"The Uses of the Useless," Daniel McKinley, 1969

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Environmental Forum — ~~ Department of Science, SUNY, Albany
14 October 1969 ~~ — Biology Building, Room 125

THE USES OF THE USELESS
~—~by Daniel McKinley

In INFANCY, Ambrose Bierce wrote, “Heaven lies about us." "The world,"
he continued, "begins lying about us pretty soon afterwards.' If the shambles
we have made of Earth is a guide, we must have pretty well reached ADULTHOOD by

now.

One reason for our fix lies no deeper than an economic philosophy that
PRIVATE PROPERTY includes the smokestack but not what comes out of it. Our
creed makes misers of us all. Harry Gunnison Brown used to say:

A college economist planned

To live without access to land

And would have succeeded---

But found that he needed
Food,clothing and somewhere to stfand.

Perhaps we need even more than that. In ecology, the USELESS is that for
which we cannot yet think of a use. And the good ecologist, as someone might
have said, must know everything, except possibly irregular Greek verbs. And
knowing all, perhaps he would be a little skeptical of the apocalyptic author
of the Book of Revelations who said that in the New Jerusalem, "there was no
more sea." Or, as Rupert Brooke had it:

"And in that Heaven of all their wish,
There shall be no more land, say fish."

Just what would you do without?

We are told by literary and historiographical Reductionists that nineteenth
century Americans did not worry about nature preservation and did not, therefore,
contain the roots of our own felt needs for nature. They did not need to worry
about some of the things that must occupy our time. But I think they did know
about the charms of nature even though ecologically blind in some ways.

Anyway, I am interested in the myths we live by today for I fancy that it is
changes brought about there that will save us. We need to tie together what

the experts tell us to step above mere expertism. In our academic world and in
the compartamentalization of expertism and power that it reflects, CONCERN for
Earth is itself left to experts. This means that the ignorant get more ignorant.
The cake goes to experts like Professor Clarence Leuba, Department of Psychology,
Antioch College, who writes in Science (1 August 1969: 443): "Recent letters by
biclogists indicate overriding coneern for the effects of defoliation in Vietnam
on plants and animals there. Strangely, these letters pay little or nor
attention to the purpose of defoliating these jungle areas: namely, to save
American and South Vietnamese lives. The concern is almost exclusively for
plants and animals. No wonder that the opinions of most academic and scientific
people regarding national and international matters command little respect."

(And kudos now come in: George Fahnestock--he does not list his professional
affiliations-- agrees with Dr. Leuba and thinks that “we seem to be getting along
pretty well without the moa, the dodo, and the passenger pigeon" (Science, 3

“October 1969:43).

I disagree that these are small matters and that we know enough to be so
callous and cocksure. I understand the South Vietnamese have their own ways of
maximizing safety -- and I can think of a surer policy than defoliation for
protecting American lives. I find it incredibie that an educated man can suppose


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it so easy to do only one thing. Even supposing tropical forest is cardboard

that you can remove without effects, there is bound sooner or later to come 4

time when you have to choose between limiting people and destroying habitat.

I still think that we might, at least, use the dodo and the passenger pigeon

as elements in a sort of Distant Early Warning system, to let us know that all may
not be well. Organisms that respond to DDT and accumulations of such ordinary
“nonpollutants" as nitrogen fertilizers,whether the response is by dying or by
over-growth, might serve us equally wel}: So far, the dodo has told us fewer lies
than the paid promoters of pesticides.

DARWIN'S DEMON: or, WHO'S TO BLAME FOR EVOLUTION?

The ascent of small mammals into the trees of tropical forest led to
daylight and color vision, to brains, to descent from the trees at the proper time
and on to man. The tropical forest doubtless still has much to tell us, if we
do not destroy it. We have had Mr. Cooley's little homily on who dominated whom
when. The brain is a product and a tool of evolutionary strategy and some little
rat-like critters used their brains against the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs them-
selves can hardly be blamed. Man will presumably be the first species to go to
extinction because of TOO MANY BRAINS.

It was perheps not until 300 to 400 million years ago that a balance was
reached in atmospheric oxygen, at the present level of a little over 20%. That
high level was the result of a long evolution of a more perfect oxygen~producing
vegetative cover and of a period of intense storage of fossil fuels, which took
carbon out of circulation. Burning all fossil fuels, of course, might balance
the books in that regard.

Nitrogen is a more complex matter than oxygen. Only the atmosphere and
bodies of organisms have important reserves of it. Some organisms break down
organic molecules and this results in simpler nitrogenous compounds, some of then,
such as ammonia, toxic. Then, a few specialized species of bacteria change these
simple compounds into atmospheric nitrogen or else other bacteria cycle .
nitrogenous materials back to green plants. From the air, additional specialized
bacteria and blue-green algae fix inert nitrogen from air into forms useful to
green plants, which cannot use atmospheric nitrogen any more than we can. Small
emounts of nitrogen flux through the ecosystem physically but not enough to main-
tain life as we know it today. As animals, we are at the mercy of green plants
for food and oxygen and for nitrogen just as universally in debt to several,
sometimes antagonistic, groups of specialized bacteria. Which ones would people
have bothered to save a century ago? Or right now?

Earth evolved beautifully without us and even today clean water is unused
water and clean air is unused air, (that is, unused by_us). Stable, functioning
vegetations are relatively undisturbed ones.

Yet, we are told that the Lord God of the Hebrews gave man ‘dominion over
the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over
all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the carth." This
somewhat redundant and overly alliterative passage is above the oldest precedent
in our mythology for doing what we have been doing. However, the fact that God
looked at His handiwork, even previous to this rather belated relegation of
authority, and found it GOOD might justify our being cautious. Elmar E. Leppik
tells us that as amphibians gave way to reptiles and the great dinosaurs, and then
to birds and mammals, fertility levels of soils went up, over a period of some
300 or more million years. This was due not to Divine Providence nor even to the
appearance of mammals but to the evolution of plants -- the long road up from

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whisk-ferns to clubmosses and horsetails, to ferns, which corresponded with the
parallel evolution of the series from scorpions to bristletails to dragonflies

to beetles to butterflies and bees. Note that this series, among plants, depicts
the evolution and elaboration of pollen, seed, fruit and regular flowers and,
among arthropod animals, the evolution of a line leading from colorblind and
rather stupid pollen stumblers of the beetle sort to those elegant creatures

of the butterfly and bee groups with capacity to tell colors, forms, and numbers
of flower parts. Ecological processes of polination shifted likewise, from

wind to insect, from fertility depleters (pines) to fertility builders (flowering
plants).

This stretches the Biblical Seven Days out over a real creation but the
creation of man on that idyllic Sixth Day badly needs revision. Modern evidence
paints anything but an idyllic picture. Man really began as an upstart carnivore
at a time of vulcanism, mountain upheaval,rampant glaciation and blistering
drought. Into that unstabilized world environment, man the opportunist popped.
As a pioneer organism, dependent upon disasters for a place to lay his head, man
has done pretty well but he has not learned to be a member of a perpetuating
climax community where stability is achieved naturally with minimum energetic
strains. It is already late on the Eighth Day.

-~-....BUILDERS IN THE ECOLOGICAL WEB: or, HAVE YOU THANKED A PLANT TODAY?

Ours is a fit world but without interactions of life with Earth and of life
with life, physical conditions on an unclothed Earth would fluctuate too widely
for comfort or even life. You have only to think of midday heat or midnight cold
in a desert or in a parking lot. In the familiar story of plant succession,
pioneer organisms, following disturbance, invade and hold down some coarse,
infertile particles. The pioneers are displaced by longer lived forms that build
up soil and eventually give way to species that live within their incomes and
whose young tolerate the shade of their elders. Soil results from interaction
among parent material, moisture and temperature and organisms. Plants hold soil
in place, certain elements are leached out and others are incorporated. Physical
evolution occurs and clays form. Soil fertility and vegetative bulk and
complexity increase; environmental conditions ameliorate and even out.

The stabilizing effects of vegetation upon landscape were known to Plato,
who wrote in “The Critias" some 2,300 years ago: "There are mountains in Attica
which can now keep nothing but bees, but which were clothed, not so very long
ago, with fine trees producing timber suitable for roofing the largest buildings,
and roofs hewn from this timber are still in existence. There were also many
lofty cultivated trees. The annual supply of rainfall was not lost, as it is at
present, through being allowed to flow over a denuded surface to the sea, but
was received by the country, in all its abundance --~- stored in impervious potter's
earth -- and so was able to discharge the drainage of the heights into the hollows
in the form of springs and rivers with an abundant volume and wide territorial
distribution." Much countryside of the Classical World and even tough and
resilient northwestern Europe is now wasteland although it was not always so.

