conservation, contraception and catholicism

A recent essay "Knowledge and the Future of Man," published by the
Catholic St. Louis University of St. Louis, Missouri, sets forth an optimis-
tic theme common to much of modern technological thinking:
"Man's perennial war of survival against the destructive forces of
nature is coming to an end in our day. And we are justifiably proud that
man is the victor . . . Famine and ignorance can now be safely controlled
by man's prudent use of his knowledge."
Though man's victory over nature is indeed nearly complete, there
is some doubt that it deserves much celebration. With much of nature
vanquished, I am not very optimistic whether man himself has much of
a future. For man's victory over nature, so absolute, so unconditional,
is in many ways a bitter defeat for himself: the defeat of his own environ-
ment. It is the only one man can ever have or use, the only one, in fact,
to which he is adapted. In destroying the very thing he loves, the very
environment he must have, man's victories over nature are hollow, and
in the long run may well be lethal.
In all honesty, I should not have accepted this invitation, old-fashioned
taxonomist and plant geographer that I am, for no field in biology is
more ancient and in some ways more archaic. Much like Linnaeus some
200 years ago, we still go out on collecting expeditions, be it to the Ozarks
or to Peru, to gather pressed specimens and moss. We become excited
when we find an unplowed prairie, or a flower that is beautiful, or one
that is rare. It is in our blood, this love affair with nature. Even the
most incredible achievement of mid-20^th century biology, the unraveling
of the genetic code, "The Double Helix," announced by Watson and
Crick in 1953, has barely affected us naturalists, or our ways. We are
still members of that ancient army of nature lovers, far in the rear of
"The Frontiers of Biology."

¹Based on an invitation lecture presented at the symposium "Frontiers of Modern
Biology," Sesquicentennial Celebration of St. Louis University, St. Louis, Missouri, on
December 12, 1968, and on a lecture at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British
Columbia in June 1970.

    However, in this tranquil "hinterland," we field biologists have per-
haps more time and chance to reflect on man's social responsibility
towards the environment. Often we see the most gigantic and urgent
problems reflected in humble ways: our flowers are getting
rarer, our prairies are all plowed. Instead, aluminum beer cans and corn
fields have inherited the good earth. While man stands ankle deep in
garbage, aiming spaceships at the moon, the naturalist sees the broken
bits and pieces of the ancient human environment and wonders how to
pick them up.
    The scientific frontier, with all its intellectual excitement, with all its
brilliant promise, seems almost irrelevant to these, the most pressing
questions that have ever had to be asked: How is man to be a man in a
denatured city or in a polluted country? How is his natural environment
to be protected from the double-edged , often misapplied blessings of a
relentless and blindly profit-seeking technology?
    These ecological questions affect all mankind, scientist and citizen,
of whatever creed, race or nationality. They were clearly defined in
1962 by Rachel Carson, who, in Silent Spring, "first forced biologists to
institute a policy of total ecological accounting," as Garrett Hardin has
so well put it. They are the most profound ethical problems of our time.
And they constitute an unexamined "frontier of biology" with monu-
mental human implications, in the long run as important to man's
future as any discovery of molecular biology.
     Now as a rather pessimistic optimist, I wish to discuss the following
Problems:

I. Man's Origins, Adaptations and Genetic Dependence on Nature.
Whether we like it or not, we are but a thin slice of evolution above
the apes (and not, as some of us may wish, but a thin slice of baloney
beneath the angels). In all our basic characteristics we are great apes,
intellectualized, clothed and culturally toilet-trained to be sure, but still
great apes. We are genetically adapted, not to the crowded cities in which
we have lived but a few generations, not to St. Louis, nor New York, but
to the African savannas, to the tribal hunting life of the veldt, to the
struggle for food and against predators, such as other bands of Homo
sapiens.

