It was something I saw in a print magazine a long time ago. I can't cite it.
It's easy to pull out a single phrase, like "never celebrated," and nitpick it. In comparison to the handwringing in the news at the time about the imminent global catastrophe we were facing, the success of getting it out out and averting the level of global atmospheric catastrophe that was expected wasn't really celebrated.
We did the same with Y2K. The world expected a financial meltdown. People were stockpiling guns and give years of flour in their basements and then it became "Gosh, I can't program my VCR."
We take success for granted. We don't celebrate that we have 7 billion people with long life expectancy and high standard of living compared to 200 years ago. Instead, we complain about overpopulation and global warming and how we are hurtling towards our doom.
"How to lie with statistics" is a terrific book about how we can take the same data and say different things with it. We tend to frame it quite negatively.
In the end, none of us is getting out of here alive. We're all just dancing on this Earth for a short while.
There are people literally trying to find ways to solve death and wondering if we can be frozen and brought back and so forth. We're never satisfied and there's some evidence that it's partly because we choose to focus on the negative and with 7 billion people there no shortage of bad news, but not because things are necessarily actually worse in absolute terms.
Sure. And it's easy to exaggerate. Why not say "underappreciated"?
"People were stockpiling guns and give years of flour in their basements"
Sure. And yet no one I knew did that. If one points to extremes and ignore the average case, isn't that an exaggeration?
"Instead, we complain about overpopulation"
Perhaps because Norman Borlaug was right in saying "But the frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed; otherwise the success of the green revolution will be ephemeral only."
"it's partly because we choose to focus on the negative"
Perhaps you are the one to see a desert flower bloom in the midst of great environmental damage. Does that mean the damage is not there and there's nothing to do?
Red Adair was already a celebrated oil well firefighter in the 1960s, when 'Hellfighters' was filmed. His fame continued to grow. I remember a number of pieces praising Red Adair Company and others involved in putting out the Kuwait oil well fires. Putting out an oil well fire with a jet engine made for eye-grabbing news.
Obituaries about him include praise like this, from CBS, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hellfighter-red-adair-dies-at-8... :
"Thanks in part to his expertise, an operation expected to last three to five years was completed in nine months, saving millions of barrels of oil and stopping an intercontinental air pollution disaster."
I therefore think you exaggerate when you write "never celebrated."
Do you have a citation for the desert bloom? I looked, but couldn't find any mention of it. Since much of the water for putting out the fires was sea water, pumped in reverse through oil pipes, I'm curious about salt water could be beneficial to a desert bloom. Was it downwind moisture?
It was far easier to find publications like "Remediation of Oil Contaminated Sludge and Soil in Kuwait":
"The destruction of oil fields in Kuwait during the Gulf War resulted in unprecedented large environmental damage. More than 500 oil lakes were formed covering more than 49 km2 area. The volume of contaminated oily sludge’s and soil, which needs to be treated in Kuwait, is estimated to be more than 20 million m3 ... Within Burgan, all lake beds, particularly the ones near the city of Ahmadi and in the working areas such as gathering centers in the oil field, are considered to be a threat to human health and harmful to all types of life, including native flora and fauna."
an "Ecology of Arabian deserts" (doi:10.1007/1-4020-3970-0_5 )
"Lakes of oil deliberately released in Kuwait by the Iraqi Armyin the 1991 Gulf War were up to 2.5 m deep and contaminated the environment, as well as the north-eastern shores of Saudi Arabia. The movement of armies and their vehicles during the first Gulf War in 1991 and the Iraq war in 2003–2005 has caused the fragile desert pavements laid down over thousands of years to be broken and destroyed over large areas of north-eastern Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and many areas of Iraq. This caused a dramatic increase in the number of violent sandstorms and dust storms, new dunes blocked roads in northern Kuwait (El-Baz, 1992), and pilots reported a doubling of dust storms following the Iraq–Iran war in the 1980s."
so I also would like to know how well benefits like the desert bloom balances the many better-known negative effects.