The
'
Subversive
Science
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON
New York
Atlanta
Geneva, !1/inois
Dallas
Palo Alto
ESSAYS TOWARD
AN ECOLOGY
OF MAN
EDITED BY
J
Paul
~hepard
Visiting Lecturer, Wi//iams Coffege
AND
Daniel McKinley
State University of New York
at Albany
Editor's Foreword
:•
Quote on page v from Paul B.
Sears, ..Ecology-A Subversive
Subject," BioScience 14(7), 11,
1964.
Quote on page v-i from William
Morton Wheeler, «The Term-itodoxa, or Biology and Soci-ety," in
Essays in Philosophical Biology.
Cambridge: Hamw·d University
Press, 1939.
Quote on page ciii from i\1.arshall
McLuhan and Quentin Fiore,
The Medium is the Massage.
Copyright© 1967 by Marshall
McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, and
jerome Agel. By permission of
Bantam Books, Inc.
Copyright © 1969 by Paul Shep·
ard and Daniel McKinley. All
rights reserved. No part of this
work may be reproduced or transmitted in any fotm or by any
means, electmnic ot mechanical
including photocopying and Te- '
cording, or by any information
storage o1· retrieval system, without permission in wTiting from
the publ-isher.
PTinted in the U.S.A.
My choice of title is not facetious.
1 wish to explore a question of growing concern. Is ecology a phase of
science of limited interest and utility?
Or, if taken seriously as an instrument
for the long-run welfare of mankind,
would it endanger the assumptions
and practices accepted by modern
societies, whatever their doctrinal
commitments?-PAUL B. SEARS.
It is pretty obvious that industrializatiOn is not of itself a panacea for man's
woes, since it tends to create as many
problems as it solves. One by-product
of the industrial age has been a considerable fouling of the human environment. Another is the rapid
exploitation and expenditure of cheap
and available resources. A third is the
development of critical social problems
among the urbanized masses. The
happiness and welfare of an industrial
population is not measured by the gross
national product. There may even be
an inverse relationship. A thoughtful
evaluation of this dilemma is the purpose of the present book
The authors have brought together
in one volume a collection of searching
and provocative essays on the ecology
of man. The central theme is that the
well-being of mankind is inescapably
associated with a healthy, productive,
and attractive environment. In addition
to material goods, people must have
pleasurable surroundings and some
measure of territorial security to be
content. The logic of this conclusion is
obvious when the human population
and its problems are subjected to the
same ecologic scrutiny as now is applied
to the study of other animal populations.
With all his technological miracles,
man is still basically an animal, with
all the natural needs, reactions, and
dependencies of an animal.
Shepard and McKinley have done a
remarkable job in selecting and integrating the essays that constitute the
body of this volume. They have put in
contemporary context the thinking of
some of the great scholars and students
of the ecology of human populations.
