In recent months the ancient fear that man is outstripping the natural resources of the globe, and must face lower standards of living or starvation, has again been voiced in many quarters. The study devoted to the balance between man and nature is called ecology: and it is to recent manifestations and developments in this field that James Rorty here devotes himself, in an effort to indicate where man stands today in relation to nature.
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Is it possible to determine, with even a rough approximation of accuracy, the position of contemporary man in the muddy turbulence of half-understood forces that shape his environment—that shifting complex of soil and water, plant, animal, and mineral wealth, human use and misuse? And if it were, could modem man, as a political animal, do anything effective to construct a stable equilibrium between himself and nature?
At one point in Civilization On Trial, Professor Arnold J. Toynbee seems about to answer our first question. But when one reads his chapter on “The Present Point in History,” one finds little more than the warning that we probably know as little about where we are, in time and in space, as past generations did. Consider, for example, the complacent Londoners who witnessed the parade of the Empire’s magnificent colonial troops at Queen Victoria’s Jubilee in 1897. “Few in the English crowd,” writes Toynbee, “were in the mood of Kipling’s ‘Recessional.’ They saw their sun standing at its zenith and assumed it was there to stay.”
Today it would be hard to find a similar complacency anywhere in the world. Instead, the season is loud with the chant of Cassandras proclaiming that civilization is doomed.
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William Vogt, author of the Book-of-the- Month Club selection, Road to Survival (Duell, Sloane & Pearce), names two horses in his particular apocalypse—Erosion, in tandem with Feckless Fecundity (now loose in lands already overcrowded). Mankind, he thinks, has “backed itself into an ecological trap.” America cannot go on mining its soils to fill the hungry mouths of irresponsibly spawning Greeks and other ERP beneficiaries; let them practice birth control, or else. Even Americans, he asserts, are too numerous.
“These two curves—of population and the means of survival—have long since crossed. Ever more rapidly they are drawing apart. . . . The crumbling ruins of two wars mark their passing. The swollen bellies of hungry babies, from San Salvador to Bengal, dot the space between them. Parching fevers and racking coughs, from Osorno to Seoul, cry aloud the cleavage between these curves. . . .
“So that the people shall not delude themselves, find further frustration through quack nostrums, fight their way into blind alleys, it is imperative that this worldwide dilemma be made known to all mankind. The human race is caught in a situation as concrete as a pair of shoes two sizes too small. We must understand that, and stop blaming economic systems, the weather, bad luck, or callous saints. . . .”
So warns Vogt, in grim accents oddly reminiscent of the early Technocrats.
Unfortunately, the number of qualified soil scientists equipped to appraise Vogt’s performance is rather small, so it is not surprising that the lay reviewers were without exception literally panicked by the book. But some weeks later, in the November 22 issue of Time, Vogt’s technical critics had their day in a five-page rebuttal of his neo-Malthusian thesis; later his defenders were heard from, including some conservationists and agricultural scientists of high standing.
Regardless of the merits or defects of Road to Survival, the controversy has been useful in introducing the word “ecology” into the language of popular discussion; this at a moment when man’s relationship to the natural environment is admittedly precarious and when it is increasingly recognized that many of our most critical problems are essentially ecological, and can be dealt with only by a synthesis of the natural and social sciences.
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Coined originally by Haeckel, the term ecology was applied first to the inter-relationships of plant life, then to plants and animals in the sub-human life range, and more recently to the complex landscape of man-in-nature—the cultural landscape. Since there are comparatively few virgin landscapes left in the world, we must be more and more concerned with problems of human ecology, in the sense that man, and especially man’s technology, are factors in the ecological situation.
Vogt, like other contemporary neo-Malthusian writers, uses the word ecology to embrace the entire complex of forces that weave the seamless web of nature, including man, man’s technology, man’s folkways, and man’s politics, in the broadest sense. The human ecologists who appeared on the scene in the early 920’s, led by professor Robert A. Park of the University of Chicago, have provided good warrant for this comprehensive use of the term.