Any change in plant cover has its effects. For example, there are some
365 kilos per hectare of exchangeable calcium in circulation in a mature North
Temperate broadleaf forest. Of this, only 8 kilos per year are lost due to
migration out of the ecosystem and 3 kilos of this loss are made good by being
returned in rainfall. This leaves only 5 kilos to be replaced by weathering from
underground rocks. The system maintains a fertile balance. Cutting the forest
and replacing it with a less complex or more pioneer level of life may result in
increased stream outflow but this is accompanied by nutrient “leakage," which
cannot be replaced by normal input of fertility. Dr. Normal H. Russell perceives


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that you do not even_have te-cut down a forest to meke it "leak." You can
lose whole performers of processes. As botanist and poet he puts it neatly:

“with ddt and dde

this forest is an open fist

to hold so close and still let go

the creatures that go in and out

the trees its fingers slipping through

like you and me who find our trail
among the million paths it makes
we walk above we walk below

we walk within the fist of trees

and dripping blowing out behind
we leave another trail of death
with ddt and dde

we open up the fist of trees

and running falling out and out
who can escape run to their death
who must remain remain to die

we stay awhile and then we too

go running falling out and out”

How do we know what plant species is useless? Leon Kelso tells me of a
Russian book on nature conservation that records discovery of "plant phytocides ,"
volatil® substances excreted by plants, capable of exerting distance effects in
checking pathogenic fungi and bacteria. For example, in parks of conifers
the bacterial content of air was 200 times less than in that of city air. At
another level of life, Russians say in a review of rock and mineral disintegration
by microorganisms that rocks harbor a heterotrophic microflora, nourished by
algae and lichens. "The resulting organic acids promote mineral decomposition,
which results in an accumulation of more complex acids and the latter decompose
primary mineral components and release free ions into the environment."

Whole ecosystems may look useless. The Amazonian tropical forest stretches
across thousands of square miles. In efforts to make it yicld profits,
unspeakable horrors have been inflicted upon its native organisms, including~-
characteristically enough -- its native peoples. ‘That forest transpires enormous
quantities of moisture into the air and this helps furnish rainfall for Colombia
and Venezuela. These regions already, dessication and degradation of vegetation
and soil. What will happen to the Amazon region itself beggars imagination.

Those native Americans of Amazonia interest me, partly because I think
there ought to be places where one can go and get his head cut off if he wants to;
and partly because I grew up in a non-growth center, one very like the eastern
American one that politicians and planners now think to improve upon. My ignorant

old grandmother knew more kinds of wild plants -- by name, by where they grow
and when, by tastes and properties --- than any hundred of you put together; nor

was it knowledge gained by slighting plants that grew in garden and yard.

Gathering plants sharpens the mind, assures an intimate knowledge of the world

you live in and in no way interferes with a healthy body and a healthy respect

for nature. Botanical taxonomists often find that native plant gatherers recognize
kinds of plants as different, upon characters that sometimes escape closet
botanists who see only dried specimens.

Maybe all this is useless. Especially happy and contented grandmothers.
fut remember that tomatoes were first grown for their bright colors and that many

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crop plants were originally weeds among more preferred plants. Some of today's
weeds are yesterday's crop plants and many other weeds are not only edible but
more tasty than fashionable things. I encourage you to eat wild plants -- not,
however, in order to feed the starving world. That is the wrong reason.

Well: you can stop buying redwood products, as I have; or you can start
being concerned about species of plants and animals. But I suspect there are
bigger, better things we could attempt. In 1966, The United States dropped
$10,000,000 worth of herbicides on Vietnam. In 1967, the treatment was 5 million
gallons, at a market cost of $32,000,000. In 1968, $50,000,000 worth was ordered
and in 1969, 100% of the U.S. production of picloram and 2,4,5-T was purchased
by the military. Stopping this is a way to help nature on a grand scale.
Destroying men is an old human story and I shall not go into it. Destroying men
by destroying nature is old too, although at times Biblical authority has been
rather ambivalently against it. If we respected Earth more, it might interfer
with our efficiency in killing our own kind but it would leave something for the
inheritors. Defoliants kill the conservers of soil fertility. Herbicides such
as 2,4,-D and 2,4,5-T kill the more soil-building broad-leaved trees first, for
conifers are resistant to them. Picloram kills the latter and is now very popular
with experts whose only interest is to do a fine job. But picloram “is so resistent
in some clay soils that under 5 percent disappears each year." (Manure from
plants treated with picloram was still a potent herbicide when used as fertilizer
a year later.) Dr. J. Ralph Audy indicates that the break-up of Malaysian
rain-forest (a rich and stable formation not far from Vietnam) “leads to less
stable communities with a much greater degree of 'herding' of single species"
which are often pests, especially when they are foreign species, as they often are.
Ultimately, a few weedy species of plants and animals will dominate the Earth's
ecology. Such weeds serve ecosystems poorly and the new areas are often very
difficult to deal with medically.

A proper concern for land and for animals that live there would put the
Vietnam idiocy in perspective. We always ignore organisms when we disturb natural
cemmunities. We have lied about their 'migrating' to favorable habitat when we
disturb them. But, says Edwin 0. Willis, in New World tropical birds "species
of the forest interior die off and are replaced by species of more open areas if
deforestation occurs. . . even if patches of undisturbed forest remain, because
many such birds are at such low densities that they apparently must have large
areas of forest for sufficient population sizes.” Nor is it just a matter of
‘useless' dicky birds. Willis continues: "replanting forests helps prevent floods
stream siltng, and erosion, while cutting forests leads to high temperatures,
wind and solar drying of soil, and low vegetation during dry seasons and to drying
of springs. . . . The problem is that moisture supplies are lost or become
irregular, not that total rainfall decreases.”

So, the upshot of defoliation is not that a few of us eggheads are more
concerned about a single bird or mammal than about one political persuasion of man.
We are concerned about the whole fabric of life, a life whose processes do not
occur except through the life and death of countless individual organisms within
the ecosystems when they evolved.3

ANCESTRAL FORMS: or, WHO NEEDS A RHINOCEROS?

Extinctions of animalspman-caused extinctions—are the hallmark of our time.
Authoritative recent estimates say that since 1600 about 1% of some 4,000 species
of mammals in the world have become extinct and that 3% are now endangered. Of
nearly 8,700 species of birds, 1.09% have become extinct in the same time and an
equal number are now endangered. If we include many differentiated and interesting

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island forms, so instructive for the study of evolution in action, we come up
with about 322 endangered and rare forms of birds, some 200 of which live on
islands, where every airfield, every phosphate mining operation and every radar
tower impose new threats.

I cannot list all the innocuous but apparently useless creatures that are
gravely endangered, the dodos of our time. You have heard of whooping cranes
and California condors. You may not know of Florida's Everglades kites whose
numbers are down to about 20 individuals, or the little cahow or Bermuda petrel
in whose eggs and young 6.44ppm of DDT has been found ~ the decline in
recruitment of young will soon wipe out the species. Yet the cahow merely gets
its food from the sea that feeds a good many of us and upon which ultimately we
may all depend for oxygen.

This concern for a few species is understandable but it dodges the issue
of what you do about habitat conservation and even what you do about species
that are economically useful and those used in massive numbers in research. As
a result of the latter pressure, great parts cf such monkey~hunting grounds as
India, Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia and the Colombian part of the Amazonian forests
are being slowly cleaned out. Monkey populations cannot stand the pressures,
as illustrated by India, where exports dropped from 200,000 or more a year 10
years ago to under 40,000 in 1965. More than 28,000,000 live wild animals
were imported by American pet businesses, laboratories and zoos in 1967, according
to William Conway of the New York Zoological Society. This included an enormous
variety of animals, many of them rare, although none of the latter make good
pets. Among 22,000,000 pounds of wild animal skins, were furs to make short-time
decorations for girls who need no adornment whatsoever. If only the rich were
guilty, one could shoot the rich: but a leopard skin coat is available to anyone
with a charge acpount and the 1969 Sears Christmas catalog offers a leopard skin
trophy for $700.

Direct capture and killing endanger a good many large animals, especially
mammals, with relatively low reproductive rates. Whales are e classic example.
The International Whaling Commission, charged with governing whaling in Antarctic
waters went on "taking quarts out of pint pots," failing to fulfill hopes that it
would end two centuries of anarcy on the high seas that has pushed almost every
species of great whale to the verge of extinction. In the Antarctic, the catch
fell from 16,434 blue-whale units in 1960-61 to 2,804 in 1967-68. Whales are most
efficient harvesters of the sea and they make it possible for whale-hunters -- as
long as there are whales -- to get a very good "return" from energy cycling
through cold polar waters. There is noWthe possibility that Antarctic Ocean
weters will begin to store permanently in bottom deposits the nutrients once in
circulation and available in the bodies of whales and their food. Another of
Earth's ecosystems is being shaken down to a lower level.?