In this era of social unrest, chronic
poverty, resource depletion, air and
water pollution, and cluttered land___ .<.L
~~"~~~-"'-
CONTENTS
Introduction: Ecology
and Man-a Viewpoint
X 215 Fifty Years of Man in the Zoo I G. Evelyn Hutchinson
1
PAUL SHEPARD
22:.1' Second Thoughts on the Germ Theory-/ Rene]. Dubas
X 230
A-Bombs, Bugbombs, and Us I G. M. Woodwell, W. M. Malcolm,
and R. H. Whittaker
Part 4
Men in Ecosystems
245
0
Pesticides-in Our Ecosystem I Fmnk E. Egler
~ 268
The Impending Emergence of Ecological Thought I LaMont C. Cole
X 275
The Cybernetics of Competition: A Biologist's View of Society I
Garrett Hardin
296
Irradiation and Human Evolution I Earle L. Reynolds
312 · The Coming Solar Age I Peter van Dresser
~316
-:(328
The Ecological Approach to the Social Sciences
I F. Fmser Darling '
An Ecological Method for Landscape Architecture I Ian L. McHarg"'
1. 333
The Preservation of Man's Environment I F. Raymond Fosberg·
Part 5
Ethos, Ecos, and Ethics
)(.341
The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis I Lynn White, ]r:
351
3
The New Mythology of «Man in Nature" I Daniel McKinley
X 363 The Modern Retreat from Function I Peter van Dresser
369
'!'-· 384
Land Use and Urban Development I George Macinko
Science and the Study of Mankind I Laura Thompson'"'
f. 395 The Steady State, Physical Law and Moral Choice I Paul B. Sears "
'i. 402 The Land Ethic I Aldo Leopold'
416
Fullness of Life Through Leisure I john Collier
437 A Woman as Great as the World I Jacquetta Hawkes
439 Additional Readings
ECOLOGY IS SOMETIMES characterized as- the study of a natural "web of
life." It would follow that man is somewhere in the web or that he in fact
manipulates its strands, exemplifying
what Thomas Huxley called "man's
place in natUre." But the image of a
web is too meilger and simple for the
reality. A web is fiat and finished and
has the mortal frailty of the individual
spider. Although elastic, it has insufficient depth. However solid to the
touch of the spider, for us it fails to
denote the eikos-the habitation-and
to suggest the enduring 'Integration of
the primitive Greek domicile with its
sacred hearth, bonding_jhe earth
to all aspects of society.
Ecology deals with organisms in an'.(:!_:·
environment and with the processes
that link organism and place. But
ecology as such cannot be studied,
only organisms, earth, air, and sea can
be studied. It is not a discipline: there
is no body of thought and technique
which frames an ecology of man. 1 It
/~ust be therefore a scope or a way of
seeing. Such a perspective on the human situation is very old and has been
part of philosophy and art for thousands of years. It badly needs attention
and revival.
Man is in the world and his ecology
is the nature of that inness. He is in
the world as in a room, and in transience, as in the belly of a tiger or in
love. What does he do there in nature? What does nature do there in
him? What is the nature of the transaction? Biology tells us that the transaction is always circular, always a
mutual feedback. Human ecology cannot be limited strictly to biological
SHEPARD I ECOLOGY AND MAN-A VIEWPOINT
conceptS, btlt it cannot ignore them. It
cannot even transcend them. It
emerges from biological reality and
grows from the fact of interconnection
as a general principle of life. It mus,t
take a long view of human life and
nature as they form a mesh or pattern
going beyond historical time and beyond the conceptual bounds of other
humane studies. As a natural history
of what it means to be human, ecology
might proceed the same way one would
define a stomach, for example, by attention to its nervous and circulatory
connections as well as its entrance,
exit, and muscular walls.
)Many educated people today believe that only what is unique tO the
~~1 is important or creative,
and turn away from talk of populations
and species as they would from talk of
the masses. I once knew a director of a
wealthy conservation foundation who
had misgivings about the approach of
ecology to urgent environmental problems in America because its concepts
of communities and systems seemed to
discount the individual. Communities
to him suggested only followers, gray
masses without the tradition of the
individual. He looked instead-or in
reaction-to the profit motive and capitalistic formulas, in terms of efficiency,
investment, and production. It seemed
to me that he had missed a singular
opportunity. He had shied from the
very aspect of the world now beginning to interest industry, business, and
technology as the biological basis of
their-and our-affluence, and which
his foundation could have shown to be
the ultimate basis of all economics.