“Human ecology,” writes Amos H. Hawley, a member of Park’s group, in the May 1944 issue of Social Forces, “is the descriptive study of the adjustment of human beings to the conditions of their respective physical environments.” An even broader and more provocative definition appears in The Science of Life by H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley, and G. P. Wells. “Ecology,” they write, “is an extension of economics to the whole of life.” To which, by way of sideswiping the classical economists, they add: “[Economics] might have been a better and a brighter science if it had begun biologically.” Park’s phrase—“a society based on a biotic rather than a cultural base”—conveys the same idea.
“Human beings,” writes H. A. Morgan, “respond to environment like all other life units of creation. The ecologist’s task is to determine man’s place—always changing because man and the forces at his disposal are constantly changing—in the living, shifting matrix of nature, including the bugs, the animals, the plants, the earth, and air and water. Man changes, but he can’t step out of the picture, although man’s works change the picture in innumerable ways, sometimes to his advantage, sometimes to his disadvantage. If man is to survive he has to know which and stop blundering about.” (From the manuscript of a book in preparation.)
An important concept of ecology is “carrying capacity”: the kinds, qualities, and quantities of plant, animal, and human life that a given landscape will support. Vogt employs this concept in his formula: C equals B over E. In this equation C stands for “carrying capacity,” B for “biotic potential,” that is to say the productive life-force inherent in the soil-plant-animal complex of a particular system, and E for “environmental resistance,” or the forces operating to suppress or limit the expression of the biotic potential. All these concepts are well illustrated by Charles Darwin’s description of the web of life found in an English meadow.
In the field near his home Darwin found that the bumblebees were almost indispensable to the fertilization of heartsease and red clover, two components of the “biotic potential” of the pasture. Humblebees alone visit the red clover, as other bees cannot reach the nectar. The inference is that if the bumblebees became extinct or very rare in England, the heartsease and red clover would become very rare, or wholly disappear. However, the number of bumblebees in any district depends in great measure on the number of field mice, which destroy their combs and nests—the field mice figuring as the “environmental resistance” limiting the multiplication of the bumblebees. But near villages and small towns the nests of the humblebees are more numerous than elsewhere and this is attributed to the number of cats that destroy the mice. Thus next year’s crop of purple clover in certain parts of England depends on the number of bumblebees in the district; the number of bumblebees depends upon the number of field mice, the number of field mice upon the number and enterprise of the cats, and the number of cats—as some one has added as a gloss to Darwin’s ecological parable—depends upon the number of old maids in neighboring villages who keep cats.
To complete the picture in terms of human ecology one must bring in the farmer who owns the meadow. Presumably he approves of the cats that eat the mice that destroy the nests of the bumblebees; their “competitive cooperation” helps to increase the carrying capacity of his field. But a good many other things are involved. To enumerate them is to identify the major factors in the ecological approach to the survival problem of modern societies.
In the first place, the farmer knows that there is no such thing as a fixed “biotic potential” in any landscape, once it is occupied and used by human beings. The amount of forage produced by that meadow and the number of cattle or sheep it will support depends upon its fertility. This can be reduced by over grazing and neglect. Or it can be greatly increased—often to a level far surpassing its virgin state—by applications of lime, phosphate, and potash.
But has the farmer the capital required to buy these plant nutrients? Will the government or the universities provide him with technical instruction and guidance in their use? Here economic and cultural factors enter the ecological picture.
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What is meant by the term “environmental resistance” as applied to this human landscape, in which man and his tools are the dynamic factors? Would the operations of the international phosphate cartel that fixed prices and allocated markets before the war be considered part of the “environmental resistance” affecting the “biotic potential” of that British meadow?
Our problem varies with the geographic dimensions, the economic and political boundaries, of the ecology we are considering. Obviously biotic potential is one thing if we assume a world in which science and technology and critical exhaustible resources such as phosphate and potash ores are freely applied to increasing the production of the available land, and to bringing new land into production. But a world of economic autarchies, trade barriers, and cold or hot war is another and lesser thing as far as its biotic potential is concerned.