Habitat destruction or ecosystemic poisons usually do more damage to wild
things then direct killing. Here Refferty's Rules for Conservation, as defined

by John Hillaby, are pertinent: “it is not illegal to poison your neighbor as
long as you don't do it all at once": especially if you meke money from it and

"your neighbors' are butterflies or crocodiles. Forty percent of the fish species
in the American Southwest are extinct or endangered. The status of the Nile
crocodile and the Florida alligator is depressing indeed. In Europe and Britain
the disappearance of butterflies has been little short of catastrophic, just as

@ massive decline in peregrine falcons and many other birds of prey has occurred
in the period of about 1950 to 1965. Pesticides are undoubtedly to blame. I do
not know if people are going to be bothered ultimately by DDT. I suspect,
however, that we need to be interested in effects of sublethal concentrations of


-T-

chlorinated hydrocarbons on our behavior, on our nerves, on our reproductive
capacities, on our children. Human milk hes been found to contain as much as 30
times as much DDT as cow's milk--as somebody said, you wouldn't be allowed to ship
it across state lines. I suppose the answer will be to give cow's milk to babies,
although in my eet ynacton it is more fun for all concerned if kids feed from the
natural container.

All animals ere not ‘bugs’ and if we have to deal with some of them, we must
rise above the advertisement I have seen in the New York Times which sneers at the
need to know what kind of bug it is: just get our pesticide and it is dead,
whatever it is. Remember that the animal enemies of pest insects are also killec
by DDT. And, besides, we have other animal friends. Coral islands are very
substantially the work of animals. And ea miscellaneous collection of oceanic life
ends up as food of colonially nesting seabirds, which deposit some 300,000 to
400,000 metric tons per annum of nitrogenous guano on favored parts of the world,
thus salvaging from the sea substantial amounts of nitrogen and phosphate,although
recent overfishing by man may put an end to this conserving system. There are
animal friends on land too. F.J. Turcek suggests that we need mammals (from deer
down to mice and squirrels) in forests for their services to the forest and that
we need forests not just for lumber or for meat production but "because of their
paramount importance. . .to climate, water and mineral cycling, to agriculture
and range management, erosion control, in catching up air pollutants, nuclear
fall-off, pesticides, etc." Russian literature (per Leon Kelso) attests that a
nest of red ants in one summer destroy three to five million insects, even during
a period of normal, non-plague population levels of prey. One Italian worker
found that ants on a million hectares of forest consumed 24,000 tons of Mood,
perhaps as much as 14,400 tons of pests per year. Americans ‘know' about this
sort of thing but apparently a dollar spent_on chemicals makes a more distinct
splash than letting ants do it for nothing.

In Russian forests, up to 60,000 pine needs per hectare stored in the ground
by nutcrackers may sprout and grow. Such cluster planting produces stronger trees
than when seeds are planted singly (Turtek and Kelso, 1968). It is now coming
to be generalized that animals that_use acorns also plant them. Domestic animals,
being foreigners, plant few acorns.

Nearly everybody has heard Darwin's estimate of our debt to earthworms but
in some parts of the world major parts of the forest soil profile are the work
of ants. Termites are essential parts of the ecosystem in African tropical
forests, °° 6 Ft Bye Eyes Po rei, Bhi La Cee OC ee ee
. a a ae ; , This is the
tropical landscape where nutrient minerals are lodged precariously in the
biosphere and the cutting of forest kills trees, kills termites and let minerals
flush from the land. It is a landscape where nations are always on the alert
for meat and our domestic mammals do not fit in. Manatees and other sirenians
have been considered as possible aquatic ‘cows' to use the vegetation that chokes
disturbed tropical rivers. It is tropical seacoasts where men compete to kill
the last green and other sea turtles that could long continue to lay protein-rich
eggs: killing them not only for the short-term value of their meat but much worse,
slaughtering for flimsy cash for a few slices cf calipee for some alderman's soup
or for some bits of tortoiseshell.?

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The disinterested may not want to know that one may use birds' stomach
contents to assay the kinds of invertebrate animals in the sea around islands; but
Ruth Patrick has found that the degree of pollution of streams can be ascertained
by finding out the numbers and kinds of species of organisms living in water.

Once a norm is established, samples of organisms can provide a quick, cheap and
reliable index to water quality.

~8.

Animals, however, serve higher purposes than purse or stomach. If the
plant world was the womb within which man was incubated, it was the animal world
that initiated him into full manhood. We were hunters of big game mammals for
a substantial part of our million years as man or near-man and W.S. Laughlin has
recently sumuarized the situation: "Hunting is the master behavior pattern of the
human species," he writes. ‘It is the organizing activity which integrated the
morphological, physiological, genetic, and intellectual aspects of the individual
human organisms and of the populations who compose our single species.” 11

But I imagine that our debt is more than that of son to evolutionary parent.
Paul Shepard has discerned connections between carnivory and tenderness and has
recently commented that our notions of beauty may come from seeing the functional
beauty of really large mammals such as elephants. His equating the caverns of
Lascaux with the Sistine Chapel seems no spiritual denigration as I glance
through the lovely pages of Leroi-Gourhan's Treasures of Prehistoric Art. 12

To animals we owe most of the insights that we have into our own behavior
W.M.S. Russell has said that "the study of higher animal societies can help us to
understand some at least of the problems in our own. They provide clear-cut
evidence about the differences between societies running smoothly and those under
stress, and they bring out relations between aggression, population and space.
Many modern workers have helped us to see that under crowded conditions damare
is done to generations born after the crowding has been alleviated. Controversisl
2ut very interestin; work is now being done on extra Y-chronosonues in male
killifish and this may have relevence to hw:an Lehavicr. We have learned, study~
ing our nonkey relatives, that some of our most treasured attributes such as
“drives to explore, to manipulate, to see, to hear, and to experience affection”
are not ours alone but are rooted in the mammalian line of evolution of which
we are but a part. All branches of our family tree have much to teach us. These
studies begin because people are interested in the animals. If we wait for human
need to spur their study, they will never be studied.

I perceive many dilemmas in all this, not least is this: our technology
destroys habitat. Animals die -- but we are legally ‘innocent' of their deaths.
Yet, they die from our lack of concern. At the very same time, our lack of
exposure to life makes it hard for us to 'kill animals.' One of the major uses
of certain animals mey be that of their multiple, varied and specialized harvest
of plant life and the animal's own ultimate, rather circumspect and reverent
“harvest'' by man. But at the risk of redunancy, I insist that this be done for
its own sake. Take leopard-skin trophies if you will-but earn them-and leave a
world that leopards can live in! We must arrange our lives to center upon
the harvesting activity and not fall back to that kind of life in order to
maximize human numbers. That defeats itself. And it defeats us.

Now we come back to the old question: What good is a butterfly? One of the
uses of butterflies may be that, as G. Evelyn Hutchinson suggests, we are not sure
"that we can really persist as humane human beings in a world in which natural
and much artificial beauty is being continually replaced by ugliness or at
best by neutral functional forms." Another use of butterflies is to be
butterflies and perform ecological functions. 14

THE ECOLOGICAL THEATER AND THE EVOLUTIONARY DROPOUT

The world is very complex. In the ecological study of this, we have
succession, with its pioneers, its competitive exclusion, its ameliorative
adjustments and its long-lasting climax or steady-state communities. We then add
producers and consumers and the latter are divided into herbivores and primary
and secondary carnivores. We then have converters to turn producers and consumers

“9 -

back into molecules for recycling through the producers again. This, however, is
comic-book ecology. You learn that converters are a very diverse group and that
they do not do each others! work; that herbivores and carnivores, especially within
climax communities, have precise roles and that they get turfed out if they play
them false. The more mechanical minded of ecologists will suggest that it is all

a matter of energy and its flow through the ecosystem; but it turns out that energy
only flows within organisms in ecosystems.+

One healthy result of these academic shenannigans is that we have begun to
talk about energy, about which we fool ourselves in modern society. We once
depended upon domestic animals, ourselves and slaves to accomplish tasks. These
methods were inefficient but they were also slow. Earth often had time to adjust
and such workers polluted rather minimally. A gasoline engine turns out enormously
more power but also enormously more wastes, many of them of a rather tricky nature.
The engine also uses nonrenewable fossil fuels. lLationt C. Cole has calculated that
if the farmer "were to deduct from the food calories. . . the calories consumed by
his machinery, the caiories used to build and transport that machinery, to mine raw
materials, to process, transport, and apply fertilizers and pesticides, and to
process and distribute the food, we would see that modern agriculture is largely
a device for exchanging the calories in fossil fuels for calories in food."
Stopping erosion by contour farming is simply more elegant exploitation. It still
leads Nature by the nose and leaves no 'wasteland’ where natural vegetation can
Bustain pollinators and other useful insects.+