Individual man has his particular
integrity, to be sure. Oak trees, even
mountains, have selves or integrities
too (a poor word for mY meaning, but
,.._ ___ ,n
L
1
,
"'"'
1
SHEPARD I ECOLOGY AND MAN-A VIEWPOINT
seeing themselves in more than one
in "our" world for all plants and
way, as man is. In one aspect the self -'animals, even for their otherness and
is an arrangement of organs, feeli'ngs; their opposition. It further implies exand thoughts-a "me" -surrounded by ploration and openness across an inner
a hard body boundary: skin, clothes,
boundary-an ego boundary-and apand insular habits. This idea needs no preciative understanding of the animal
defense. It is conferred on us by the
in ourselves which our heritage of Plawhole history of our civilization. Its
tonism, Christian morbidity, duality,
virtue is veri£ed by our affluence. The and mechanism have long held repel/alternative IS a self as a center of orlant and degrading. The older counter\ ganizatwn, constantly drawing on and currents-relics of pagan myth, the
l influencing the surroundings, whose
universal application of Christian com/_ skm and behavior are soft zones conpassion, philosophical naturalism, na-') tacting the world instead of excluding ture romanticism and pa~theism-haye
/It. Both VIews are real and then recibeen swept away, leaving only odd
( procity significant. We need them both bits of wreckage. Now we find our\ to hav.e a healthy social and human
selves in a deteriorating environment
matunty.
which breeds aggressiveness and hosThe second view-that of relatedtility toward ourselves and our world./
ness of the self-has been given short
How simple our relationship to rill='
shrift. Attitudes toward ourselves do
ture would be if we only had to choose
not change easily. The conventional
between protecting Our natural home
image of a man, like that of the heraland destroying it. Most of our efforts to
die lion, is iconographic; its outlines
ptovide for the natural in our philosoare stylized to fit the fixed curves of
phy have failed-run aground on their
our vision. \Ve are hidden from ourown determination to work out a peace
selves by habits of perception. Beat arm's length. Our harsh reaction
cause we learn to talk at the same
against the peaceable kingdom of senwe learn to think, our language, for
timental romanticism was evoked partly
example, encourages us to see ourby the tone of its dulcet facade but
selves-or a plant or animal-as an
also by the disillusion tO' which it led.
isolated sack, a thing, a contained self;
Natural dependence and contingency
/Ecological thinking, on the other
suggest togetherness and emotional
.c requires a kind of vision across bounsurrender to mass behavior and other
\ daries. The epidermis of the skin is
lowest common denominators. The enecologically like a pond surface or a
vironmentalists matching culture and
forest soil, not a shell so much as a
geography provoke outrage for their
delicate interpenetration. It reveals
over-simple theories of cause and effect, against the sciences which sponthe self enobled and extended rather
than threatened as part of the la~dsor them and even against a natural
scape and the ecosystem, because the
world in which the theories may or
beauty and complexity of nature are
may not be true. Our historical disapcontinuous with ourselves.
pointment in the nature of nature has
created a cold climate for ecologists
And so ecology as applied to man
faces the task of renewing a balanced
who assert once again that we are limiview where now there is m;m-c<mltei·ecl-.~ ted and obligated~fhow they __ must
the centers__of humanism .and techfl"QT;;gy~-- t_o convey there a sense-of our
-plac€ in a unjye;rsal vascul_ar system
With9ut depi-iving us of our self-esteem
confidence.
.
Their message is not, aft~r ~ll, all
ad news. Our natural affihations define and illumine freedom instead of
denying it. They demonstrate· it better
than any dialectic~ Being more enduring than we individuals, ecological
patterns-spatial distributions, symbioses, the streams of energy and
matter and communication-create
among individuals the tensions and
polarities so different from di~hotomy
and separateness. The response's, or
what theologians call «the sensibilities" of creatures (including ourselves)
to such arrangements grow in part
from a healthy union of the two kinds
of self already mentioned, one emphasizing integrity, the other related-:
ness. But it goes beyond that to something better known to 12th century
Europeans or Paleolithic hunters than
to· ourselves.Jf nature is not a pri~.2P­
and earth a shOddy way-station,. we
,-----1;:;;-d the Tai!Ilaii.d"!OTce_iO-~ffirm
~-g.§_t .. ~ . --·-·----~~~-"'·~·-·----····--···-· . .-.... ,,~~ ..... -·-·"~"····"~~""/
i't:s metabolism a.s....Q.l!I .m:V.n:=m. .m.!h~!Y~
,-o~~r· ~·~·~--a·s·--p·~;<.~(~!:
~_o so ~~.~~.~--nothing les-s than· a shift in our whole
~
.