And the ecological problem varies again depending on our time perspective. The biotic potential of a given acreage is one thing today, another tomorrow, depending upon the multiplying applications of the work of plant breeders, agronomists, chemical engineers. Conservation farming and sustained-yield forestry become practicable when farmers and woodlot owners can get forty-year mortgages at low interest rates; otherwise they may find themselves caught in an “ecological trap” that forces them to destroy the future biotic potential of their land in order to make a temporary living.
Equally important are cultural values, folkways, food habits, the effect of advancing living standards on the birthrate. All these and many other factors enter into any attempt to estimate the carrying capacity of the planet and balance it against the tendency of populations in some countries to breed faster than they can feed themselves with the agricultural resources at their disposal.
Hence the current controversy between the neo-Malthusians and their opponents could go on forever, generating more heat than light. The only sensible answer to the question of whether the earth can support mankind is “It depends.”
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For example, America: by applying his C= B:E formula to the American land, Vogt estimates that its true carrying capacity, if we stopped mining our soils, would be not our present 143,000,000 people, but about 100, 000,000. Few soil scientists would agree with this startlingly pessimistic estimate.
But Vogt is not a soil scientist. He is an ornithologist by training, and the former editor of Bird Lore. Perhaps for this reason his ecology tends to be distinctly primitive. When things get too crowded man should move over and make room for the grouse and the ducks. People who perversely settle on flood plains are “ecological incompetents.” The various categories of land have their strictly limited biotic potentials, says Vogt: “We cannot force land into the pattern we wish to impose upon it,” he writes, “but must fit the use to the land, its capabilities and its limits.”
This is true enough as far as it goes. But compare the following, by Edward H. Graham, Chief of the Biology Division of the Soil Conservation Service: “Some day, in every country, planned programs may determine the pattern of land use, and then not only crops and tame animals, but indirectly the occurrence of all living things will be determined by man’s conscious planning and use of the land. It is conceivable that at least so far as the larger land forms are concerned, the majority of wild plants and animals may cease to be, except as living museum pieces in refuges or wilderness areas. . . . Man is independent of his environment to the extent that he can modify it” (Natural Principles of Land Use, Oxford, 1948).
Another expert who has done a good deal both to deflate the neo-Malthusians and to distinguish the physical and biological dimensions of the world’s feeding problem from its cultural and political aspects is Charles E. Kellogg, Chief of the Division of Soil Survey of the United States Department of Agriculture. Given the will to use it, the world does not lack land, Kellogg points out. By extending our agriculture into the cool temperate areas of North America and northern Eurasia, we could bring into use three hundred million acres of new arable land. In addition, there are the barely touched soils of tropical Africa, South America, Central America, Southeastern Asia, and the Pacific Islands. If only twenty per cent of these soils were brought into cultivation, a billion acres might be added—if we need them. We probably would not need them—not all of them at least—if we achieved the 20-per—cent average increase in the production of land already under cultivation that USDA experts consider entirely practicable.
Modern science has not only greatly increased the efficiency of our agriculture, but continues to do so at an accelerated rate. Between 800 and 1940 the number of man-hours required to produce 100 bushels of wheat dropped from 373 to 47. New corn hybrids developed for the South recently boosted yields from 22 bushels to 125 bushels per acre. In 1820 one farm worker supported about 4.5 other people; by 1946 this figure reached 14.5.
By adding the production of potential new land and the increases demonstrably possible on land now being farmed, Kellogg concludes that the food needs of the estimated world population in 1960 could readily be met. But immediately he is obliged to qualify.
“Such estimates,” he writes, “are very optimistic in one sense and probably still too low in another. They indicate what could be done with present knowledge if the political and economic barriers to effective soil use were somehow removed. At the moment this ‘if’ may seem to call for miracles of education and statesmanship that few expect” (Address to the American Farm Economic Association, September, 1948).
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The optimum miracle—in fact the ultimately indispensable miracle—is a world government that will make possible the operation of the planet as an ecological unit. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations is in fact almost obliged by the terms of its charter to dream of such a miracle. Meanwhile, however, it can and does perform a useful function by making itself a kind of world center for ecological hopes and headaches.
