Nature s Economy

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~ ~ ~ ~

That was the picture as

it

looked a mere decade after the

Bikini tests.. Not until 1958, however, did the ecological

effects of atomic fallout become of more widespread con

cern to American scientists. In that year scientists organized

the Committee for Nuclear Information in St. Louis, whose

aim was to strip the secrecy from the government's weapons

program and to warn their fellow citizens of the dangers in

. further nuclear testing and nuclear power. One of its mem

bers was the plant physiologist Barry Commoner, who

would become a prominent leader in the growing environ-

THE

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OF

ECOLOGY

menta l movement. Other scientis ts began to join this cam

paign of information and protest, and increasingly they were

from the biological disciplines. Their campaign against the

radiation threat to the planet set a precedent for scientists

taking up political issues, mobilizing public opinion, and,

out

of guilt as

much

as responsibility, calling for a new

ethic toward nature. The bomb tested at Alamagordo had

at last set off a powerful moral reaction.

Rachel Carson was

not

a prominent leader in

that

first

wave of critical reaction among scientists. For a long while

she shunned politics and controversy. But like many other

citizens she listened and worried; slowly she joined the

reaction. When she made her

commitment

to speak out,

she came armed wi th facts and eloquence, animated by an

intense conviction

that

the world had entered a more dan

gerous era than any before and

that

scientists could no

longer pursue thei r research as usual. Through her writings

Carson began to teach people how to think about the new

vulnerability of nature, and she became the first to warn

the public of a whole new category of toxic substances,

organic pesticides made of chlorinated hydrocarbons, that

f

i

were polluting the earth. Translated into more than two

dozen languages, her work inspired a global environmental

t

consciousness.

Carson was born in 1907 and grew up on what was then

the rural outskirts of Pittsburgh. With the aid of a schol

arship she attended the Pennsylvania College for Women

(now Chatham College], then went on to Johns Hopkins

University for an M.A. degree in genetics. Her most im

portant scientific training, though, came in summers spent

at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory on Cape Cod,

where she discovered the ecology of the sea. She felt drawn

to it emotionally as well as scienti fically and devoted

most

of her life to its study and enjoyment. What she found in

the sea was a vast untouched realm in which living orga

nisms had evolved in an environment quite unlike the land

surface. The sea seemed an unspoiled part of nature,

whereas the North American cont inent had, by her lifetime,

been explored, settled, and manipulated extensively. Had

Carson lived during earlier days, she might have longed to

go westward and alone into the wilderness. Instead, this

ealing the Planet

4746

Worster, Donald (1994) Excerpt. In, Nature's economy: ahistory of ecological ideas - 2nd ed. (pp.346-359, 462-465).Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521468345.


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small, shy woman became a marine biologist prowling the

wild oceanic world of the East Coast, peering into tide pools,

wading at night onto mudflats

with

bucket and flashlight

in hand, diving into deeper waters

with

a snorkel or pres

surized helmet. No one would do more than she to direct

American thinking to the vast ocean environment, which

comprises three-fourths of the planet's surface.

The

decade of

the

thirt ies was not a propitious one for a

woman seeking a career in the natural sciences. She became

her mother's sole financial support and, in 1936, found it

necessary to accept a job as junior aquatic biologist with

the Bureau of Fisheries, then in the Department of Com

merce, later absorbed into the Fish and Wildlife Service of

the Department of

the

Interior. Until 1952 tha t government

agency was her professional home, and she worked her way

up to become its chief editor of publications. She resigned

when

her own writings gave her sufficient income to be

independent. Her first book was

Under the Sea Wind 1941),

but

it was her second,

The Sea Around Us

1951),

that

brought her fame and a small fortune; it was on

the

best

seller lists for more than eighty weeks and won the National

Book Award. A third title,

The Edge of

the

Sea

appeared in

1955. By that point Carson had found a new career as a

freelance science writer, searching for meaning, beauty, and

a mystery still unpenetrated by science in the stories of

the

sea.

World War Two left an unintended

but

destructive legacy

for nature in many ways other than the atomic bomb. Car

son's own government agency had been mobilized to learn

more about the marine environment and help devise means

to exploit

it for food, navigation, and defense. In a second

edition of

The Sea

round

Us

published in 1961, Carson

acknowledged how much had been changed by the new war

generated technology. Americans and Russians were dump

ing radioactive wastes in the ocean, and fallout from the

testing of bombs was settling over

the

waters.