Cheap power is a mixed blessing in many ways, as you have already heard. What
supersonic transports will do to the chemistry and physics of the high atmosphere
is everybody's business. Look at what modern airplanes are already doing. Nor is
the future of nuclear energy any happier a solution. The question of radioactive
wastes simply is not settled and there is the matter of just what you do with heat
alone generated by the 10% per year growth in our use of electricity that the
Empire State is dedicated to supplying. Our past record of getting rid of far fewer
wastes leaves me wary of official reassurances .16

It is long since time we stopped thinking of plant eaters simply as enemies
of plants. Myriapods are found to be “both characteristic of forest and
susceptible if the habitat changed." The pill millipede is a key species in
conversion of wood brome grass; there is a conversion bottleneck if the millipede
is absent. Examples could be multiplied endlessly that species in natural
communities play roles that are often narrow and specialized. Fraser Darling lists
the niche functions (roles) of big game mammals in Zambia -- elephant, hippo, rhino,
buffalo, zebra, giraffe, two kinds of pigs and 21 species of antelopes ~-- where
each species seems to be playing a particular role in the ecosystem. Some make
paths for others; some fell trees; others disperse seeds; some keep rivers open
and fertilize waters; some graze in wetlands; others graze in special places; some
are browsers; browsers and grazers may.operate at special heights or specialize
as to which plants are eaten; some like woody stuff, others fruits, flowers, buds,
leaves, etc., etc. Consider the consequences of replacing this delicately balanced
ecological spectrum of consumers and converters (and there are thousands of
non-memmal species not mentioned) with a_domestic cow wnich, at best, can only
perform the functions proper to 4 cow.

The first step toward ecosystem balance is to see what we do not have to do,
how we can lessen our pressures, how we can fit into the ecosystem. The burden
of my message is perhaps a little clearer. If you love not the ecological array
of antelopes and other mammals, termites and ants in the soil, caterpillars in the
forest canopy and the gentle rain of their nutrient-rich fecal pellets, you will
inherit a land where much of the vegetative matter produced does not get eaten,
where cattle eat by preference the young trees, where much of what remains is not

-~ 10 --

1”
properly trampled and commuted for return to organic matter, where accumulating
litter ends up producing very hot fires that kill forest reproduction and where
ashed mutrient is likely to be flushed permanently through chemically inert soils
or lost due to surface erosion.t

Much stability of processes in the earthly environment is due to life. Life
first developed the potential for "a balanced nonexploitative economy" (Cole) when
photosynthesis began perhaps some 2,700,000,000 years ago. This, in conjunction
with the fossilizing of carbon compounds, finally gave Earth an atmosphere with
oxygen in it. This favorable balance, where many physical fluctuations have been
ameliorated by life, is world wide. Locally, hard environments are always present.
We ought to treasure such harsh environments as deserts that give us marvelously
adapted cacti and camels for they tell us what Earth is capable of. Other harsh
environments are inhabited by pioneer animals and plants that are few in kinds but
great in individual numbers. They maximize energy flux and provide a minimum of
protection to the environment. They include our common crop plants and most annual
weeds. Physical conditions in simpler systems tend to fluctuate violently but
plants gradually modify conditions and in milder climates the pioneer community is
replaced by a richer, more stable one. It remains to be seen whether man can
become a respectable member of a climax conditiong. So far, most of his cultural
enrichment and social stability has been purchased by degrading environments, not
by adjusting to them. It is very unlikely that our culture can long survive world-
wide pioneer style environmental fluctuations of the sort that we are about to
produce.

Natural communities such as forest tend to develop toward a relative stability
where maximum protection [("maximum support of complex biomass structure” -- Odum) ]
is fostered. .This is not the same as achieving a maximum yield. Nor can we
maximize both at once. In the settled community, more and more energy entering
the ecosystem is used up in maintenance. This is as true of mature forest as of
the integrated and settled human community, where social services require more and
more of the budget (or at least, ought to!). (I take this to mean social amenities,
as art museums and quiet places as well as social necessities such as garbage
disposal). There is, in both situations, some tendency toward a build-up of unused
biomass and energy. In the forest, tree trunks take carbon out of circulation.
Many ‘useless! and specialized animals appear. In the stable human community,
people live longer, specialize, have coffee-breaks, academic conferences,
accumulate more junk, build up fortunes, sponsor artists. (See Garrett Hardin, in
THE SUBVERSIVE SCIENCE, for thoughts on the need for some breakdown). The
adifferances between climax forest, where this is done on small daily inputs of
energy and carbon and small daily, nearly balanced, outputs of respiratory wastes,
and that of the modern affluent human society are glaringly obvious. In the
latter, we do not stop growing, we do not halt our production of more and ever
more embryonic tissue. There are more and more pioneer-type drain and
monopolization of resources, more and greater pioneer-type wasteages of energy.

19

I am not advocating a deathless oligarchy of oldsters, whether trees or men.
Death is the only way that minerals, trapped with carbon in tree trunks, can be
recycled for growth of new individuals and for repair of old ones. Death must
be not epidemic but omnipresent.

It turns out that all this is not simply done and cannot be done simply.
Charles Elton long ago proposed that it was the diversity of natural communities
that was primarily responsible for their achieving and maintaining balance, Any-
way, succession increases biomass and stratification and there is usuall¥ an
increase in number of niches (tasks) and in general an increase in numbers of
species. Stability seems to be encouraged by this diversity of pathways of
energy and of checks and balances. Pioneer communities and those made by man


aa a

~ll-

certainly are simple; they do fluctuate in productivity and they are subject to
major fluctuations in physical conditions and they do allow major loss of mutrients.
Thus, you get the biggest returns from soil by cropping it in the conventional

way, just as you can make the biggest immediate withdrawals from a savings bank
with a gun. But it is safer to invest’ in the environment and harvest the interest.
In nature, this factor of SAFETY is enhanced by the increased degree of pleasant-—
ness associated with living in a complex over a simplified ecosystem. Consider
living in a corn field. It is may also be appropriate to remember that rapid
photosynthesis in the young forest or the wheat field is often accompanied by

rapid turnover and production of little surplus oxygen. <9

A major step toward saving us from being an Evolutionary Dropout would be to
try to create a sort of interspersed mosaic of treatments of the Earth, after
the manner suggested by Odum, where you have an intimate, very patchy environment,/
where maximum development on small areas is balanced ecologically within areas left
mostly alone. (See handout.)

squares to be in relation to each other? I subpect 4 the ‘box "at top Sught to be
perhaps several times as big as all the rest put together. Nor are formal and
quantitative functions attached to the arrows.

In a limited world, we need to agree on limited objectives. Hence, we must
not ask for perfect apples, pure white flour or superwhite laundry, and perhaps
not elimination# of our enemies. We often talk as if we have the right to replace
animal species when they get in our way. In ecology this monopolization of space
by one species is called Competitive Exclusion. We wey find when we are the only
species present in the biosphere, that it is cultures that must face each other
in competition. (Unless we simply make all life impossible, first). At any rate,
it has been found that predation by an enemy, so-called, in some species is capable
of preventing extinction of the prey. It may even be that we must not ask for
elimination @f predatory disease germs, unless we are willing to die of something
worse than germ-borne diseases. Garrett Hardin once said in a slight updating of
the Ten Commandments: “Blessed are they that have external enemies, for they
shall know internal peace. And not just external enemies need to be kept, if I
may trust Dr. Hilary Koprowski who has written in 'a letter to a future grandchild":

"If a universal antibiotic is found, immediately organize societies to prevent
its use. . . .Use any feasible natinnal and international deterrents to prevent
it falling into the hands of stupid people." A mild case of a disease is still
often the best treatment. Germs ‘insulted’ by miracle drugs prove most difficult
to treat in individual sufferers. And, in insect pests, you need to keep enough
of them around in orchards so that you do not let their enemies starve for lack of
food. Paradoxically, our control of Earth becomes more precarious the more
complete it becomes. Instead of emphasizing inefficient but evolving biological
pest controls, we have chosen chemical ones. Our chemicals now accumulate in
animals, including us, concentrate in food chains; are often not biodegradable;
cause resurgence and resistance in pest populations; and destroy parasites,
predators and pollinators that we need desperately to keep.