Currently the FAO is attempting to increase the world production of fertilizers and rationalize their distribution among its member countries. Its fertilizer targets for 1960 require quadrupling our present production of nitrogen and more than doubling our production of phosphate and potash.
The nitrogen problem is relatively easy since nitrogen is a renewable resource. It can be synthesized from air either in factories or by the bacteria of legume cover crops.
The true bottlenecks are phosphate and potash, especially phosphate, which is the key mineral in most agricultural production. The principal phosphate reserves of the world are in the United States, Soviet Russia, and North Africa, with relatively small deposits scattered in a few islands of the Pacific and elsewhere. Before the war, Japan’s intensive agriculture was largely dependent upon imported phosphate; within a few months of Pearl Harbor, Japanese freighters were still moving through the Panama Canal, laden with Florida phosphate. With the outbreak of war, the Japanese took over the British-mandated phosphate islands of Nauru and Ocean Island, thereby cutting the ecological life lines of New Zealand and Australia, whose wheat ranchers and dairymen have long been dependent upon phosphate. Promptly American bombers wrecked the phosphate installations on both islands. Now the British and their Dominion partners are painfully restoring them while we keep the Japanese alive by heavy shipments of Montana phosphate.
Our Western phosphate deposits constitute nearly a third of the world total. They will have to be drawn on heavily if we are to make any serious attempt to modernize the agricultural economy of China and feed adequately, for the first time in history, its huge and expanding population. But perhaps Russia will relieve us of that responsibility; she too has the required phosphate.
India, too, needs phosphate for her deficient soils, as well as a major revision of her unecological folkways. The Indian population problem will scarcely be solved while the land is burdened by sacred but relatively unproductive cattle—whose phosphate-rich bones, when they die, are shipped out of the country.
These are just a few of the ecological problems that the fertilizer committee of the FAO has to worry about. Our advancing fertilizer science and technology will help by developing more concentrated and efficient fertilizers. To that end, a half dozen Agricultural Experiment Stations are conducting highly important investigations utilizing radioisotopes of phosphorus, supplied by the Atomic Energy Commission. But here, as elsewhere, the chief limiting factor is political. Russia, with a third of the phosphate deposits of the world, is not a member of the FAO, nor is the work of her soil scientists available to the rest of the world.
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The word “ecology” has rarely been used in connection with the Tennessee Valley Authority. Yet in effect the TVA is a large-scale experiment in applied ecology—perhaps the first in history; certainly the first since the impact of the industrial technology on the natural environment began to pose critical ecological problems for modem man. This is better understood abroad than in this country; in fact it is TVA’s significance and value as an ecological demonstration that constitute its uniqueness in the eyes of foreign visitors. For more than a decade we have been hearing of projected TVA’s for Palestine, the Danube basin, the Yangtse, the Damodar in India, the Tigris- Euphrates watershed—all areas where complex and baffling political problems are rooted in population pressures and problems of resource development and utilization.
In 1933, when the TVA Act was passed, the Tennessee Valley exhibited a fairly complete collection of ecological problems, many of them acute. Largely through the influence of H. A. Morgan, the biologist member of the original TVA triumvirate, the ecological approach was more or less consciously embodied in TVA policies and programs from the beginning. Multi-purpose dams were built to regulate the flow of the river, harness its power, and provide slack-water transportation from Paducah to Knoxville. Hydro-electric power was used to process the phosphate ores of Middle Tennessee. The experimental phosphates produced at Muscle Shoals were used to spark the growth of protective and productive cover crops and forage on eroding hill farms.
In addition to making available phosphate, the key soil mineral, TVA’s low-cost power created opportunities for new industries. They processed locally the raw materials that had formerly been shipped North in the traditional pattern of an exploited colonial economy. Gradually, the increased full-time and part-time employment provided by these industries took some of the pressure of the high regional birthrate off the land. At the same time, agronomic reforms were building up the fertility of the soil, increasing the man-hour productivity of the fans, and introducing some badly needed animal proteins into the unbalanced carbohydrate diet of the people. Sustained-yield forestry practices and new wood-using industries, fostered by the TVA, increased the income from farm woodlots.