The

effects

of those substances on the whole chain of living organisms,

from the smallest diatoms to the largest marine mammals,

and on

man

himself, could not be foretold. Although man's

record as a steward of

the

natural resources of the earth has

been a discouraging one, she wrote, the re has been a cer

48 T H E G E

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E C O L O G Y

tain comfort in the belief that the sea, at least, was inviolate,

beyond man's ability to change and to despoil. But this

belief, unfortunately, has proved to be naive. The fate of

Bikini Atoll made that

clear.

Carson subsequently turned her attention to other deadly

poisons falling from

the

sky, particularly the persistent pes

ticides like DDT (dicholoro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) that

had also come out of the war years and were spreading

through terrestrial food chains and draining into the sea,

affecting even penguins at

the

South Pole. After years of

gathering all the scientific data she could find on the eco

logical consequences of pesticides, she brought

out

in 1962

a very different book from any she had written heretofore:

it bore the ominous title

Silent Spring

and was a measured

but severe indictment of modem agriculture, the chemical

industry, and applied entomology. The message of the book,

still controversial, was that humans were endangering their

own lives through an arrogant, manipulative attitude to

ward other forms of life.

Along

with

the possibility of the extinction of mankind by nuclear

war, the central problem of our age has

. . .

become the contami

nation of man's total environment with such substances of in

credible potential for harm substances that accumulate in the

tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate

the

germ cells

to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon which the

shape of the future depends.

Carson assembled enough facts to show

why

the more per

sistent chemicals must be restricted, but her deeper message

was the need for ethical change, away from a spirit of con

quest and toward a respect for all forms of life and an ac

knowledgment of our dependence on them. The 'control

of nature ,' she wrote, is a phrase conceived in arrogance,

born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy,

when it was supposed

that

nature exists for

the

convenience

of

man

. . . . I t is our alarming misfortune that so primitive

a science has armed itself

with

the most modem and terrible

weapons, and that in turning

them

against the insects it

has also turned them against the earth.:

Recent feminist scholars have argued that Carson's moral

critique of the conquest of nature emerged

out

of a wom

en's culture that had long emphasized cooperation and

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.. -

I

nurturance instead of the pursuit of conquest and

wealth."

Certainly, Carson drew on many women for support during

what became a storm of reaction, much of it belittling to

her as a woman. But the acknowledged intellectual influ

ences on her life were

men

like Albert Schweitzerand Henry

Bigelow, and millions of

men

as well as women looked on

her as the prophet of a

new

ethic toward nature. When she

died of cancer at age fifty-six, she had organized no political

movement nor had she seen

that

new environmental ethic

become common; however, she had helped make ecology

a familiar word and environmentalism a growing interna

tional

cause."

In

the earlier part of this century the word "environ ment"

referred main ly to

theextemal

social influences (asopposed

to genetic endowment) working on the individual. Envi

ronmentalism

referredto

the belief

that

the "physical, bi

ological, psychological or cultural environment" was a

crucial factor shaping the structure or behavior of animals,

including man." " But increasingly as the battle of heredity

versus environment los t saliency after World War Two, en

vironment came to mean, particularly and especially, the

natural

influences surrounding people, including flora,

fauna, climate, water, and soil;

human

beings, it was under

stood, were

not

passive victims of their surroundings-they

were imbedded in them, they interacted

with

them, and

they could have an effect.

An

environmentalist, conse

quently, became anyone who was concerned

with

the pres

ervation of those biophysical surroundings from pollution,

depletion, or degradation. For generations technological de

velopment had progressed on the premise of transforming,

even replacing, the natural world. Environmenta lists coun

tered

that

humans, no

matter

how impressive their tech

nology, needed to protec t

that

natural world from the ir own

actions in order to survive or live well. Nature is

not

a realm

set

apartfrom

humans like another country

that

one visits

from time to time, but instead is a vast, intricate com

munity, a system of connections and interchanges highly

vulnerable to disturbance, on which

humans must

inescap

ably depend. .

The new

environmentalism, to be sure, did

not

appear

suddenly on the scene with no precedents or intellectual

T H E G E

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preparation. Rachel Carson expressed an indebtedness to

such nineteenth-century figures as Henry Thoreau and John

Muir, who had celebrated nature in a wilder sta te and sought

to reestablish a direct personal relationship

with

the non

human. Both

men

devised private strategies for getting out

side the cocoon of civilization and into the woods or

mountains. But in a nation of over 200 million people,

with

a far denser web of artifice obscuring the natural order,

that

kind of private quest had become difficult. Environmental

ism was, therefore, not a private relationship,

not

a kind of

retreat, but a decidedly public engagement-a strategy pur

sued in the courtroom and legislative chamber to defend a

relationship found even in the heart of

the

largest mega

lopolis.

