to destruction. To understand this calamity, we need to begin with a close look at the nature of the environment itself. Most of us find this a difficult thing to do, for there is a kind of ambiguity in our relation to the environment. Biologically, human beings participate in the environmental system as subsidiary parts of the whole. Yet, human society is designed to exploit the environment as a whole, to produce wealth. The paradoxical role we play in the natural environment—at once participant and exploiter—distorts our perception of it.
Among primitive people, a person is seen as a dependent part of nature, a frail reed in a harsh world governed by natural laws that must be obeyed if he is to survive. Pressed by this need, primitive peoples can achieve a remarkable knowledge of their environment. The African Bushman[162] lives in one of the most stringent habitats on earth; food and water are scarce, and the weather is extreme. The Bushman survives because he has an incredibly intimate understanding of this environment. A Bushman can, for example, return after many months and miles of travel to find a single underground tuber, noted in his previous wanderings, when he needs it for his water supply in the dry season.
We who call ourselves advanced seem to have escaped from this kind of dependence on the environment. The Bushman must squeeze water from a searched-out tuber; we get ours by the turn of a tap. Instead of trackless terrain, we have the grid of city streets. Instead of seeking the sun's heat when we need it, or shunning it when it is too strong, we warm and cool ourselves with man-made machines. All this leads us to believe that we have made our own environment and no longer depend on the one provided by nature. In the eager search for the benefits of modern science and technology we have become enticed into a nearly fatal illusion: that through our machines we have at last escaped from dependence on the natural environment.
A good place to experience this illusion is a jet airplane. Safely seated on a plastic cushion, carried in a winged aluminum tube, streaking miles above the earth, through air nearly thin enough to boil the blood, at a speed that seems to make the sun stand still, it is easy to believe that we have conquered nature and have escaped from the ancient bondage to air, water, and soil.
But the illusion is easily shattered, for like the people it carries, the airplane is 5 itself a creature of the earth's 'environment'. Its engines burn fuel and oxygen produced by the earth's green plants. Traced a few steps back, every part of the craft is equally dependent on the environment. The steel came from smelters fed with coal, water, and oxygen—all natuce's products. The aluminum was refined from ore using electricity, again produced by combustion of fuel and oxygen or generated by falling water. For every pound of plastic in the plane's interior, we must reckon
that some amount of coal was needed to produce the power used to manufacture it. For every manufactured part, gallons of pure water were used. Without the earth's natural environmental constituents—oxygen, water, fuel—the airplane, like man, could not exist.
The environment makes up a huge, enormously complex living machine that forms a thin dynamic layer on the earth's surface, and every human activity depends on the integrity and the proper functioning of this machine. Without the photosyn- thetic activity of green plants, there would be no oxygen for our engines, smelters, and furnaces, let alone support for human and animal life. Without the action of the plants, animals, and microorganisms that live in them, we could have no pure water in our lakes and rivers. Without the biological processes that have gone on in the soil for thousands of years, we would have neither food crops, oil, nor coal. This machine is our biological capital, the basic apparatus on which our total productivity depends. If we destroy it, our most advanced technology will become useless and any economic and political system that depends on it will founder. The environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe. . . .
In broad outline, these are the environmental cycles which govern the behavior of the three great global systems: the air, the water, and the soil. Within each of them live many thousands of different species of living things. Each species is suited to its particular environmental niche, and each, through its life processes, affects the physical and chemical properties of its immediate environment.
Each living species is also linked to many others. These links are bewildering in their variety and marvelous in their intricate detail. An animal, such as a deer may depend on plants for food; the plants depend on the action of soil bacteria for their nutrients; the bacteria in turn live on the organic wastes dropped by the animal on the soil. At the same time, the deer is food for the mountain lion. Insects may live on the juices of plants or gather pollen from their flowers. Other insects suck blood from animals. Bacteria may live on the internal tissues of animals and plants. Fungi degrade the bodies of dead plants and animals. All this, many times multiplied and organized species by species in intricate, precise relationships, makes up the vast network of life on the earth.
The science that studies these relationships and the processes linking each living thing to the physical and chemical environment is ecology. It is the science of planetary housekeeping. For the environment is, so to speak, the house created on the earth by living things for living things. It is a young science and much of what it teaches has been learned from only small segments of the whole network of life on the earth. Ecology has not yet explicitly developed the kind of cohesive, simplifying generalizations exemplified by, say, the laws of physics. Nevertheless there are a number of generalizations that are already evident in what we now know about the ecosphere and that can be organized into a kind of informal set of "laws of ecology." These are described in what follows.
The First Law of Ecology: Everything Is Connected to Everything Else
Some of the evidence that leads to this generalization has already been discussed. It 10 reflects the existence of the elaborate network of interconnections in the ecosphere: among different living organisms, and between populations, species, and individual organisms and their physicochemical surroundings.
The single fact that an ecosystem consists of multiple interconnected parts, which act on one another, has some surprising consequences. Our ability to picture the behavior of such systems has been helped considerably by the development, even more recent than ecology, of the science of cybernetics. We owe the basic concept, and the word itself, to the inventive mind of the late Norbert Wiener.[163]
The word "cybernetics" derives from the Greek word for helmsman; it is concerned with cycles of events that steer, or govern, the behavior of a system. The helmsman is part of a system that also includes the compass, the rudder, and the ship. If the ship veers off the chosen compass course, the change shows up in the movement of the compass needle. Observed and interpreted by the helmsman this event determines a subsequent one: the helmsman turns the rudder, which swings the ship back to its original course. When this happens, the compass needle returns to its original, on- course position and the cycle is complete. If the helmsman turns the rudder too far in response to a small deflection of the compass needle, the excess swing of the ship shows up in the compass—which signals the helmsman to correct his overreaction by an opposite movement. Thus the operation of this cycle stabilizes the course of the ship.
In quite a similar way, stabilizing cybernetic relations are built into an ecological cycle. Consider, for example, the fresh-water ecological cycle: fish—organic waste— bacteria of decay—inorganic products—algae—fish. Suppose that due to unusually warm summer weather there is a rapid growth of algae. This depletes the supply of inorganic nutrients so that two sectors of the cycle, algae and nutrients, are out of balance, but in opposite directions. The operation of the ecological cycle, like that of the ship, soon brings the situation back into balance. For the excess in algae increases the ease with which fish can feed on them; this reduces the algal population, increases fish waste production, and eventually leads to an increased level of nutrients when the waste decays. Thus, the levels of algae and nutrients tend to return to their original balanced position.