Introduction to Our Synthetic Environment

Introduction

The epoch of man constitutes a very small period in the history of life on our planet. Within this brief period, man has made radical changes in his environment. He has abandoned the rugged individualism of life in the open country, essentially based on a natural system of diversified agriculture, and congregated into congested, polluted cities which require monoculture and chemicalized forms of agriculture. In making this shift, man has tried to create an urban environment that follows the dictates of technology and economics, but the change has been made by totally disregarding the natural laws of biochemistry that apply to the human organism as a living unit.

During the latest part of that short epoch, modern systems of technology and the social complications produced by these systems have served to harvest excessively the natural living resources required by man. There has been a methodical exploitation of the soil productivity that is indispensable to the maintenance of human communities, thus adding a note of urgency to the great and march from the older East to the younger West. That march has rolled on until a point has been reached where the natural supports for life in the most recently acquired outpost–the Western Hemisphere–are rapidly dwindling. In addition, there is now a world population approaching three billion consumers who are forced to live on less than three billion acres of productive land.

AII the populations below man are compelled to behave according to the natural laws that control living bodies. As a result of evolutionary processes, each living thing emerges as a climax crop; it belongs to a stable community of plants and animals that occupies a particular location for a limited period of time. But man, with a mental capacity transcending that of other living things, has used most of these locations to his own advantage and to the disadvantage–even extinction–of other forms of life. As a result, the human species, with a few exceptions, does not conform to evolution according to natural or ecological patterns. In fact, man’s technological powers disrupt these patterns by destroying the very conformers that support him. His reckless, often irresponsible attempts to exploit the natural environment have greatly increased the contamination of the soil, the atmosphere, and even our inland waters. These acts of wanton exploitation have been destroying our “decomposer” populations (the microbes), thereby weakening the “producer” populations (the plants) that capture and store energy from the sun in the form of food. Although man stands at the apex of the biotic pyramid, his indifference to the needs of other forms of life threatens to undermine the entire structure.

Scientific studies have revealed a great deal about the conditions that are necessary for the survival and health of organisms lower than man. Let us consider the simplest of these forms, the microbes, of which there are countless kinds. Every microorganism lives in an environment which provides the required amount of moisture, a tolerable temperature, favorable pressure, an adequate supply of oxygen and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, a limited intensity of sunlight, and sources of food that regularly furnish energy and the essentials for growth, self-protection, and reproduction. It is a basic law for the survival of a species that all of the factors required for the maintenance of life be well balanced. This law holds not only for microbes but for all organisms, whether they be wild or domesticated.

For ages nature has supplied evidence of the immutability of this law. But it was scarcely more than a century ago that we began to recognize some aspects of the larger natural order, or ecological pattern, that explains the distribution of different populations according to suitable environments and several of the relationships between species that make for biological interdependence or, as the case may be, competition. The science which deals with these problems is called ecology. Ecology offers the possibility of cataloguing the natural laws that, both qualitatively and quantitatively, determine the environments required to produce climax populations. We are slow to realize that it has always been either in accordance with these laws or in violation of them that populations continue to exist or are extinguished. These laws have prevailed whether animal and plant species were located naturally on the earth’s surface or whether they were transplanted by man.

Like other forms of life, primitive man also fitted into a natural ecological arrangement. He did not often venture outside his familiar and limited environment, nor did he attempt to change it very much. He obeyed those natural forces and factors that limit any form of life to certain soil conditions and to a particular climatic setting. By using radioactive carbon to date the early remains of man, archaeologists have found evidence suggesting that man, like other animals, lived primarily in areas whose ecological potential made for high-protein foods. In retrospect, “as a standard to which we might repair,” we wish now that we might have learned why the wind-mixed, semi-humid virgin soil of the American Plains could support soil microbes as decomposers and plants as producers of an ample supply of proteins as well as carbohydrates, and thereby could maintain the several intimately integrated populations of consumers among which the bison and American Indian were climax crops. That standard would be decidedly valuable, since the area to this very day is one marked by outstanding human longevity. Such cases are evidence of a high level of natural survival without the use of a highly mechanized technology, imported foods, and other means for managing a community.

At the present time the management of crops and livestock does not seem to be guided by our knowledge of the nutritional limitations created by soil fertility and the climato-geological setting in which climax crops develop. We freely transplant plant and animal species from anywhere merely for economic gain and in utter disregard of the benefits or dangers to the species involved. In our nearly complete disregard for the requirements for soil fertility, we have introduced higher (or lower) species into many areas of the world while steadily depleting the soil supports required to maintain them in health. The result has been that carbohydrates in crops tend to increase at the expense of proteins, vitamins, and minerals, and the fattening of livestock by means of a high-carbohydrate diet, castration, and hormones has replaced the art of animal husbandry.

In view of these subversive attempts to manage plants and animals for no other purpose than maximum economic gain, is it surprising to learn that we have disrupted many of the favorable ecological relationships between different forms of life? Should we not expect to find that insect pests and other potentially harmful species are turned into ravaging hordes that overrun vast areas of the world? Can we expect to remove these infestations by means of powerful poisons that damage man as well as lower animals? Shall we rely hopefully on antibiotics to remove problems of disease when resistant bacteria develop as rapidly as DDT-resistant insects?

A highly urbanized society tends to emphasize the value of technology in providing a “higher standard of living.” In practice the city dweller is reduced to collecting the means of life while the tiller of the soil works at earning them by means of his direct contact with nature. Having left the countryside for the city, the vast majority of people in the Western world find themselves in a position where they can evade the responsibility for maintaining the soil in productivity. It is typical of the modern outlook, for example, that American tax legislation makes ample allowance for the depletion of crude oil, coal, and other minerals, but no one seems to have conceived of the need for a similar allowance for replenishing the resources of the land. At the same time, we tend to regard food cultivation as a form of industry, as a problem in economic management that is undertaken to provide “fair returns to the farmer. “

Actually, agriculture is quite the opposite of industry. Good agriculture involves a co-operative enterprise with nature, indeed a series of creative operations that center on the Iiving fertility and organic matter of the soil.

By exploiting the soil exclusively for economic gain, we are pushing all the life forms of the earth closer to their ecological fringes of survival. So far as man is concerned, the consequences of this tendency take the form of a decline in the nutritional quality of food staples and forage crops and an increase in diseases and pest infestations. Instead of trying to remedy the situation by restoring the balanced relationships that exist in the natural world, we normally resort to methods and devices that have been developed for increasing sales profits.

Fortunately, there is still hope. If man can bring his powers of reason to the service of nature by trying to understand the ecological patterns on which his existence is based, his technology can then be fashioned in such a way that both he and the natural world will gain from any modifications of the environment. To achieve this end requires knowledge. It is indeed fortunate that Mr. Herber has undertaken a broad review of the enormous dislocations and problems produced by our synthetic environment. His emphasis on the importance of conforming to the basic ecological patterns of the natural world is both timely and necessary.