Where economic and technical bottlenecks appeared, the TVA attempted to break them, sometimes with notable success. TVA research facilitated the expansion of the quick-freezing and locker-plant industries, now prospering throughout the Valley. TVA agricultural engineers developed and demonstrated a practical barn haydrier that facilitated the ecologically required shift of land use from row crops to grass. Cheap water transport of grain from the Middle West accelerated this shift.
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Almost to the degree that TVA’s regional ecological demonstration succeeded, there developed a corresponding resistance on the part of the political environment, especially outside the Valley. To this resistance, the conflicting vested interests of big business and big government have both contributed.
Big business—specifically the private-power lobby—saw itself increasingly challenged by TVA’s low power rate and the war-fostered expansion of its system, and by the agitation for the establishment of similar authorities for the Missouri and Columbia watersheds. But since low-cost electric power is the life’s blood of the emergent regional economy, the expansion of the TVA system has been vigorously supported by the local power boards and Chambers of Commerce of the Tennessee Valley.
Although TVA’s activities expand the market and increase the sales of commercial fertilizer, the fertilizer industry distrusts government even when it comes bearing gifts. It has opposed the expansion of TVA’s experimental fertilizer production. It has also opposed the national extension of the fertilizer “test demonstration” program proposed in the National Soil Fertilizer Bill, which was supported by the Farm Bureau and the Farmers Union.
Big government opposition to TVA’s ecological demonstration has arisen from the fact that various TVA programs have inevitably cut across the administrative lines of federal “action” agencies, especially in the crowded spectrum of aid to the farmer. That federal and regional conservation programs can be harmoniously coordinated has been proved in the case of the wild life and forest services, but there has been a conflict of long standing between TVA and the Soil Conservation Service.
The SCS has its own ecological philosophy and program, its own mandated powers and responsibilities, which are national in scope, and its own teams of technically competent and hard-driving conservationists. On the one hand, the SCS has insisted that TVA’s test demonstration program has not been adequate to the conservation needs of the Valley. On the other, the SCS has not been willing to modify its standard procedures and gear its activities into the established test demonstration program conducted jointly by the TVA and the Extension Service. What makes the TVA-SCS controversy so critical is its relation to the projected extension of the TVA idea to the Missouri, Columbia, and other watersheds. Until the protection of its jurisdictional rights is assured, the SCS has intimated that it will oppose the creation of other regional authorities. Obviously this is the language of inter-bureau pressure politics, rather than ecology.
The root cause of this conflict has been well analyzed by Dr. Charles M. Hardin of the political science staff of the University of Chicago. Dr. Hardin has pointed out that there is a categorical difference between the “organic” approach of the TVA to ecological problems and the “pluralistic” approach of the USDA and other old-line federal agencies. The organic approach asserts the interdependence of the various aspects of the social process. It recognizes that a given action program may give rise to a new situation, for which the responsible agency must accept the consequences. TVA has been obliged to adopt the organic approach because, as a regional agency, with responsibilities to both agriculture and industry, it has to live with the political consequences of what it does or neglects to do.
In contrast, the agencies grouped in the USDA’s large family are created to exercise particular agricultural or conservation functions. Any imbalances or conflicts in the organic functioning of the total economy are just too bad, as far as the particular agency is concerned, since it is responsible for doing only its own limited job.
It is possible that in some degree the TVASCS squabble of competing ecologists reflects a more fundamental conflict of political philosophies. The soil-conservation districts organized by SCS technicians have unique powers, considerably qualified in many states and rarely exercised in any, with respect to the regulation of land use according to standard land-classification tables. In the January 3, 1947 issue of Science, H. H. Bennett, chief of the Soil Conservation Service, writes that “application of land technology is certain to spread around the world either voluntarily or by decree.” In the latter case the limitations thereby imposed on the autonomy and initiative of the individual farmer would raise important political questions: ultimately, the question of whether the extension of the powers of central agencies in Washington does not tend, consciously or unconsciously, toward political totalitarianism, and whether regional authorities, by decentralizing administrative responsibility and power, do not provide effective “grass roots” brakes against such a trend.
