Man First ? Man Last ?

The Paradox of Human Ecology

Hugh H. Iltis

   The ubiquitous conservation speeches
and environmental panels of today are
dealing mainly with urgent problems of
population, pollution, and crowding. That
the priorities are given to these big-city,
strictly human, homocentric syndromes is
obvious- and understandable. People die
of pollution, people go crazy with crowd-
ing, people starve and lay waste the lands
through overpopulation.
   Hopefully, we may yet solve the pollu-
tion crisis; we can, I think, clean up our
polluted nests. But if, in cleaning up the
cities, we forsake the rest of life, if we,
in our human preoccupation, let all but
corn and cow slide into the abysmal
finality of irreversible extinction, our
species indeed will have committed eco-
logical suicide.
   However, there is no cause for opti-
mism in the broader environmental crisis,
for the specters of ecosystem collapse, of
catastrophic extinctions of most living
animal species and of a vast number of
plant species, are now on the horizon.
   According to Talbot (Bioscience, 15
March 1970), 3% of the world's mammals
became extinct in historic times, not count-
ing such prehistoric wonders as the Irish
Elk or the Mammoth, and most of them
during the past 50 years ! Today, 10% to
12% can be considered endangered,
extrapolating from the conservative 8% of
species and subspecies listed as periled in
the Red Data Book for Mammals of the
International Union for the Conservation
of Nature, and perhaps 130 of the 400
United States mammal taxa are believed
to be threatened with extinction. Birds are
fairing no better! S. Dillon Ripley of the
Smithsonian Institution recently estimated
that a majority of animal species will be
extinct by the year 2000! And Kenneth
Boulding suggests that, with the present
rate of human reproduction, in another
generation it may be economically
impossible to maintain any animals, ex-
cept domesticated ones, outside of zoos.
Butterfly and wild flower, mountain
lion and caribou, blue whale and pelican,

coral reef and prairie land- who shall
speak for you ? My grandchild may need
to know you, to see and smell you, to hear
and feel you, to be alive- bright and
happy!
   Yet among all the many programs of
the recent "Teach-ins" at the University
of Michigan and at Northwestern Univer-
sity and 1000 other campuses, few spoke
for the wild environment, for nature, for a
Morpho butterfly in a Peruvian valley, for
a timber wolf chasing caribou in Alaska.
    This lack of concern is understandable,
because man now occupies every bit of
the earth and like a dictator, controls, or
thinks he could control, if he wished,
every living thing. As some see it, except
for a few primitive tribes, "Man has . . .
broken contact almost entirely with the
ecological universe that existed before his
culture developed. He no longer occupies
ecological niches; he makes them." *
    But have our genes ceased to need the
environment that shaped them? If we
destroy ecosystems and species with aban-
don- ecosystems to which we are adapted,
species whose values we do not yet know,
and cannot predict- we surely do it at our
own peril.
      Thus, the lack of focus on the natural
environment, on the wild animals and
plants, on the woods and streams, is
frightening.
      Who defends wilderness, the natural,
unspoiled environment? Who defends
the environment in which we evolved,
and which we still need in all its purity?
Who, except for a vociferous but ineffec-
tive minority?
      The ultimate question one has to ask
is this: Shall man come first, always first,
at the expense of other life? And is this
really first? In the short run, this may be
expedient; in the long run, impossible.
     Not until man places man second, or,
to be more precise, not until man accepts
his dependency on nature and puts him-
self in place as part of it, not until then
does man put man first! This is the great
paradox of human ecology. Not until

man sees the light and submits gracefully

and moderates the homocentric part of himself;
not until man accepts the primacy of the beauty
the diversity, and integrity of nature and limits
his domination and his numbers, placing equally
great value on the preservation of the environ-
ment and on his own life, is there hope
that man will survive.

      If we are to usher in an Age of Ecologic
Reason, we must accept the certainty of a radical
economic and political restructuring as well as
ethical and cultural restructuring of society
No more expanding populations. No new
unnecessary dams. No new destructive sub-
divisions. We must stop and limit ourselves now.

    Let the archaic power structures of the
technologically intoxicated cultures of the USA,
USSR, Japan, and others, listen and listen well to
the winds of change:

     The earth and the web of life come first,
    man comes second;
      profits and "progress" come last.

    Man now is responsible for every wolf,
as well as for every child, for prairie and ocean
as well as for every field.

      Henceforth the laws to govern man must be
laws of ecology, not the laws of a self-
destructive laissez-faire economics. And what
the laws of ecology say is that we, we fancy
apes, are forever related to, forever responsible
for this clean air, for this green, flower-decked,
and fragile earth.

      Indeed, what ecology teaches us, what it
implores us to learn, is that all things, living
and dead, including man, are interrelated
within the web of life. This must be the
foundation of our new ethics.

     If you love your children, if you wish them
to be happy, love your earth with tender care
and pass it on to them diverse and beautiful,
so that they, 10,000 years hence, may live in a
universe still diverse and beautiful, and find
joy and wonder in being alive.

The author is with the botany department of the University of * G.L. Stebbins, Saturday Review, March 1970. BioScience Vol. 20 No. 14
Wisconsin, Madison. July 15, 1970