica. This is a piece of ice about the size of Connecticut that has been around for 12,000 years or so. It broke off. Ice shelves are always breaking off these days, and there 's a lot of concern that the North and South poles are in danger of becoming islands or barges.

Didn 't we know this would happen? Sure we did, but it 's more fun to ridicule Al Gore than to listen to the repeated warnings by the world 's scientific community.

In the meantime, Time magazine reports this week that the Amazon rain forest is being destroyed at an ever-faster rate, in part because the American corn crop is being diverted to ethanol production and because soy bean fields are being planted in corn, leading Brazilian farmers to use grazing land for soybean production and clearing the rainforest to make new grazing land. That 's a convoluted explanation of the fact there is no free lunch. Every drop of fuel we waste brings disaster a tiny bit closer.

Don 't we know what will happen?

Yes, we do. If we 're lucky, 50 years from now, people will look at today 's scare-stories the way we now look at "On the Beach. " If we 're not lucky, Ava Gardner 's question will prove prescient.

Contact Wineke at bwineke@madison.com or at 252-6146. Read Wineke 's blog at www.madison.com/wsj/blogs.