Humanizing the Earth

In recent years, the annual Christmas-week meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science has been as much an occasion for acrimony and gloom as for surveys of scientific progress. The proceedings have been repeatedly--and often mindlessly--disrupted by young radicals. They have also been marked by one pessimistic report after another on man's despoliation of his home planet. Last week in Washington, D.C., at the A.A.A.S.'S 139th meeting, scientists were again subjected to dissent and despair, but this time there was also welcome relief in the form of an eloquent defense of prudent technological growth.

The defender was Rene Dubos, distinguished Rockefeller University microbiologist, elder statesman of science and author (A God Within, So Human an Animal). In a major address entitled "Humanizing the Earth," Dubos, 71, disputed one of the fashionable credos of contemporary environmentalists: that any human interference with nature is in itself undesirable. In other words, Dubos flatly disagreed with Barry Commoner's so-called fourth law of ecology: "Nature knows best." On the contrary, Dubos insisted, nature does not always know best. It is, in fact, often "shortsighted." To prove his point, he cited not only such major natural calamities as droughts, hurricanes and earthquakes, but also the periodic deaths of large populations of animals like lemmings, muskrats and rabbits. Said Dubos: "Only the most starry-eyed Panglossian optimist could claim that nature knows best how to achieve population control."

Equilibrium. A less dramatic but equally pertinent example of nature's shortcomings is its inability to recycle all the wastes it creates. One instance of such a breakdown of "ecological equilibrium" is the accumulation of tons of guano (bird excrement) along the coast of Peru. Indeed, he noted, it is only when man collects the guano for fertilizer that the nitrogen-and phosphate-rich material is eventually returned to the "biological cycle in the form of plant nutrient." Guano is not the only example of nature's garbage. Peat, coal and even oil are all organic materials that have undergone only partial decomposition. Paradoxically, Dubos added, when man burns these fuels (and pollutes the atmosphere) he also helps complete nature's unfinished cycle, "because he thereby makes the carbon and minerals of these fuels once more available for plant growth."

Nature should also be modified in other ways, Dubos believes. "Many richnesses of nature are brought to light only in regions that have been humanized"--that is, transformed by human toil into agricultural lands, gardens and parks. But Dubos warned that for every pound of food produced by these areas there is an enormous expenditure of energy--to make and drive the farmer's tractors, to irrigate the land, to manufacture fertilizers and pesticides. Thus, he took issue with another ecological dogma--that expansion of energy production should be curtailed. The continued well-being of agriculture, he said, is "intimately bound to the development of new sources of energy, as are all other aspects of human life."

Despite such iconoclasm, Dubos is in fact an advocate of cautious ecological management, and is alarmed by man's mountains of garbage. Technological societies, like the primitive societies that preceded them, he says, have been notoriously careless of their wastes. Still, he doubts that the ways of nature offer a solution to the solid-waste disposal problem. "It requires new technological methods and changes in the innate (natural) behavior of man."

Dubos is also worried about the further destruction of the wilderness. "The thunderous silence of deep canyons, the solitude of high mountains, the luminosity of deserts," he said, keeps man in "resonance with cosmic events." But these qualities can be preserved even while man alters nature because "the interplay between man and nature has commonly taken the form of a true symbiosis--namely, a biological relationship that is beneficial to both."

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