-~12-

| PROTECTIVE
mature, undisturbed .
/ \
vA ENVIRONMENTS \
/ \
4
/ 77] IN K \
/ ! \ \
\
/ \ ‘

/ IN \

7 *

L / | \ \
LA Z |
_ y | | .

PRODUCTIVE N\ COMPROMISE
unstable, growth - > multiple-use
ENVIRONMENTS ! ENVIRONMENTS
=. ~~ ! | =

CK A

\ ™ ; /
\ \ /
NX \ . J
\
NN v2
S|
~\ | URBAN-INDUSTRIAL
nonvital
| ENVIRONMENTS
E.P. Odum

1969

POPULATION: LIFE WITHOUT GUIDANCE: or, IS THERE ALWAYS ROOM FOR ONE MORE?

I defend the esthetic approach to control of environmental quality. It keeps
the ecosystem open-ended. I tire a little of people who tell me that I ought to
be worrying about oxygen supply. If I had had my way, we should never have gotten
into the fix where we had to worry about that. It is enough for me to observe
that we need the cover of wild nature to escape our fellows, to make love in, to
find a place where we can experiment beyond prying eyes, for inspiration and as a
yardstick of human impact upon landscape. All of these, even love-making, are
relatively useless occupations from an economic standpoint. And all are endangered
today. Like Paul Ehrlich, I have no faith in thimbles in emptying a sinking ship;
along with the late William Vogt, I think mops no good at all if the washbowl
is running over: Shut off the tap' Thus, my interest in population control. There
is no one thing that you can do that will produce such quick, good results in
preserving environmental quality as reducing the number of children born next
year 22,43 )

Compound interest growth applies to cancer cells and to present~—day human
populations as well as money. Even with a lessened percentage of growth, it is
still possible to have more people born. Some 700,000 individuals were added to the
world population each week in 1950. By 1966, the number had become 1,300,000; by
1980, it will be close to 2,000,000 -- this burden to the world now equals one-~
third of an entire United States every year. The current population of over 3.5
billion is growing at a rate of about 2 percent per year ~- from less than 1
percent for Europe to over 3 percent for Latin America. Thus, it takes Costa Rica
some 18 years only to double its population: and, I fancy, triple or quadruple
its needs and increase forty-fold its wants: and its present-day 1.7 million will
expand in just one century to 4k times the present total.

The whole world is not much better off, for its population will double in
about 37 years. Now, this has not characterized mankind for very long, nor can it
go on for very much longer. The enormity of our present growth rate is perhaps seen
a little better if you imagine 100 people starting out a mere 5000 years ago and
growing at the "modest" rate of 1 percent per year, the present U.S. rate,since then -
It would have produced 2 1960 population of 2.7 billion persons per square foot of
land surface of Earth.

The number of babies born has got to drop. It can happen too late for us to
Save anything worth having but it has still got to happen. We may be the last
generation that can make a decision between two currently VIABLE alternatives --
controlling population and keeping sexual love or controlling population by
eliminating what I call love. We are almost the first generation with a really
decent opportunity of keeping uncrippled love and simultaneously lowering birth-
rates, thanks to relatively efficacious and safe contraceptive and abortion
techniques. But time is running out.

This does not mean that decisions cannot be enforced within harsher rules.
Primitive man, as hunter and gatherer with a minimum of zovernmental organization,
maintained a very low population level. There is not much evidence that major
population controls were outside man. He has almost always been too smart a mammal
for that. Incontrovertible evidence is accumulating that populations were kept
under control by a whole constellation of social practices such as abortion,
ritual war, geronticide and, expecially, massive infanticide. It certainly was
a@ rough life, but not necessarily so nasty, brutish and short as Hobbes would have
us believe. Some people now refer to it as the first "affluent society” and James


~~ jh -

Woodburn says of the modern day hunter-gatherers, the Hadza, that tney'neet
their nutritional needs easily, without much effort, much forethought, much
equipment, or much organization." And the Hadza hardly live on top quality land .eT

I emphasize here not that infanticide is a good thing but that the control
was social. Men can make ecologically valid decisions and carry them out. Either
we imagine that population growth is a good thing and forget all the rest, or we
behave like responsible cave men. Now, I have been told that we can or must
feed the world. We are not doing it by a long shot now but maybe we could. But
what if the world merely uses the reprieve in order to double again in 35 years?
Would we then feed the world? Do we mean to starve before we apply controls?
Surely, it will be just as "SINFUL" then to practice controls as now, at a time
when much good could come of it. Are we going to wait until we are sprawling
over a dung heap like maggots over & carcass?

Dare we ask for enough to secure a future for us? Dare we not? There are
more people in China under ten years of age than there are in the entire population
of Russia. Do we wish the rest of Earth to follow in a path that can only end in
@ world where it will be criminal to eat meat, to demand living space, affluence?-
and where those who do will be so readily underbid by someone in more desperate
circumstances that it is incredibly unlikely that any worthwhile society will
survive? Dr. J. Ralph Audy considers man's numbers among "man-made maladies."

From high populations come resource depletion, the ills of crowding, the increased
speed of spread of diseases, the encouragement of new ones and the pollution of
environments. The greatest malady of all maybe what strikes well-developed and
stable social communities as the world is thrown together, higgledy~piggledy, a
condition that we have only just seen the birth of. I am a pretty determined
peliever in determinism and " do not think that, without leaving permanent scars,
you can make metropolitan life a vast experiment in sensory deprivation and con-
comitant sensory bombardment with nonsense.!! (And TV and movies are both these
things') Today, vast numbers "make money out of the ecological miseries of others
as botanist Hugh Iltis says. We are certainly the ADAPTIVE ANIMAL but where do
you stop? George H. Gallup, Jr., recently found that of every 100 people who live
in big cities only 13 would choose to live there. Those 13 make a big noise (just

as all the Texans you know are obnoxious )--but the others are quietly disturbed
and in need of help.©9

We shall certainly have to make ecological commitments and stick to them. We
do not have to commit infanticide but we shall have to repeal abortion laws.
Social controls must operate if a social animal (and we are very social) is to be
successful. We must preserve something--we have to have air and water and there is
no way to assure these things unless we both preserve nature and control our
numbers. There must be some sort of permit systex. of effluent charges (so that
both smokestack and smoke become private -r perty),levies, assessments, cost-
internalization and social purposes. This is what Garrett Hardin calls “mutually
agreed upon coercion." (And it is coercion: try not paying income taxes or attempt
to drive on the left side of the road.) There will be no future of only the rich
"conserve" and if others must be rich before they too conserve. We cannot have a
Robert Kennedy equating reproductive irresponsibility with civilized achievements,
even if he can "afford" to pay for it in the monetary sense. We cannot long have
6 percent of the people of the world expanding 60 percent of the energy . 39

Aldous Huxley once wrote a delightful account on the blessings that befell
an Indian villazer, in the form of dung for fuel, because of the chance visit
of an unconstipated elephant. No doubt a woman reduced to chasing elephants to
stay alive has a problem but it is a real problem. If all of us do not solve the
population explosion, civil rights and most of the other live issues of today will
become classic examples of PSEUDOPROBLEMS. I should rather join Eugene P. Odum


~15 -

in placing my bet on the ecological proposition of “One Man: One Hectare"” than
on any such metropolitan-based slogan as "One Man: One Vote." "Freedom,"
remarked Paul Shepard, “does not begin in the destruction of the organic world
which produced it, though it may end there." 31

THE SACREDNESS OF THINGS: or, A-MYTHING WE MUST GO

We are in our present fix because our intelligence operates piecemeal and in
the service of the wrong myths. I know they are wrong, for they have failed us.
One function of myth ~-- aside from imparting meaning to life -- is to act as an
ecological "brake" upon cultures. This is achieved by causing some things to be
done and others to be not done. I did not say that this is the conscious aim of
myths: JI say it is one of their accomplishments. Can we invent myths? I don't
know. How do you apply them? JI don't know. Can you apply them, particularly in
@ polymorphic culture in flux? I am not sure that you can. We do, however, have
myths. They have served us poorly and have now delivered us onto the doorstep of
oxygen exhaustion, world-wide plague, rampant starvation or an all-enveloping
thermonuclear war. We listen to everybody's myth on how to TAME NATURE but we
sneer at anybody's reverence for nature. The result is that we have endangered
ourselves. We grow but we cannot control growth. In an individual organism, that
Would be called cancer. The shallowness of our love for life shines through in
our demeaning of life on Earth. Maybe we need to learn again to love life and to
love it enough that we can control mere human growth.

I doubt if we can live without myths and I am humbly certain that we cannot
live by any that are ECOLOGICALLY UNSOUND. What frightens me about today is not
so much the ignorance and the violence but, as we have been told, the speed with
which things happen. Salvation lies more and more in being absolutely right the
very first time. It has rarely been man's way to be right the first time.