fifl~-~"0(r8'ferBnce
!?._ .
x:
ana ·o·i!LJ!ttitiide
t~rds lif;itself, a. Yfi9:§L.P.~},:g~p-~-~~m
Ofth~. T~~dsc~Pi·-~;,~ ~~eative, h~-~-
.
m3 ~I0:Y..~J?.. qJ._Q.~.Ji.,.---.~.'e··· .r_~l~~iQJf~.!p:s. . W
tllin,&§_~~~.e.~.-~~.~}3s_JQ~ . -thinK{ With=-;~; losing o~I,JH~lJls..e_vula..grgRLhgman
destiny' and .Without"intellectual-..sur-
rellcTer;·-·~~-:;~.s~. afflrf!l. .t.hf!t.th~- ~9rl0is~ . -~~ei~g,. _;l_ .part.of ..ovL.9.F!l: . .ko..sly.
2
-s·uch a being may be called an ecosystem or simply a forest or landscape.
Its members are engaged in a kind of
z See Alan Watt~, "The. World~~ You.r B~~(' in
SHEPARD I ECOLOGY AND MAN-A VIEWPOINT
SHEPARD I ECOLOGY AND MAN-A VIEWPOINT
\(\;\J
choreography of materials and energy
The exuberance of kinds as the set- science, its greater and overriding
and information, the creation of order
ting in which a good mind could evolve wisdom is universal.
and organization. (Analogy to corporate
(to deal with a comp~orld) was not ··· That wisdom can be approached
organization here is misleading, for the
only a past condition. Man did not
mathematically, chemically, or it can
distinction between social (one spearrive in the world as though disembe danced or told as a myth. It has
cies) and ecological (many species) is
barking from a train in the city. He
been embodied in widely scattered
fundamental). The po!ld _is ~P.._~_:x;:oqJ1I?l~~·continues to arrive, somewhat like the economically different cultures. It is
Its ecology iiidU:a_e_s_ air~-v-ents: J.h~'- birth of art, a train in Roger Fry's defi- manifest, for example, among preof sunlight tO-fOod- ~nd
nition, passing through many stations, Classical Greeks, in Navajo religion and
the food-chains within -and around it,
o of which is wholly left behind.
social orientation, in Romantic poetry
man drinking, bathing, .fishing, plowidea of natural complexity as a
of the 18th and 19th centuries, in
ing the slopes of the watershed, drawterpart to human intricacy is cen- Chinese landscape painting of the 11th
ing a picture of it, and formulating
tral to an ecology of man. The creation century, in current Whiteheadian phitheories about the world based on what
of order, of which man is an example,
losophy, in Zen Buddhism, in the
he sees in the pond. He and all the
is realized also in the number of speworld view of the cult of the Cretan
other organisms at and in the pond act
cies and habitats, an abundance of
Great Mother, in the ceremonials of
upon one another, engage the earth
landscapes lush and poor. Even desBushman hunters, and in the medieval
and atmosphere, and are linked to
erts and tundras increase the planetary Christian metaphysics of light. What is
other ponds by a network of connecopulence. Curiously, only man and
common among all of them is a deep
tions like the threads of protoplasi
possibly a few birds can appreciate
sense of engagement with the landconnecting cells in living tissue~
this opulence, being the world's travscape, with profound connections to
The elegance of such systemS and
elers. Reduction of this variegation
surroundings and to natural processes
delicacy of equilibrium are the outwould, by extension then, be an ampu- central to all life.
come of a long ev~lution of interdetation of man. To convert all ''wastes" ,
It is difficult in our language even to
pendence. Even society, mind and
-all deSerts, estuaries, tundras, ice-\
describe that sense. English becomes
culture are parts of that evolution.