Other precedents included the conservation movement,

which gained

momentum

in the early twentieth century

under

the

leadership of Gifford Pinchot, Chief Forester dur

ing the Theodore Roosevelt administration. But

that

move

ment had aimed at preserving national parks and wildlife

refuges, setting up a national forest system under susta ined

yield management, and protecting the nation's soils and

minerals. Typically, conservation had been a movement to

put the

government in charge of overseeing and even own

ing the land. Activists like Pinchot argued that American

society could

not

endure

without

a permanent supply of

natural resources, and they feared

that

a short-sighted con

sumption might threaten

the

nation's security. On the

other

hand, conservationists tended to look on nature as a series

of discrete places needing

defense-a

Yosemite Valley, a

pine forest, an eroded farm on the Great Plains. When en

vironmentalism emerged, it maintained some of

that

same

commitment

to the program of land conservation; for ex

ample, it supported the Wilderness Act of 1964 and a num

ber of endangered species acts. But all the same, the core

of

the

movement was shifting as more and more citizens

sensed that

the human-nature

umbilical itself was under

attack and

that

defending it required a more comprehensive

way of thinking.

The

emergence of the new viewpoint owed

much

to a

relatively obscure group of thinkers in the two or three

decades

that

preceded the new movement of environmen-

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talism, most of them academics in such fields as ecology

and geography. They were the first to see the environment

as a set of interactive relationships between humans and

the rest of nature. Many of

them

thought about those re

lations on a global scale, transcending dramatically

the

more limited national consciousness of the conservation

ists. Their ideas often came from abroad: for example, from

the Austrian geologist Edward Suess, inventor of the con

ceptof

the biosphere; from French and German geographers,

who had long debated the question of nature as a limiting

factor on

human

activity; and from a succession of English

naturalists, including Charles Darwin, Charles Elton, and

Arthur

Tansley.

A key American figure in this emerging

body of thought was Aldo Leopold, who introduced many

readers to t he science of ecology through his 1949 book of

outdoor essays,

A Sand County Almanac.

By the fifties

those influences had all come together in a new integrative,

interdisciplinary point of view

that

united the natural and

social sciences, a view

that

might be called

human

ecology.

Avoiding the extremes of environmental determinism,

which had tried to reduce cultures to their physical circum

stances, and of a technological optimism

that

was blind to

its Side-effects,

the

new view taught

that human

life

must

be lived

within

constraints, both physical and moral.

Examples of

that

emerging

human

ecology run all through

the late forties and the fifties. Among anthropologists of

the

period Betty Meggers and Julian Steward, one working

in Amazonia,

the

other in

the

American Southwest, laid

the

foundations for cultural ecology. Among geographers

Carl Sauer was the crucial figure-a broad-ranging scholar

who produced a number of influential studies of people

living in close contact

with

nature. Two important books

published Simultaneously in 1948, Our Plundered Planet

by Fairfield Osborn, and Road to Survival by William Vogt,

both offered a planetary perspective on

man's

growing effect

on his surroundings.

Then

in 1955 several of those same

scholars, and many more from

many

disciplines and

many

countries, came together in Princeton, New Jersey, for a

symposium on

the

state of

the human-nature

relation, ded

icated to the memory of the nineteenth-century American

conservationist George Perkins Marsh. As

much

as any

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T H E G E

OF

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event, that Princeton gathering prepared

the

intellectual

ground for the environmental movement.

13

Take, for example, the contribution by Paul Sears, bota

nist and chairman of the conservation program at Yale Uni

versity. Sears reviewed the global impact of

human

population growth, the intensification of agricultura l land

use, water and air pollution in industrial areas, noting along

the way

that

the United States,

with

less

than

a

tenth

of

the world's population was consuming more

than

half of

the mineral production. Man is dependent, he argued,

upon other organisms both for

the

immediate means of

survival and for maintaining habitat conditions under

which survival is possible.': Neither Sears nor

the

other

1955 conference-goers called themselves environmental

ists, but their focus on the place of

humans

in the global

environment, and their general concern about the state of

that environment, all helped give environmentalism a set

of defining ideas.

What environmentalism added to those fertile ideas of

human

ecology was a sense of urgency, bordering at times

on apocalyptic fear. The environment was in a sta te of cri

sis.