Historically, we have seen the meteors of Divine Plenitude and the Great Chain
of Being burn themselves out in Cosmic Toryism. Romanticism got us nearer a
viable organic viewpoint than Christianity, except in some subversives like St.
Francis. But Romanticism grew into too lush a flower for the cold blasts that
blow between the worlds of evolutionary reality, ecological imperatives and
uniformed human impertinence. I am still impressed, however, by evidence
[presented by Elizabeth Sewell, Morris Peckham and Paul Shepard] that early
Romanticists were able to see so clearly that exotic worlds require to be handled
with hand attuned to new entities. In the 18th Century, the Hard Line of the
Western World prevailed and Alan Moorehead aptly called the result in the South
Pacific The Fatal Impact. The guiding spirits of our times, of course, are not
Romantic. Commisars have replaced Tories in the Cosmic plan and human impertinence
has delivered us into the unfeeling hands of what G. Evelyn Hutchinson calls an
lsiectronic Antichrist, a machine that even denies that it ever originated. Pre-
occupations, among chief devotees of the Electronic Antichrist, with such trivia
as hydrogen bombs and putting a man on the moon show how little they really differ
from each other. These ideals are utter denials of the vision of E.E. Cummings who
spoke of "the absolute truth of the heavenly earth” and who wrote that "eyes can
mither feel or think ~~ & most people's think." 3¢

We are a nation where industrial workers waste enormous amounts of material
and time. We throw away cars before they are worn out. We waste food, buy
megatons of plastic crap. We deplete our soil, erode our lives and rot our lungs
in the tobacco business. We burn up gasoline to pollute the grandeur of mountains
with slops, noise, toilet tissue and bottles. Even the moon is not sacred. We are
well heeled and apparently the pitch is a popular one. Far too many share our
delinquent ideal that the only socially acceptable way to make your mark is to
leave a scar. I do not see much advance toward humanity in an affluent craze for


-~ 16 ~

speedboats and snowmobiles, both an outgrowth of the Hot-Rodder, who is a tourist
of sorts - a kind of Ugly American at home. So far, the delinquents -~- people
alive to the means of the Establishment, merely differing as to ends -~- have
distinguished our time and there are plenty of recruits coming. I just do not
think that William Kuhns is right to demand that we "live with the new technologies
in style and with grace," as if one posture were as good as another, for along
with the blessings, as he would have them, of telephones, electric toothbrushes,
cheap TV movies, silly cars, speaking elevators, toys, computers and electronic
music, we also have traffic jams, noise, fumes, carbon monoxide, sewage, bombs,
crowds, starvation, lost species of organisms and shoddy food. I think Brian
Hocking more correct to warn thet in this “highly artificial environment, an
enquiring mind is a hazard.’ We are pathologically concerned that others be as
uprooted as we are. We have listened too long to technologists, social and medical
ones, sell us awe by the thimbleful and we come to pride ourselves on HOW LITTLE
reverence we really need. MAN, THE ADAPTABLE ANIMAL! We have the new Midas Touch.
He who has power over everything soon has nothing but power. There is more to life
than power. I do not think that we can forget the old and the familiar nor do I
think thet we should wish to avoid letting our wisdom and organic viewpoints

infuse our confrontation with the new and different. Maybe we can find out "How
to Save the World Without Really Trying," as ny friend Tom Lyon of the English
Department, Utah State University, suggests. 3

Let us distinguish between healthy sociality and "pathological togetherness."

The latter may be even worse than pathological separateness for there is no
identifiable feeling of what to do or even that anything much is wrong. It is the

ban disease. Healthy human existence consists of withdrawal as well as approach:

being hungry and being fed; of being in love and out of love; of work and play;
of thinking and not thinking. Wilderness is “useless" because it is apart from
the marketplace. When there, one is not on the job. But, as in Josef Fieper's
leisure, such 'wilderness' is truly recreative, creative all over again, a retreat
to a place from which new exists may be made. Wllderness (leisure) is not a
pleasuring place which patches you up for the old routine. It may even be a Hell

of en_experience but you return really a new man, not just with a new suntan. "Tn
wilddrhess is the salvation of the world," Thoreau sang, and he meant wildness of
the mind, too -~ the part of the mind you do not share, perhaps cannot share. You

can confound that part with empty action and you can sate it with noise. You
cannot really use it and perhaps pore truly it uses you. Maybe that is the true
use of wildness in nature, too. 3

We tend to distrust what we cannot see. Western philosophy has assumed
that Nature runs smoothly and reliably just as soon as science gets her secrets
There are still pratfalls ahead for us and I urge that we keep our demands, our
numbers, low enough to give us some ecological maneuvering room. Yet we have
usually destroyed societies that were mythologically balanced and our emmisaries
now go forth and do likewise all over the world. 35

"Thought is crude,” Aldous Huxley wrote [in Literature and Science:] and
"matter unimaginably subtle." We have stumbled upon ways of turning both thought
and matter into a swirl of pullulating crudeness. We profane the symbolic nature
of bread and wine and lull ourselves away from the essentially blood and gristle
nature of man and, in our ill-gotten odor of innocence, we ransack the world.
The backlash from Earth takes its toll of human life-stuff. Our culture's aim to
deal predictively with matter has led to uur being driven unpredictably by our
own material technology. All earthly things are muted into neutral counters
in a mercenary fabric. Mere things becloud our thoughts. (Rhinoceroses are no
good unless you can sell them; cars are good puoinesl Fo tan sell them;
pesticides are good because they haven't killed us yet). Our contemptible use of
things prevents our dealing adequately with things.


- 17 -

Uncertainties cannot be entirely avoided. Such a fate led Jacques Bossuet,
17th Century French historian, to observe that man never knows what he does and
that he never does entirely what he intends. It is a chancy and yet contingent
universe. The modern version of this, aptly extended by Garrett Hardin, is that
it is impossible to do only one thing. The dream of complete social predictebility
is pathological tyranny. It is a dream that makes up for uncertainities of the
non-human environment by tyrannizing over the human condition -- just as, in other
ways, it tyrannizes over nature to avoid coming to grips with human ills. We
need the year and its circle of seasons, its cycles of birth, death and rebirth
where the human dream is richly interpenetrated with chance. Sacrifice will then
be real and the world wit not perpetually be cut down to a size patterned by our
limited imaginations. 3

In our day, the search for perfection within historical time is pernicious --
on Earth as in Heaven. Until the ultimate disaster, we shall eliminate first this
and then that species of animal or plant. We shall be sure we still have time to
recant, to push through another deal, to be irresponsible a little longer, to argue
legalistically that there is always room for one more. We demean the past,
empty the present and mortgage the future.

Our devaluation of things has gone full circle. Earth and its creatures
and resources are pawns that do not touch us. The hurt has gone out through the
world of nature and has returned to pierce our own hearts. Men too have become
pawns. Because the spirit has gone out of transactions with nature, we have lost
contact with each other even though we wallow in crowds. We exist only in arid
dreams of HAPPINESS TOMORROW.

Yet the world of nature is shot through with purpose, with refreshening
returns. Man's lordly denial of this, in his presumption that only he has purpose
is really a denial of the seat of his purposefulness. Our deliberations have
depguperated and polluted us. We have promised ourselves feelings tomorrew. But
nonworldly dreams, in which a massive sample of nature has not been caught up and
nurtured on its own terms, will Le barren -- and dangerous to us all. You can
fabricate empires of pure symbol but you will save no Adirondack meadows, no
whooping cranes, no black~footed ferrets, no Oregon tidepools, no dugongs. Our
culture does not instruct us in preserving dugongs. Reason provides us @ poor
account of the nature within which reason was evolved. Bodies and brains exist
because there is (or was) a world fit for them. This is not enslaving Determinism

- but liberating truth. Elimination of alleged natural limitations can turn man more

and more into his own worst eneny.

A man convinced that things are mere things will then look for a spirit or
soul of some UNTHINGLIKE sort to carry the burden of his undeniable freedom. Yet
I am not sure a soul is more wonderful than an atom. Nor does this highly
spiritual freedom always make us demonstrably freer. Modern purveyors of
spirituality seize upon narrow and outmoded doctrines to intensify pressures of the
population explgsion and deprive all of us of freedom. They refuse to be
consisten jspaimn hospitals, drugs, pesticides, destructive monocultures of
new crops and speedy transport of the products of their irresponsibility to

luckier places. It is a savage misuse of science by a fragment of an old myth.