fields, marshe-s, steppes and moorsimprecise or mystical-and therefore
There is an essential relationship beinto cultivated field-s -an-d.._.J;ities would
suspicious-as it struggles with "protween them and the natural habitat:
impoverish rather than en~iCh life escess" thought. Its noun and verb orthat is, between the emergence of
thetically as well as ecologically. By
ganization shapes a divided world of
higher primates and flowering plants,
esthetically, I do not mean that w<,aseH static doers separate from the doing.
pollinating insects, seeds, humus, and
term connoting the pleasure of DaULHes.;, , It belongs to an idiom of social hier11 arboreal life. It is unlikely that a man{We have diverted ourselves with
archy in which all nature is made to
'- like creature could arise by any other
bug campaigns and greenbelts in the
mimic man. The living world is permeans than a long arboreal sojourn folname of esthetics while the fabric of
ceived in that idiom as an upright ladloWing and followed by a time of ter:_gur very environment is unravelling.
der, a "great chain of being," an image
restriality. The fruit's complex conIn the name of conservation, too, such
which seems at first ecological but is
struction and the mammalian brain are
basically rigid, linear, condescending,
things are done, so that conservation
twin offspring of the maturing earth,
becomes ambiguous. Nature is a funda-f• lacking humility and love of otherness.
impossible, even meaningless, withmental "resource" to be sustained for
are all familiar from childhood
out the deepening soil and the mutual
with its classifications of everything
our own well-being. But it loses in the
development of savannas and their
on a scale from the lowest to the hightransl~tion into usable energy and
faunas in the last geological epoch.
est: inanimate matter/vegetative life/
commodities. Ecology may testify as
~~ternal complexity, as the mind of a
lower animals/higher animals/men/
often against our uses of the world,
primate, is an extensi~tural comangels/gods. It ranks animals themeven against conservation techniques
plexity, measured by the variety of
selves in categories of increasing good:
of control and management for susplants and animals and the variety of
the vicious and lowly parasites, pathotained yield, as it does for them. Alnerve cells-organic extensions of. each
gens and predators/the filthy decay and
though ecolo12:v mav be treated as a
-conversion
Ce
scavenging organisms/indifferent wild
or merely useless forms/good tame
creatures/and virtuous beasts domesti~
cated for human service. It shadows
the great man-centered political
scheme upon the world, derived from
the ordered ascendency from parishioners to clerics to bishops to cardinals
to popes,' or in a secular form from
criminals to proletarians to aldermen
to mayors to senators to presidents.
And so is nature pigeonholed. The
sardonic phrase, "the place of nature
in man's world," offers, tongue-incheek, a clever footing for confronting
a world made in man's image and conforming to words. It satirizes the prevailing philosophy of anti-nature and
human omniscience. It is possible because of an attitude which-like ecology-has ancient roots, but whose
modern form was shaped when
Aquinas reconciled Aristotelian homocentrism with Judea-Christian
dogma. In a later setting of machine
technology, puritanical capitalism,
and an urban ethos it carves its own
version of reality into the landscape
like a schoolboy initialing a tree. For
such a philosophy nothing in nature
has inherent merit. As one professor
recently put it, :'The only reason anything is done on this earth is for people. Did the rivers, winds, animals,
rocks, or dust ever consider my wishes
or needs? Surely, we do all our acts in
an earthly environment, but I have
never had a tree, valley, mountain, or
flower thank me for preserving it." 3
This view carries great force, epito~<><: ~
mized in history by Bacon, Descar~
Hegel, Hobbes, and Marx.
Some other post-Renaissance thinkers are wrongly accused of undermining our assurance of natural ·order. The
3
Clare A. Gunn in Landscape Architecture, July
SHEPARD I ECOLOGY AND MAN-A VIEWPOINT
theories of the heliocentric solar system, of biological evolution, and of the
unconscious mind are held to have deprived the universe of the beneficence
and purpose to which man was a special heir and to have_ evoked feelings
of separation, of antipathy towards a
meaningless existence in a neutral
cosmos. Modern despair, the arts of
anxiety, the politics of pathological individualism and predatory socialism
were not, however, the results of Copernicus, Darwin and Freud. If man
was not the center of the universe, was
not created by a single stroke of Providence, and is not ruled solely by rational intelligence, it does not follow
therefore that nature is defective where
we thought it perfect. The astronomer,
biologist and psychiatrist each achieved
for mankind corrections in sensibility,
Each showed the interpenetration_ of
human life and the universe to be
richer and more mysterious than had
been-thought.