The

specter haunting scientists like Carson was

death-the death of birds, of ecosystems, of nature itself,

and, because of our dependence on nature, the death of

humans

as well. Though environmentalists sometimes

tried to temper their gloom with a more hopeful and polit

ically acceptable emphasis on a green future in which

cities, economies, and productive technologies would all be

reembedded in the tangled web of life, they had trouble

convincing themselves

that

public attitudes were changing

fast enough to avert disaster. In his widely admired and

influential Reith lectures delivered in 1969 over

the

BBC

one of Britain's most prominent environmentalists, Frank

Fraser Darling, though admitting

that

Carson's emotional

overtones made

him

uncomfortable, also admitted

that

he

could

not

be an optimist and

that

he was troubled by

the

constant necessity, for political reasons, of expressing faith

which at bottom I do not feel.':

n

1968, a half-dozen years after

Silent Spring

appeared,

the California biologist Paul Ehrlich heard yet a nother bomb

ticking, ready to usher in chaos and mass death: th e pop-

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ulat ion explosion, which had reached over three billion

and was increasing at a global average of more

than

2 percent

a year, and in many poorer countries at a rate of 3 percent

or more. Thus, it was

not

technology alone,

but

human

biology that now had become a factor in the rush to Ar

mageddon. Once more the wraith of Thomas Malthus ma

terialized, warning of approaching limits to

human

population and

human

consumption, a prediction echoed

in such books as

The Limits

to

Growth Blueprint for Sur-

vival

and

Small Is Beautiful

all of which feared

that

com

plex industrial civilization as a whole might be breaking

down. In the authors' view, an 'economy expanding at a

geometric ratio, using ever more energy, land, minerals, and

water,

must

eventually

run

up against the limits of the

earth. Looked at as a set of interdependencies rather than

as a storehouse of commodities, the environment was

not

merely a set of things to be used up. Here the environmen

talists confronted deeply seated attitudes among traditional

economists, business leaders, politicians, and

the

public

about the virtues of economic growth, a ttitudes underlying

the

modem

economic system and indeed

the

whole mater

ialistic ethos of

modem

culture.

16

Barry Commoner, who had been among the first sc ient ists

to move into environmental politics, kept pace

with the

broadening agenda, though he never became a Malthusian

about population or resource scarcity. In 1963 the U.S. Sen

ate ratified a treaty banning the atmospheric t esting of nu

clear weapons, effectively removing the first great cause

from the environmentalist agenda,

but

Commoner saw

that

there were plenty of other dangers threatening planetary

health. His

Committee

for Nuclear Information became the

Committee

for Environmental Information, and publisher

of a

new

magazine called Environment. He began studying

the damaging effects of nitrate-based chemical fertilizers,

seeping from agricultural fields

into

the public's

water

sup

ply, on the body's ability to transport oxygen in the blood.

He also began alerting

the

country to

what

he called

the

most

blatant example of the environmental crisis in the

United States,

the

galloping eutrophicat ion of 12,000-year

old Lake Erie from phosphates in household detergents.

The

drive to maximize corporate profit, he maintained, was

the

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THE

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force behind the development of those new harmful prod

ucts, all of which had safer

but

less lucrative substitutes.

n

his book,

The Closing Circle

published in 1971, Com

moner argued

that

the

great need was for an awakened pub

lic, led by informed scientists, to force the government to

restrain the development and marke ting of those technol

ogies by corporate

America.

By the late sixties

that

call for regulating

the

polluters

began to have a significant effect on the political process.

In 1969 Congress passed

the

National Environmental Policy

Act, which set up a new Environmental Protection Agency

and required an environmenta l impact

statement

for any

federally funded project

that

might cause damage to the

earth.

Other

landmark legislation included clean water acts

in 1960, 1965, and 1972 and clean air acts in 1963, 1967,

and 1970. n Britain, a Con trol of Pollution Act passed Par

liament in 1974; though it drew on a long history of public

health and sanitation reform, it too expressed a rising level

of anxiety about

the deteriorating environment. By

that

point

the

list of pollutants had expanded to include auto

mobile emissions, solid wastes, toxic metals, oil spills, even

the

heat

trapped by

the

atmospheric buildup of

the

green

house gas, carbon dioxide.

IS

This discovery of nature's vulnerability came as so great

a shock that, for many Britons and Americans, the only

appropriate response was talk of revolution. In a trivia l vein,

new

terms were added to the English language like eco

polit ics, ecocatastrophe, and ecoawareness. Beyond

such Madison Avenue gimmicks, however, more funda

mental changes were called for. To cite only one instance,

Michael McCloskey, the executive director of

the

Sierra

Club, concluded in 1970

that

a revolution is truly needed-in our values, outlooks and

eco-

nomicorganization. Forthe crisisofour environmentstemsfrom

a legacy of economic and technical premises which have been

pursued in the absence of ecological knowledge. That other

rev-

olution, the industrial one that is turning sour, needs to be re

placed by a revolution of new attitudes toward growth,

goods

space and living things.