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There do exist ways of handling our ecological problem. But certainly any honest attempt to consider ecologically the present status of our American food economy and culture in the framework of existing practices, is bound to lead to troubling conclusions. Most of us, city dwellers especially, live at the end of a food chain that extends all the way from the dinner table to the farmer’s soil and his use of it. Some of the links of that chain are dangerously weak. Worse, our politics and our culture are such that we do not find it easy to strengthen them.
For many years it has been known that the unbalanced extractive agriculture generally practiced in this country from the beginning of white settlement has affected adversely not only the yields but the quality of food crops. A survey conducted by Dr. Firman E. Bear of Rutgers University, and reported in the Autumn 1948 issue of Land, showed that the mineral content of snapbeans, tomatoes, cabbage, and lettuce tends to increase as we move from the more leached lands of the South to the North, and more sharply as between the older lands of the East to the newer lands of the Midwest and West.
Another example is the notorious fact, referred to casually by Elliot E. Cohen in a recent article in Commentary, that our great milling and baking industries find themselves unable to provide us with a decent loaf of bread. It is not enough to say, as does Mr. Cohen, that these industries are caught in a financial and technological cul-de-sac; the cul-de-sac is political and cultural too, in the widest sense of these terms.
One notes, in this not untypical human ecological situation, such factors as the vested interests established by the food industries in nutritionally obsolete methods of producing and distributing flour and bread, and in popular food preferences and habits which they themselves are largely responsible for creating or perverting by means of advertising; the utilization of chemistry and other sciences to serve the technical convenience and financial profit of the manufacturer rather than the health and nutrition of the consumer; the progressive liquidation of the consumer interest and the consumer press that began around the turn of the century and was completed during the early New Deal by the emasculation of the Tugwell pure food bill and Henry Wallace’s purge of the consumer advocates who had gained a brief foothold in the Department of Agriculture; the food lobbyists’ terrorization of the Food and Drug Administration and other government agencies; the “cartelization” of the food scientists by the establishment of industry-supported foundations that control most of the funds available for nutritional research.
Once this situation is grasped it becomes possible to understand the tragicomedy played by our War Food Administration with its wasteful and compromising “enrichment program.” (While the public was given to believe that the nutritional elements originally removed from the wheat to make American flour had been restored, actually the “enrichment” restored only a relatively small fraction of the lost minerals and vitamins.) It is also possible to extract wry amusement from the fact that today if you want to eat a decent piece of bread your best bet is to get yourself committed to one of the New York State mental hospitals. As a result of the joint labors of Commissioner MacCurdy and Dr. Clive M. McCay of Cornell University, these hospitals are now serving the best bread in America.
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At the root of the human ecological problem, it can be seen, are the ethical and social values around which our culture is organized. As Professor Toynbee points out, “Mankind has been the master of its physical environment since the middle of the Paleolithic Age; since that time man’s only dangers—but they have been deadly dangers—have come from man himself.”
Vogt, Fairfield Osborn (Our Plundered Planet, Little Brown, 1948), and others are properly appalled at the rate we are running through what are called “our natural resources.” But a natural resource is not something that stands alone, outside human nature. The only world we can know is man’s world. A natural resource becomes such only because it aids and supports human life. And we can only decide whether we have “enough” reserves by asking the question: What kind of life, at what cultural level, organized on what ecological scale, changing at what rate of speed? Our immediate problem is to construct a viable man-and-nature partnership until we can answer some of these questions.
The limits of the resource base would answer them ultimately—if only these limits were not forever changing under the impact of our expanding technological culture. The crux of the problem then becomes the assertion of human values that will provide a human rationale for this expansion and, in turn, a balanced human ecology within the perceived and protected matrix of the natural environment.