The reply that God will take care of birds and flowers is invalid unless we
let Him take care of us. I propose a stewardship by man within nature that is a
full-fledged transaction, ecologically informed, sacramentally complete and
experigfentally diverse. We have too long denigrated the passing moment, the
ephemeral individual animal or its species or the sunset that occurs but once.
Let us really value them. In this regard, I am much more impressed by the wise
pessimism of Norbert Wiener, for whom the whole universe seemed a perishing
particular that would sore day be uninhabitable by man or microbe, than by all


- 18 -

the shallow homocentrisms of Pierre Teilhard or Karl Heim. With Wiener's
philosophy, I am left loving a world that reaches from every molecule of myself
to my wife and children and to sea anemones in amethyst seas and that embraces
memories of porpoises in the Gulf of Maine and the hope of seeing the dance of
whooping cranes. Each field of bluets, ineffably enameled and delicately scented
(in springtimes that always burned into summers) and each ironweed garlanded with
butterflies (in autumns that ended in sodden winter's death) has mirrored for me
the universe in saving ways that man alone cannot do. And not in vain. The
function for man cf bluets and ironweeds, of redwoods and elephant shrews, of
‘cerulean warblers and bottle gentians, is in man's perpetual reauthentication of
the world and of himself.39

That is the real use of the useless 0

1.

aa 147 C4A~7-A

G. Evelyn Hutchinson, "The Electronic Antichrist," in The Enchanted Voyage,
1962; David Lowenthal, "Is Wilderness 'Paradise Enow'? images of nature in
America" (Columbia University Forum, 7(2): 34-40, spring 1964); Paul Shepard,
"The wilderness as nature" (Atlantic Naturalist, 20: 9-14, 1965); Vincent
Scully, The Earth, the Temple and the Gods, 1962; Roderick Nash, Wilderness

and the American Mind, 1967; D. McKinley, "Man: new dimensions of concern”
(Yale Review, 57(4): 612-615, 1968); Barry Commoner, Science and Survival,
1966; B. Commoner, "Nature unbalanced; how man interferes with the nitrogen
cycle" (Scientist and Citizen, 10(1): 9-13, 28, Jan.-Feb. 1968); C. Leuba,
letter, Science, 165: 443, 1 August 1969; G. Fahnestock, letter, Science, 166:
43, 30 October 1969; Garrett Hardin, "The cybernetics of competition: a
biologist's view of society" (Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 7(1):58-84,
132} reprinted in The Subversipre Science, by P. Shepard and D. McKinley,
1969).

E.J.H. Corner, "The evolution of tropical forest" in Evolution as a Process ed.
by J.S. Huxley, A.C. Hardy and E.B. Ford, 1954; P. Shepard, Man in the
Landscape, 1967; LaMont C. Cole, “Can the world be saved?" (BioScience, 18(7):
679-684, 1968); L.C.Cole, "Man and the air" (Population Bulletin, 24: 103-113,
1968); Elmar E. Leppik, “Evolutionary correlation between plants, insects,
animals, and soils" (Annales Societatis Litterarum Estonicae in America,

3 (1959-1963): 28-50, 1963).

Leon J. Henderson, The Fitness of the Environment, 1913; Rudolf Geiger, The
Climate Near the Ground, 1957; Carl 0. Sauer, "Theme of plant and animal
destruction in economic history" (1938), in Land and Life, 1963; Eugene P.
Odum, "The strategy of ecosystem development” (Science 164: 262-270, 1969);
Norman H. Russell, unpublished poem; N.A. Gladkov, Nature Conservation, 1967,
L. Kelso, transl.; A.N. Ilyaletdinov, 'The action of microorganisms in rock
weathering’ (Izvestiya Akad. Nauk, Biol. Ser. 1969: 420-427; G.L. Carefoot
and E.R. Sprott, Famine on the Wind, 1967; Wilfried H. Portig, letter, Science,
159: 376, 26 Jan. 1968; Donald Ugent, "The potato in Mexico: geography and
primitive culture" (Econ. Bot., 22: 108-123, 1968); G.E. Hutchinson, "The
Gothic Attitude to Natural History," in The Itinerant Ivory Tower, 1953:

A.W. Galston, letter, Science, 164: 373,1969; L.C. Cole, "Man's effect on
nature" (The Explorer, Cleveland Natural Sci. Mus., 11(3): 10-16, Fall 1969);
L.E Gilbert, et al., letter, Science, 161: 964-965, 1968; J. Ralph Audy,
"Ecological aspects of introduced pests and diseases" (Med. Journal of Malaya,
11(1): 21-32, 1956); T.0.Perry, letter, Science, 160: 601, 10 May 1969; G.H.
Orians & E.W. Pfeiffer, letter, Science, 165: 443, 1964; E.O. Willis, letter,
Science, 164: 373-375, 1969; Charles S. Elton, The Ecology of Invasions by
Animals and Plants, 1958, E.P. Stebbing, "Forests, aridity and deserts,"

in Biology of Deserts, ed. by J.L. Cloudsley-Thompson, 1954.

James Fisher, Noel Simon and Jack Vincent, Wildlife in Danger, 1969; W.O.
Stieglitz, et al., "Status and life history of the Everglades Kite in the
United States" (U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Sci. Rept.: Wildlife no. 109,
1967); C.F. Wurster, jr., and D.B. Wingate, "DDT residues and declining
reproduction in the Bermuda petrel" (Science, 159: 979-981, 1968); John
Hillaby, "Primate overkill" (New Scientist, 10 Oct. 1968: 93); T.E. Rowell,
"Primates as a natural resource. . .' (IUCH Bull., 2(6):46, 1968); W.G. Conway,
"The consumption of wildlife by man" (Animal Kingdom, 73(3): 18-23, June 1968).


10.

li.

le.

13.

1h.

15.

~ 20 -

IUCN Bulletin, 2(11): 88, 1969, J. Fisher, et al., op. cit.; Roland Clement,
National Audubon Society, "Effective population control: an essential for
conservation," Paper given at meeting cf Association for Voluntary
Sterilization, New York, 1 October 1969.

Hugh B. Cott, "Nile crocodile faces extinction in Uganda" (Oryx, 9(5): 330-332
1968); E.N. Willmer, “Where are the butterflies?" (IUCN Bull., 2 (6): 47-48,
1968); David Peakall, "Progress in experiments on the relation between
pesticides and fertility" (Atlantic Naturalist, 22: 109-111, 1967); C.F.
Wurster, "DDT in human milk” (Ecology, Center, Berkeley, Calif.); D.J. Kuenen,
"Man, food and insects as an ecological problem" (Proc. 16th Internatl. Congr.
Zool., 16(7): 5-13, 1964).

G.E. Hutchinson, "The biogeochemistry of vertebrate excretion" (Bull. Am.
Mus. Nat. Hist. no. 96, 1950); Roland Clement, op.cit.; F.dJ. Turcek, "Large
mammal secondary production in European broad leaves and mixed forests. . .
(Biologia, Bratislava, 24(2): 173-180, 1969); ant literature, translated from
the Russian by Leon Kelso, personal communications.

i

F.J. Turcek and L. Kelso, “Ecological aspects of food transportation and
storage in the Corvidae" (Communications in Behavioral Biology, PT. A, 1(4):
277~297, 1968); K. Mellenby, "The effects of some mammals and birds on
regeneration of oak" (Journal of Applied Ecology, 5(2): 359-366, 1968).

W.H. Lyford, “Importance of ants to brown podzolic soil genesis in New England"
(Harvard Forest Papers, 7: 1-18, 1963); W.B. Collins, The Perpetual Forest,
1959; Colin Bertram, In Search of Mermaids, 1963; J.J. Parsons, The Green
Turtle and Man, 1962; Archie Carr, So Excellent a Fishe, 1967.

M.J. Ashmole and N.P. Ashmole, "The use of food samples from sea birds. . ."
(Pacific Science, 22: 1-10, 1968); Ruth Patrick, et al. "An ecosystemic
study of the fauna and flora of the Savannah River" (Proc. Acad, Nat. Sci.
Philadelphia, v. 118, 1967); Ian L. McHarg, "An ecological method for
landscape architecture" (Landscape Architecture, January 1967, pp. 105-107).

W.S. Laughlin, "Huntin : and integrating biobehavior syste= and its
evolutionary impcrtance,' in Man the Hunter, ed. by R.B. Lee and I. DeVore,
1968; see also S.L. Washburn and C.S. Lancaster, "The evolution of hunting,"
and other papers in the same volume; W.S. Laughlin and other authors in

The Social Life of Early Man, ed. by S.L. Washburn, 1961.

Paul Shepard, personal communication and "The tender carnivore” (Landscape
14(1): 12-15, 1964); a brief summary of A. Leroi-Gourhan's thesis is in his
"The Evolution of Paleolithic art" (Sci. Amer., 218(2): 59-79, 1968).