Darwin's theory of evolution has
been crucial to ecology. Indeed, it
might have helped rather than aggravated the growing sense of human alienation had its interpreters emphasized
predation and competition less (and,
for this reason, one is tempted to add,
had Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer,
Samuel Butler and G. B. Shaw had less
to say about it). Its bases of universal
kinship and common bonds of function, experience and value among organisms were obscured by pre-existing
ideas of animal depravity. Evolutionary
theory was exploited to justify the
worst in men and was misused in defense of social and economic injustice.
Nor was it better used by humanitarians. They opposed the degradation of
men in the service of industrial progress, the slaughter of American Indians, and child labor. because each
SHEPARD I ECOLOGY AND MAN-A VIEWPOINT
treated men "like animals." That is to
liberal education, the traditional presay, men were not animals, and the
~cription for making broad and welltemper of social reform was to find
rounded men. Unfortunately, there is
good only in attributes separating men little even in the liberal education of
from animals. Kindness both towards
ecology-and-man. Nature is usually
and among animals was still a rare idea synonymous with either natural rein the 19th century, so that using menj sources or scenery, the great stereoas animals could mean only cruelty./1 types in the minds of middle class,
Since Thomas Huxley's day the ;on- college-educated Americans.
animal forces have developed a more
One might suppose that the study of
subtle dictum to the effect that, "Man
biology would mitigate the humanistic
may be an animal, but he is more than -largely literary-confusion between
an animal, too!" The more is really
materialism and a concern for nature.
what is important. This appealing ...
But biology made the mistake at the
aphorism is a kind of anesthetic. Th-&
end of the 17th century of adopting a
truth is that we are ignorant of what it modus operandi or life style from
is like or what it means to be any other' physics, in which the question why
kind of creature than we are. If we are· was not to be asked, only the quesunable to truly define the animal's
tion how. Biology succumbed to its
experience of life or "being an animal" own image as an esoteric prologue to
how can we isolate our animal part?
technics and encouraged the whole
The rejection of animality is a rejec- -. society to mistrust naturalists. When
tion of nature as a whole. As a tellcller scholars realized what the sciences
I see students develop in their huwere about it is not surprising that
manities studies a proper distrust of
they threw out the babies with the
science and technology. What COJOC<,rnsl. bathwater; the information content
me is that the stigma spreads to the
and naturalistic lore with the rest of it.
natural world itself. C. P. Snow's "Two (~hi§_ i~Lthe setting_ in which academia
Cultures," setting the sciences against '·and intellectual America undertook
the humanities, can be misunderstood
the single-minded-pursuit of human
as placing nature against art. The idea
urii'(iueness, and uncovered a great
that the current destruction of people
mas·s of pseudo distinctions such as
and environment is scientific and
lat(giiage, tradition, culture, love, conwould be corrected by more comrnu.ni·· ~ sCiOU·s-ness, history and awe of the
cation with the arts neglects the 'hatrEJd$ suP-ernatural. Only men were found to
for this world carried by our whole
be capable of escape from predictaculture. Yet science as it is now tm1glilt bility, determinism, environmental
does not promote a respect for nacontrol, instincts and other mechature. Western civilization breeds no
nisms which "imprison" other life.
more ecology in Western science than
Even biologists, such as Julian Huxley,
in Western philosophy. Snow's two
announced that the purpose of the
cultures cannot explain the antithesis
world was to produce man, whose sothat splits the world, nor is the divicial evolution excused him forever
sion ideological, economic or political
from biological evolution. Such a view
in the strict sense. The antidote he
incorporated three important presumpproposes is roughly equivalent to a
tions: that nature is a power structure
shanerl ~ft-P.r hnTYI>m nnl-iti..-•<ll 'h-iPr-
*
immortal souls; and omnipotence will
come through technology. It seems to
me that all of these foster a failure of
responsible behavior in what Paul
Sears c.all~ "the l!.vi?g la~dscap~"
cept W1thm the hm1ts of 1mmed1ate
self-interest.