There is no doubt in the minds of the scientists best qualified to judge that today the world could feed itself adequately—if it (or those who are its managers) wanted to do so badly enough. The survival problem is no longer or even primarily a matter of either resources or of techniques. To reiterate, it lies in the field of values. We must make the collective will to survive on a decent and self-respecting human level the central motive of our culture; we cannot hope to secure such survival of the human race and its civilizations as a by-product of the operation of a value system that has other preoccupations and priorities.
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If the milling and baking industries are unable to produce a decent loaf of bread, it is because these industries are concerned, logically and necessarily from their point of view, with other problems: the technical one of making a standard loaf carry a maximum of air and water and conceal its staleness from the housewife; the political one, solved largely by subsidizing nutritional research, of preventing academic and government nutritionists from becoming “unreasonable” to the point of trying to function in behalf of the health and survival of the population.
If our nutritionists found themselves unable to put through an intelligent wartime food program it was because they lacked status and power in our society as compared to the hucksters and the lobbyists. The British nutritionists did much better, largely because they enjoy fewer commercial subsidies, on the one hand, and, on the other, higher status and greater influence on government policy.
If government appropriations for basic research in the vital and enormously rewarding fields of soil science, agronomy, genetics, and food chemistry are relatively trivial, that is again a reflection of the prevailing pattern of human ideals and aims. Many scientists believe that for a fraction of what we spent on radar during the war, we could come close to solving the food problem and eliminating hunger as a factor in future human history. Quite possibly, three major researches would do it. They are:
- The production of food yeast from hydrolyzed wood, a process carried to a fairly high point during the war in Germany. This process, when fully developed, promises not only to give us extraordinarily cheap proteins for domestic animals and man, but to raise the whole ecology of land use to a higher, more productive level.
- The production of phosphate fertilizers that are not fixed in insoluble forms in the soil, thereby enormously increasing the efficiency of our agriculture, and perhaps doubling the life expectancy of world phosphate reserves.
- Farming the ocean, which is our residual and practically inexhaustible reservoir of minerals essential to life, by mastering the problem of artificial photo-synthesis and training algae to produce cheap fats, sugars, and proteins.
These are not science fictions. All of them are practicable projects, now under way but financed in terms of thousands of dollars instead of the hundreds of millions required to obtain large results quickly.
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This, then, would seem to be the point we have reached in history. For the first time we have enough knowledge and enough tools to enable us to understand man’s place in nature, to locate our position in time and space, and to perceive the outlines of a planetary ecology, emerging or at least potential. Politics may be either a limiting or a liberating factor with respect to the biological carrying capacity of a given geographical unit. More and more, statesmen will be forced to become ecologists and cut the cloth of political policies and programs to fit the ecological measure of the natural and human resources at their disposal.
As Arthur P. Chew has pointed out (Ploughshares into Swords, Harper, 1948), technologically backward countries cannot industrialize beyond the feeding capacities of their respective agricultures without introducing dangerous tensions into the field of international politics; Japan is the most familiar illustration of the point. Certainly our own politics is badly in need of ecological appraisal and adjustment. There are ecological limits even to the productivity of these United States. An ecologist, reading President Truman’s recent message on the State of the Union, might well ask: “Is the cold war ecologically practicable? For how long?”.
On the other hand, the President’s subsequent “bold, new program” for building up the backward areas of the world is clearly on the right track, ecologically. As this plan is being worked out in Washington it provides chiefly for the export of scientists and technologists rather than food and critical minerals. If our entomologists can banish the tsetse fly from the interior of Africa, if our technicians can locate a feasible rail route from Rhodesia to the east coast, these and similar services will do more for Africa, for Europe, and for the world than any indiscriminate sharing of our not unlimited present physical resources would do.
Considered merely as spectacle, our present moment in history has a kind of Miltonic grandeur. By constructing a single global ecology at the highest technological level we can banish hunger from history. Mankind can be as the gods. Or, alternatively, in the epilogue of some unimaginable atomic or bacteriological Armageddon, the residual human life can try again, in an era of primitive peace and quiet.
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