The

oppressor, as perceived here, was more than Com

moner's economic class of capitalists who had been

the

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great engine of the Industrial Revolution and of most tech

nological innovation thereafter. Like many other environ

mentalists, McCloskey was challenging the whole set of

values associated

with

the rise of a bourgeois civilization

the worldview of the aspiring middle class, with its dedi

cation to technology, unlimited production and consump

tion, material self-advancement, individualism, and the

domination of nature. Similarly, the political scientist Wil

liam Ophuls insisted

that

the basic principles of modem

industrial civilization are ... incompatible with ecological

scarcity and that the whole ideology of modernity growing

out of the Enlightenment, especially such central tenets as

individualism, may no longer be viable. Time had run

out

on an enti re culture. Nature's economy had been pushed to

the breaking point, and ecology was to be the rallying cry

for a cultural revolution. 19

If the overthrow of modem bourgeois civilization had

become the most radical aim of the ecology movement, it

was ironic to find

the

movement's strongest appeal among

the Anglo-American middle class. That fact was well and

often noted, with not a little indignation, by

the

would-be

middle classes of the world. Many asked whether the mes

sage of ecology was a sermon on the virtues of poverty, to

be heeded only by those who were still have-nots. Could

middle-class environmentalists, others questioned, bring off

a revolution against their Owneconomic self-interest, or did

they really mean after all to enact more modest, liberal,

pragmatic reforms

that

would leave the base of the bour

geois culture intact? Was it even conceivable, two hundred

years after Watts' steam engine, to abandon the achieve

ments of the Industrial Revolution, or had the chains of

history bound us to a self-propelled technology? What

would an alternative social order founded on the science of

ecology look

like-and

would the middle class really accept

such a world? Perhaps most significant, would

the

billions

of people st ill living in relative or absolute scarcity

want

to

live there?

The media culmination of those events and gropings for

a new order came on April 22, 1970, when citizens around

the United States, and many abroad, observed the first Earth

Day, a

time

set aside for sober reflection on environmental

356

THE

GE

OF

ECOLOGY

conditions. The idea of such a day originated

with

Senator

Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, but the

main

organizer was

a twenty-five-year-old antiwar activist, Sam Brown, who

held distinctly apocalyptic views about the fate of the earth.

He now tried to apply the tactics of student protests against

the Vietnam War and race discrimination to the environ

mental crisis, though some observers thought there was less

seriousness in the new cause; burning a credit card some

how did not seem as radical as burning a draft card. A News-

week reporter wrote: Despite

the

desperate sickness of the

environment, despite the turnout of millions of at least

partially awakened Americans, the whole demonstration

seemed to lack the necessary passion. Perhaps, if that was

so, most Americans had not yet been scared enough. They

had not

yet

absorbed all the fear and pessimism that was

driving many scientists. Thus the day became in many com

munities more of a party than a wake.

There was still plenty of fierce passion in

the

busiest

figure of Earth Day 1970, Barry Commoner, who managed

to address audiences on four different campuses in the

space

of a few hours. Commoner had eminent companions on the

day's lecture circuits, including Paul Ehrlich, Rene Dubos,

. Ralph Nader, Benjamin Spock, and even the beat poet Allen

Ginsberg. At least one prominent figure, however, took a

novel approach to the issues agitating students: Secretary

of

the

Interior Walter Hickel traveled to the University of

Alaska to speak, where he announced that he would approve

the construction of a 800-mile pipeline from the North

Slope of

that

state to supply America's vast fleet of auto

mobiles with gasoline. But most Earth Day speakers called

on the

public to drive less, conserve more, and to question

the

automobile-indeed, to question a way of life that was

based on maximizing the consumption of oil and other nat

ural resources, on promoting private wealth and national

prestige as the highest social goals.

President Richard Nixon, though no environmentalist

himself and rebuffed in angling for a campus speaking op

portunity, nonetheless called on citizens to make their

peace

with

Mother Nature. Easy words from a man who

was still waging a war in Southeast Asia, but the shift in

official language was striking. The old imperial slogan that

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Carson had protested,

the

conquest of nature, had sud-

denly gone hollow all over the country, even

if

many of the

forces behind the words remained as strong as ever.

n

a

mere quarter of a century the nation had raced from Ala-

magordo to Earth Day. A period that had begun

with

the

demonst ration of an awesome weapon to defend American

freedom and empire and the consumer way of life against

evil regimes had arrived at the point where that same way

of life had itself become the great danger, a danger that lay

within, requiring a new kind of defense.