What ecology must communicate to
the hUmanities-indeed, as a humanity
-is that such an image of the world
and the society so conceived are incomplete. There is overwhelming evidence of likeness, from molecular to
mental, between men and animals. But
the dispersal of this information is not
necessarily a solution. The Twp Culture idea that the problem is all information bottleneck is only partly true;
advances in biochemistry, genetics,
ethology, paleoanthropology, comparative physiology and psychobiology are
not self-evidently unifying. They need
a unifying principle not found in any
of them, a wisdom in the sense that
Walter H. Cannon used the word in
his book Wisdom of the Body,4 about
the community of self-regulating systems within the organism. If the ecological extension of that perspective is
correct, societies and ecosystems as
well as cells have a physiology, and
insight into it is built into organisms,
including man. What was intuitively
apparent last year-whether aesthetically or romantically-is a find of this
year's inductive analysis. It seems
apparent to me that there is an ecological instinct which probes deeper
and more ·comprehensively than science, and which anticipates every scientific confirmation of the natural
history of man.
It is not surprising, therefore, to find
substantial ecological insight in art.
Of course there is nothing wrong with
a poem or dance which is ecologically
ex)
SHEPARD I ECOLOGY AND MAN-A VIEWPOINT
SHEPARD I ECOLOGY AND MAN-A VIEWPOINT
neutral; its merit may have nothing to
do with the transaction of man and
nature. It is my impresHion, however,
that students of the arts no longer feel
that the subject of a work of artwhat it "represents"-is without importance, as was said about 40 years
ago. But there are poems and dances
as there are prayers and laws attending to ecology. Some me more than
mere comments on it. Such creations
become part of all life. Essays on nature are an element of a functional or
feedback system influencing men's reactions to their environment, messages
projected by men to themselves
through some act of design, the manipulation of paints or written words.
They are natural objects, like bird
nests. The essay is as real a part of the
community-in both the one-species
sociological and many-Hpecies ecological senses-as are the songs of
choirs or crickets. An essay is an Orphic
sound, words that make knowing possible, for it was Orpheus as Adam who
named and thus made intelligible all
creatures.
What is the conflict of Two Cultures
if it is not between science and art or
between national ideologies? The distinction rather divides science and art
within themselves. An example within
science was the controversy over the
atmospheric testing of nuclear bombs
and the effect of radioactive fallout
from the explosions. Opposing views
were widely published and personified when Linus Pauling, a biochemist,
and Edward Teller, a physicist, disagreed. Teller, one of the «fathers" of
the bomb, pictured the fallout as a
small factor in a world-wide struggle,
the possible damage to life in tiny
fractions of a percent, and even noted
that evolutionary progress comes from
mutations are detrimental, argued that
a large absolute number of people
might be injured, as well as other life
in the world's biosphere.
The humanness of ecology is that
the dilemma of our emerging world
ecological crises (over-population, environmental pollution, etc.) is at least
in part a matter of values and ideas. It
does not divide men as much by their
trades as by the complex of personality
and experience shaping their feelings
towards other people and the world at
large. I have mentioned the disillusion
generated by the collapse of unsound
nature philosophies. The anti-nature
position today is often associated with
the focusing of general fears and hostilities on the natural world. It can be
seen in the behavior of control-obsessed engineers, corporation people
selling consumption itself, academic
superhumanists and media professionals fixated on political and economic
crisis; neurotics working out psychic ,
problems in the realm of power over
men or nature, artistic symbol-manipu-{
lators disgusted by anything organic. nL
includes many normal, earnest people i;
who are unconsciously defending
themselves or their families against a
vaguely threatening universe. The
dangerous eruption of humanity in a
deteriorating environment does not
show itself as such in the daily experience of most people, but is felt
as general tension and anxiety. We
the pressure of events not as direct
causes but more like omens. A kind
of madness arises from the prevailing
nature-conquering, nature-hating and
self- and world-denial. Although in
many ways most Americans live comfOrtable, satiated lives, there is a
less frustration born of an increasing
nullity. The aseptic home and society
_Jr
L-~-
...l~-~~1-
and avoidance fails to provide for the
value· of solitude, to integrate leisure
and natural encounter. Instead of
tl1ese, what are foisted on the puzzled
and troubled soul as Culture, Security
and Escape are more art"inuseums,
more psychiatry, and more automobiles.