W.M.S. Russell, abstract, Advance of Science (London), 22: 565, 1965; K.
Myers, "The effects of density on sociality and health in mammals" (Proc.
Ecol. Soc. of Australia, 1: 40-64, 1966); State Univ. Newsletter, Albany,
April 21, 1969; editorial, Science, 135; 697, 1962; S.L. Washburn, "The
study of human evolution" (Oregon State System of Higher Education, London
Lectures, 1968).

Marston Bates, The Forest and the Sea, 1960; G.E. Hutchinson, "The uses of
beetles," in The Enchanted Voyage, 1962.

C.S. Elton, Animal Ecology, 1927, and The Pattern of Animal Communities ,1966;
BE.P. Odum, Fundamentals of Ecology, 2nd ed., 1959.


16.

LT.

18.

19.

20.

el.

22.

23.

ah.

25.

-?21-

L.C. Cole, "Man's ecosystem" (BioScience, 16(4): 243-248,1966) and "Man
and the air" (Population Bulletin, 24: 103-113, 1968); J.R. Clark, "Thermal
pollution and aquatic life” (Sci. Am., 220 (3): 18-27, March 1969); J.A.

Snow, "Radioactive wastes from reactors" (Scientist and Citizen, 9(5):

89-96, May 1967).

P.B. Sears, "Integration at the community level’ (American Scientist, 37: 235
235 242, 1949); F. Fraser Darling, Wild Life in an African Territory, 1960);
Stephen Collins, "Benefits to understory from canopy defoliation by gypsy
moth larvae" (Ecology, 42: 836-838, 1961); Daniel Smiley, "The gypsy moth
and natural areas" (Ecological Studies Leafl. no. 11, Nature Conservancy,

1967).

H.T. Odum and R.C. Pinkerton, "Time's speed regulator, the optimum
efficiency for maximum output in physical and biological systems" (American
Scientist, 43: 331-343, 1955); F.R. Fosberg, "The preservation of man's
environment" reprinted from Proc. 9th Pac. Cong. in The Subversive Science,
by P. Shepard and D. McKinley, with editorial commentary); D. McKinley,
"Human ecology: some thoughts on brash pioneering in an orderly world"
(Atlantic Naturalist, 19: 165-174, 1964); E.P. Odum, "The strategy of
ecosystem development" (Science, 164: 262-270, 1969).

E.P. Odum, op.cit. footnote no. 18; G. Hardin, op.cit. footnote no. l.
C.S. Elton, op.cit. footnotes 3 and 15.

Odum, op. cit.; footnote no. 18, Garrett Hardin, “Statement to the
Conservation and Natural Resources Subcommittee of the Committee on
Government Operations, United State House of Representatives," 16 Sept. 1969;
G. Hardin, "The economics of wilderness" (Natural History, 78(6): 20-27,
June-July 1969).

Garrett Hardin, "The competitive exclusion principle" (Science, 131: 1291-
1297, 1960); G.E. Hutchinson, "Prolegomenon to the study of the descent of
man,” in The Heological Theater and the Evolutionary Play, 1965; G. Hardin,
"A second Sermon on the Mount” (Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 6(3):
366-371, 1963); R.L. Kyllonen, "Crime rate vs. population density in United
States cities: a model" (General Systems, 12: 137-145, 1967); Hilary
Koprowski, "Future of infections and malignant diseases, in Man and His
Future, 1963; Stephen Enke and R.A. Zind, "Effect of fewer birth on average
income" (Journal Biosocial Science, 1: 41-55, 1969, and unpubl. ms.);

J.R. Audy, "Man-made diseases," in The Air We Breathe, 1961, and "Measurement
and differential diagnosis of health" (ms. 1967); F.L. Dunn, “Epidemiological
factors: health and disease in hunter-gatherers," in Man the Hunter, 1968;
D.J. Kuenen, op.cit., footnote no. 6; C.F. Wurster, jr., "DDT reduces
photosynthesis by marine phytoplankton" (Science, 159: 1474-1475, 1968),

and "Chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides and the world ecocsystem"
(Biological Conservation, January 1969: 123-129; also published as "DDT:
danger to the Environment,” in University Review (SUNY), summer 1969); J.S.
Mill, "Of the stationary principle,” in Principles of Political Economy
(Collected Works, vol. 3: 752-757), 1965.

Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 1968; Wm. Vogt, People!, 1961; see
Kyllonen, and Enke and Zind, footnote no. 22; J.J. Spengler, "The economist
and the population question" (American Economic Review, 56: 1-2h, 1966).

Population Reference Bureau, Washington, Population Data Sheet, 1969.

P.R. Ehrlich, op. cit., footnote no. 23, Alex Comfort, Sex in Society, 1966.


27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

33.

3h.

35.

36.

37.

38.

- 22..

R.B. Lee and I. DeVore, Man the Hunter, 1968; E.S. Deevey, jr., "The human
crop" (Scientific American, 194(4): 105-112, 1956); O.P. Pearson,
"Metabolism and energetics” (Scientific Monthly, 66: 131-134, 1948).

See footnote no. 27; G. Hardin, “The tragedy of the commons" (Science, 162:
1243-1248, 1969; reprinted in Population , Evolution and Birth Control,
Ond ed., 1969). H.R. Hulett, "Optimum world population” (unpubl. MS,
Genetics Dept., Stanford University Medical School, 1969).

H.H. Iltis, letter, Science, 156: 581, 1967; George H. Gallup, jr., "The
U.S. public looks at its environment" (IUCN Bulletin, 2(12): 99-100, 1969).

G. Hardin, op. cit., footnote no. 28.

Aldous Huxley, Jesting Pilate, 1926; E.P. Odum, op. cit., footnote no. 18;
William Vogt, "Population patterns and movements," in Future Environments
of North America, ed. by F.F. Darling and J.P. Milton,1966; Paul Shepard,
Man in the Landscape, 1967, and “Whatever happened to human ecology?"
(BioScience, 17: 891-894, 911, 1967).

A.O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, 1936; Morse Peckham, "Toward a theory
of Romanticism” (PMLA, 66: 5-23, Modern Language Assoc. of America, 1951);
Elizabeth Sewell, The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History, 1960; Paul
Shepard, "The artist as explorer” (Landscape, 12(2): 25-27, 1962-63);

G.E. Hutchinson, "The electronic Antichrist," in The Enchanged Voyage, 1962;
E.E. Cummings, Adventures in Value, photos by Marion Moorehouse, 1962; Alan
W. Watts, Nature, Man, and Woman, 1958.

Alex Comfort, Authority and Delinguency in the Modern State, 1950; William
Kuhns, Environmental Man, 1969; D. McKinley, "Ethics, technics, and biology"
(The Yale Review, 58(4): 617-620, 1969), and "Thoughts on the survival

game” (Snowy Egret, 32(1): 11-22, 1969); Brian Hocking, Biology--Or Oblivion,
1965; Tom Lyon, unpubl. ms.; E.G.D. Murrey, “The place of nature in man's
world" (American Scientist, 42: 130-135, 142, 1954).

J.B. Calhoun, "Population density and social pathology" (Scientific
American, 206(2): 139-148, Feb. 1962), and "A glance into the garden," in
Three Papers on Human Ecology, ed. by Darl Bowers, 1966; Josef Pieper,
Leisure, the Basis of Culture, 1952; Roy I. Wolfe, “Leisure: the element
of choice” (Journal of Human Ecology, 2(6): 1-12, 1952).

Henry A. Regier, Zoology Dept., University of Toronto, "Ecological aspects
of overcoming world hunger," unpubl. ms.; P. Shepard and D. McKinley,

The Subversive Science, 1969; T.R. Odhiambo, "East Africa: science for
development” (Science, 158: 876-881, 1967).

Conrad Bonifazi, A Theology of Things, 1967; Lynn White, jr., "The
historical roots of our ecologic crisis" (Science, 155? 1203-1207; reprinted
in The Subversive Science.

Karl Lowith, Meaning in History, 1957; G. Hardin, op. cit., footnote no. 1l.,
Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History, Harper Torchbooks, 1959.

Peter M. Driver, "Toward an ethology of human conflict: a review"

(Journal of Conflict Resolution, 11(3): 361-374, 1967) and "An ethological
approach to the problem of mind," in The Mind, ed. by W.C. Corning and KM.
Balaban, 1968); Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, 1966.


39.

ho.

- 23-

Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 1950; James C. Logan, :The
secularization of nature,” and H. Paul Santmire, "The integrity of nature,"
in Christians and the Good Earth, Faith/Man/Nature Papers no. 1, 1969.

With profound apologies to scores of unnamed writers whose ideas are inter-
woven into this essay.