Eventually, environmentalists sought alliances

with

other groups demanding cultural

change-with

feminists,

some of

whom

insisted

that

women were more attuned

to

grasping ecological interdependencies than men; with eth-

ical radicals who wanted to extend rights to animals, trees,

and the rest of nature; and with advocates for poor nations,

who demanded protection from environmental damage and

toxic dumping done by rich nations.

n

1972, when envi-

ronmentalists, official and nonofficial, assembled in Stock-

holm, Sweden, from

allover

the world to survey the global

situation, they faced

the

formidable task of learning to work

together, across all the barriers of class, language, ideology,

and religion that separated them, in order to meet the now

global problems of nuclear proliferation, overpopulation,

overconsumption, industrial pollution, and resource ex-

haustion.

The first Earth Day and the Stockholm event, the first of

a series of international environmental conferences, sug-

gested to the American media that the decade of the sev-

enties would become

the

Age of Ecology.

f

the phrase

suggested

that

everyone in the nat ion or world had accepted

the message of ecologists like Carson and the others, then

it was surely a joke. Even among

the

small circle of Amer-

ican and British scientists, there was no consensus on how

bad the environmental crisis was, or even whether there

was a crisis at all. Nonetheless, a new phase of civilization

did seem to be appearing in a fitful, halting, and confused

way. The covers of news magazines were now graced by a

starkly beautiful image of Earth: a photograph taken from

an American spaceship showing a gleaming sphere dappled

with

green and brown continents,

with

wide expanses of

358

0

THE GE OF ECOLOGY

deep blue water and swirling white clouds, a single unique

sphere of life surrounded by unending blackness.

That

lonely planet, people now understood in a way no previous

generation could have done, was actually a small and fragile

entity. Though eventually corporations would

turn

that im-

age into a icon of the global marke t economy, and

the

per-

ceptual revolution it had promised would be thwarted by

resurgent nationalism, for a while and for many the pho-

tograph of earth was a stunning revelation. The planet had

come to seem far more singular and yet more fragile

than

at any othertime in

human

experience. Its thin film of

l ife

humanity' s sole means of

survival-was

far thinne r and far

more vulnerable than anyone had ever imagined.

I

I

I

ealing

th

Planet

359


8/9

14. Wheeler, Ant Colony" and "Hopes in

the

Biological Sciences, "

, in

Essays in Philosophical Biology.

IS. Wheeler, quoted by Evans and Evans, pp.

308-9.

16, Karl Schmidt, "Warder Clyde Allee." Allee et al. AEPPSI. Prin

ciples of nimal Ecology,

p. 436. Alfred Emerson,

The

Biological

Basis of Social Cooperation," p. IS.

17. Allee, "Cooperation Among Animals," and nimal Aggrega

tions: A Study in General Sociology,

chs.

9-16

and pp.

355-57.

18. Robert Redfield [ed.], Introduction to "Levels of Integration in '

Biological and Social Systems,"

p.4.

Alfred Emerson, "Ecology,

Evolution

j

and Society," p. 118;

this

essay was Emerson's presi

dential address before the Ecological Society of America.'

The

group 's debt to Herb ert Spencer was made clear in Ralph W. Gerard

and Alfred Emerson, "Extrapolation from the Biological to

the

Social,"

Science

n.s. 101 (June 8, 19451: 582-85.

19. Ralph W. Gerard, "Higher Levels of Integration," in Redfield,

"Levels," pp. 83, 85.

20. Emerson, "Biological Basis of Social Cooperation

p. 17. Gerard,

"Biological Basis for Ethics," p. 115. Another exp

t

icit

reaction to

World War

Two

was Allee 's "Where Angels Fear to Tread: A Con

tribution

from General Sociology to

Human

Ethics." It was one

more

plea for world peace and cooperation as taught by nature.

21. Wheeler,

The

Organization of Research" 19201, and

The

Ter

mitodoxa, or Biology and Society" (1919),in

Foibles of Insects and

Men;

and "Emergent Evolution of

the

Social," pp.

42-45.

22. Emerson, "Biological Basis of Social Cooperation," pp.

16-17.

Gerard, "Higher Levels of Integration," p. 82.

23. Joseph Wood Krutch,

The Modern Temper,

esp. ch. 2,

The

Par

adox of

Humanism ;

The Twelve Seasons, p. 13; If You Don t

Mind My Saying So, p.357;

"Conservation Is

Not

Enough," in

The Voice of the Desert,

pp. 194-95;

The Great Chain of Life,

pp. 161-62. See also Krutch's autobiography,

More Lives Than

One,

esp. pp.