The ideological status of ecology is
that of a res-istance movement. Its
Rachel Carsons and Aldo Leopolds are
subversive (as Sears recently called
organic sources of health and increasingly isolated from the means of altering the courHe of event'>. Success,
where its price is the misuse of landscapes, the deterioration of air and
water and the loss of wild things, becomes a pointless glut, experience
one-sided, time on our hands an unlocalized ache.
The unrest can be exploited to perpetuate itself. One familiar prescription for our sick society and its loss of
environmental equilibrium is an increase in the intangible Good Things:
more Culture, more Security and more
Escape from pressures and tempo. The
"search for identity" is not only a social but an ecological problem having
to do with a sense of place and time in
the context of all life. The pain of that
search can be cleverly manipulated to
keep the status quo by urging that
what we need is only improved forms
and more energetic expressions of
what now occupy us: engrossment
with ideological struggle and military
power, with productivity and consumption as public and private goals, with
commerce and urban growth, with
amusements, with fixation on one's
navel, with those tokens of escape or
success already belabored by so many
idealists and social critics so ineffec-
tually.
To come back to those Good Things:
the need for culture, security and escape are just near enough to the truth
to take us in. But the real cultural deficiency is the absence of a true cultus
with its significant ceremony, relevant
mythical cosmos, and artifacts. The
real failure in security is the disappearance from our personal lives of
the small human group as the functional unit of society and the web of
other creatures, domestic and wild,
which HrP. nHrt of onr hnmflnitv As for
ecology itself5). They challenge the
public or private right to pollute the
environment, to systematically destroy predatory animals, to spread
chemical pesticides indiscriminately,
to meddle chemically with food and
water, to appropriate without hindrance
space and surface for technological and
military ends; they oppose the uninhibited growth of human populations,
some forms of «aid". to "underdeveloped" peoples, the needless addition of radioactivity to the landscape,
the extinction of species of plants and
animals, the domestication of all wild
places, large-scale manipulation of the
atmosphere or the sea, and most other
purely engineering solutions to problems of and intrusions into the organic
world.
'
l
If naturalists seem always to be
against something it is because they
feel a responsibility to share their
understanding, and their opposition
constitutes a defense of the natural
systems to which man is committed as
an organic being. Sometimes naturalists propose projects too, but the project approach is itself partly the fault,
the need for projects a consequence of
linear, compartmental thinking, of machine-like units to be controlled and
manipulated. If the ecological crisis
SHEPARD I ECOLOGY AND MAN-A VIEWPOINT
were merely a matter of alternative
techniques, the issue would belong
among the technicians and developers
(where most schools and departments
of conservation have put it).
Truly ecological thinking need not
be incompatible with our place and
time. It does have an element of humility which is foreign to our thought,
which moves us to silent wonder and
glad affirmation. But it offers an essential factor, like a necessary vitamin, to all our engineering and social
planning, to our poetry and our understanding. There is only one ecology,
not a human ecology on one hand and
another for the subhuman. No one
school or theory or project or agency
controls it. For us it means seeing the
world mosaic from the human vantage
without bein-g man-fanatic. We must
use it to confront the great philosophical problems of man-transience,
meaning, and limitation-without feat.
Affirmation of its own organic essence
will be the ultimate test of the human mind.
Part 1
Men as Populations