290-334

on

his

"conversion."

PART SIX

Chapter 16

1. Robert Iungk,

Brighter Than a Thousand Suns,

pp. 196-202. Alice

Kimbal Smith,

A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists Move ment in

America,

1945-47 (Chicago, 1965). .

2.

Neal

Hines, "Bikini Report,"

Scientific Monthly

72 (February

1951): 102-13; Richard Miller,

Under the Cloud: The Decades of

Nuclear Testing (New York, 19861, pp. 75-79.

The

first shot, called

Able, occurred on July 1, and

the

second, Baker, on July 25.

3. Philip

L.

Fradkin,

Fallout,

chaps.

6-7.

46

Notes

4. Science 123(22 June 1956): 1110-11. Representative of the popular

press coverage of

the

issues are

Newsweek

47 (June 25, 1956): 70;

and

Time

67 (June 25, 1956): 64-6 5., .

5. According to Donald Fleming, the catalyzing factor in Co mmon

er's political involvement was a request by presidential candidate

Adlai Stevenson in 1956 for

infonnation

on fallout from atmo

spheric testing- the first time a scientific issue had been intro

duced

into

a presidential campaign." See Fleming, "Roots of

the

New

Conservation Movem ent," p. 42.

6. Rachel Carson,

The Sea Around Us,

p. xi.

7. Rachel Carson,

Silent Spring,

pp. 8, 297.

8. For excellent discussions of Carson as a feminist,

consult

Vera

Norwood,

Made from This Earth: American Women and Nature

(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1993), pp. 143-71; and H. Patr icia Hynes, The

Recurring Silent Spring

(New York, 1989), pp. 180-215. For a gen

eral account of Carson's life and work, see Paul Brooks, The House

of Life: Rachel Carson at Work

(Boston, 1972).

9. In 1967, a group of American scientists founded

the

Environ

mental

Defense Fund, which, inspired by Carson, succeeded in

getting

DDT

banned in 1972 as a

threat

to

both human

life and

natural ecosystems. See Thomas R. Dunlap,

DDT: Scientists, Cit

izens, and Public Policy

(Princeton, N.J., 1981); and John Perkins,

Insects, Experts, and the Insecticide Crisis: The Quest for New

Pest Management Strategies (New York, 1982), pp. 86-87.

10. "Environmentalism," Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, vol.

5 (New York, 1931), p. 561.

11. Samuel Hays

(in Beauty, Health, and Permanence,

p. 55) iden

tifies the period after 1965 as a

new

phase in American environ

mental

politics

when

pollution

took its

place alongside

the

older

conservation concerns.

12. The Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky, a

student

of

the

re

lation of living organisms to geochemical cycles; was

the

first to

develop

the

biosphere concept scientifically. He defined it as that

part of

the

atmosphere and surface of

the earth

where life exists."

Kendall E. Bailes,

Science and Russian Culture in an Age of Rev

olutions: V. 1. Vernadsky and His Scientific School, 1863-1945

(Bloomington, Ind., 1990), pp. 123-24.

13. Bettyl' Meggers, "Environmental Limitation on the Develop

ment 0 Culture, American Anthropolol{ist

56 (October

19541:

8 0 1 2 ~ i u l i a n H. Steward, The Theory

ot

Cultural Change [Ur- .

bana,

ui. ,

19551; Carl

Ortwin

Sauer, Land and Life, ed. John

Leighly (Berkeley, Calif., 1963); Fairfield Osborn, Our Plundered

Planet

(Boston, 1948); William Vogt,

Road to Survival

(New York,

19481.

The

proceedings of the Princeton

symposium

were pub

lished in Man s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, ed. Wil

liam

L. Thomas, Jr.

Notes

463


9/9

14.Paul B.Sears, The Processes ofEnvironmental Change byMan,"

in Thomas,

Changing the Face of the Earth

p. 471.

IS. Frank Fraser Darling, Wilderness and Plenty

p. 54.

16. Paul R. Ehrlich,

The Population Bomb;

Donella H. Meadows,

Dennis 1. Meadows, Iergen Randers, and William W. Behrens III,

The Limit s to Growth

(New York, 19721; Edward Goldsmith,

Blue-

print for Survival;

and E. F. Schumacher,

Small Is Beautiful

(Lon

don, 1973).

17. Barry Commoner,

The Closing Circle

pp.94, 200, 268. Com

moner identified four basic laws of ecology, which became widely

cited as the popular essence of the science: 1) Everything is con

nected to everything else; 21 everything

must

go somewhere; 3)

nature knows best; and 4) there is no such thing as a free lunch

[pp

33-46).

18. U.S. public expenditures for pollution control rose from about

$800 million in 1969 to $4.2 billion in 1975.

Environmental Qual-

ity: The Sixth

Annual

Report of the Council on Environmental

Quality

(Washington, D.C., 1975), p. 527. Great Britain likewise

increased its expenditures, and the results were notable: Output

of smoke fell from over 2 million metric tons in 1953 to 0.5 million

in 1976. The mileage of unpolluted rivers went up from 14,603 in

1958 to 17,279 in 1972, an increase of 18 percent. See Eric Ashby,

Reconciling Man with the Environment

(Stanford, Calif., 1978),

pp.6-7.

19. Michael McCloskey,

Ecotactics

ed. John Mitchell and Con

stance Stallings, p. 11. William Ophuls,

Ecology and the Politics

of Scarcity Revisited

p. 3.

20. Newsweek

751May 4, 1970):26-28. For other coverage see

Time

94 (April 27, 1970): 46.

21. Arne Naess,

The

Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology

Movements"; and Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology

pp.65-76.

22. Paul Sears,

Deserts on the March

p. 162.

23. Ibid.

p. 177.

24. Ibid.

p. 142.

25. A painting of Commoner appeared on the cover of the February

2, 1970, issue of

Time

veil. 95), against a background divided

between environmental darkness (a landscape of industrial pol

. lution) and light (a green, pleasant countryside).

In the

issue pub

lisher Henry Luce described Commoner as the "leader of a tiny

band of once sheltered scientis ts who have suddenly risen to prom

inence and sometimes sound like new Ieremiahs." See also

the

accompanying article, "Fighting to Save the Earth from Man,"

pp.56-63.

26. LaMont Cole,

The

Impending Emergence of Ecological

464

Notes

Thought ," p. 30; G. Clifford Evans,

A

Sack of Uncut Diamonds,

p. 37; H. N. Southern, "Ecology at

the

Crossroads," p. 1.

27. Robert 1. Burgess, "United States," in

Handbook of Contem-

porary Developments in World Ecology

ed. Edward J. Konnondy

and J. Frank McConnick, pp. 69-70.

28. This insis tence on the reality of holism, mutual ism, and the

common good in nature appears strikingly throughout Eugene P.

Odum's introductory essay for

Ecosystem Theory and Applica-

tion

ed. Nicholas Polunin, pp. 1-1 L

29. Shelford wanted the society to acquire and protect undisturbed

natural communities, but, blocked by hostile eastern members,

he was forced to go outside the society to establish

the

Ecologists'

Union, which later evolved into the Nature Conservancy, a private

land-acquisition organization

that

would become phenomenally

successful. Interestingly, the name chosen was the same as Brit

ain's Nature Conservancy, a government agency established by

the Labor administration in 1947, lithe

most

significant mil estone

in British ecology," according to Andrew Duff and Philip Lowe

("Great Britain," in Konnondy and McConnick,

Handbook

p.

145).

In Britain, it became

the

government's responsibility to

preserve natural areas; while in

the

United States, it became a

program privately

run

by ecologists and philanthropist s.

30. Eugene P. Odum, The Emergence of Ecology as a New Integra

tive Discipline," p. 1290.

31. On

the

relations of

the

Odums to atomic research, see Joel B.

Hagen,

An Entangled Bank

chap. 6.

32. Eugene P. Odum,

Fundamentals of Ecology

p. 8.

33. See, for example, the classic anticipation of modem ecology,

Stephen Forbes'

The

Lake as a Microcosm," first published in

the

Bulletin of the Peoria [Illinois] Scientific Association 1887).

34. Eugene P. Odum,

The

Strategy of Ecosystem Development,"

p.266.

35. The term "homeostasis" came from Walter Cannon,

The Wis-

dom of the Body

rev. ed. (New York, 1939).

The tenn

did

not

imply something

set

and immobile. t means a condition which

may vary, but which is relatively constant (p.

241.

Odum's adop

tion of it indicates

that

he tended to see

the

ecosystem as a super

organism, comparable

with the human

body.

36. The terms "K-selection" and "r-selection" came from Robert

MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson, The Theory of Island Bio-

geography. .

37. Odum,

Fundamentals of Ecology

pp. 271-72.

38. Odum, "Strategy of Ecosystem Development," p. 266.

Notes

465

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