    In common with all living things, man is highly adapted to his natural
environment. George Gaylord Simpson has said that any monkey with-
out a realistic perception of the tree branch he jumped for was soon a
dead monkey and not one of our ancestors. Any one of our potential
grandparents 500,000 years ago, who did not hear a hungry tiger, was
eaten and didn't enter our gene pool. Thus, any one of our ancestors
who was not well-adapted to the natural environment did not succeed.
    We are the result of natural selection, a process which has acted on
man as "man" for some two million years, on man's primate character-
istics for some 40 million years, on man's mammalian attributes for some
80 million years, and on living things at the cellular level for four billion
years! But "natural selection" by a crowded or polluted environment
acting on civilized urban citizens has been operative only a few thousand
years, a few hundred generations at most, and on big-city dwellers for
two hundred years or ten generations at most- not nearly long enough
to have had any profound genetic effects. So inside of us we are still
pretty wild, untamed and untamable, as wars and human relationships
show so well.
    Genetic Adaptation Versus Cultural Adaptation. - Genetic adaptations
are the inherited, intrinsic attributes of our cells; we cannot do without
them, they are us. Each man is, in fact, nothing but a great big bundle
of genetic adaptations. We cannot change them, we cannot really effect-
ively suppress them, except through many hundreds of generations of
natural selection.
    Cultural adaptation is another thing. It is a cultural or personal
adjustment, at a given time in history, in a particular culture, to changes
in the environment, both physical and social.
    A story told about Winston Churchill illustrates these tow types of
adaptations well. A lady member of Parliament looked furiously at a
slightly intoxicated Churchill and said, "You, sir, are drunk." "And
you, madam, are ugly," he replied, "but tomorrow I shall be sober."
     Being ugly is probably genetic; being drunk is cultural! Our genes,
like Churchill's lady, have to be accepted. We cannot change our genes.
We cannot genetically adapt to pollution, crowding, or a dull denatured
environment. But while we cannot change our genes, we can relatively
easily adjust our culture or change our customs to fit new conditions.
We do not have to get drunk. We do not have to destroy the environment.
We do not have to over-populate the earth. There are choices which we
can make, but whether we make them is, of course, up to us. It is impor-
tant to remember that only in the context of this cultural flexibility is
there any real hope for a sensible future for man. Reliance on possible

of nature. That is why he has to follow the same laws as dogs, cats, and
rats - though temporarily, with the help of science, he has been able to
partially escape this fate: he has death control, birth control, near ab-
solute control - or so he likes to think.
    Homocentricity. - The man-centered approach of much of science and
western religions is a most powerful force that prevents us from knowing
more about ourselves. It limits the proper study of mankind to man-
as if he evolved in a vacuum, an orphan without an environmental back-
ground, a literal child of Genesis, made de novo out of clay.
     Darwin dropped his evolutionary bombshell a full 110 years ago, de-
throning man; and today no one seriously questions his thesis. We accept
it for all living things. Nevertheless, we accept the animal origins of man
only in an apologetic, reluctant way. We don't like to think of ourselves
as animals.
    The broad, nearly all inclusive significance of human evolution and
adaptation has still not had its full impact on modern human society,
nor on the social sciences or the humanities. We may admit our animal
origins, yet we are not really happy with the idea. We are much like
the neurotic who says "two plus two is four, but I don't like it."
    The one major exception is in medicine. In our hospitals we use rats
and dogs as experimental substitutes for humans. Here, at the crucial
level of life and death, we admit that beasts and men are, in fact, physio-
logically alike and thus follow the same laws.
    Why then, in discussing pollution or city crowding or overpopulation,
do we say "man is the exception, man does not need the natural environ-
ment, he does not need to follow the same rules as animals."?
    Obviously, there is need for intellectual consistency. If we accept the
use of rats in hospitals to discover medical laws for humans, we must
likewise accept the applicability of animal population laws to man.
There cannot be a population ecology universally applicable to all ani-
mals and a human population ecology applicable only to man. Just as
the Church learned long ago to face the fact that there cannot be the-
ological evolution as distinct from Darwinian Evolution, so today we
must question whether a population policy based on theological grounds
should long persist.
    This inconsistent homocentric trap is by no means restricted to the
Church. In the planning of cities, in modern agriculture, in the delibera-
tions of most economists, sociologists and anthropologists, human civiliza-
tion is still blindly and stubbornly homocentric in near-lunatic ways.
    The rejection by many scientists of frequent contact with nature as
a basic human need is but one manifestation of this myopic homocentric-
ity. What they reject, in fact, are most of the basic human adaptations

out of which intrinsic human behavior is woven. This rejection occurs commonly
at the academic, political and theological level. Yet, in our private be-
havior we continually try to satisfy our adaptational needs for nature
in a thousand subtle instinctive ways: swimming pools and gardens,
pets and house plants, humidified air at 80 F., pictures on the walls,
vacations in the country, plastic flowers in bank lobbies, driving or hiking
through the country side - all substitutes to make up for the lost wild
environment that once was our home, for the savanna in which we once
were, and still are, comfortable.
    And when civilization becomes too much for us, when there are pro-
fessional, social or economic pressures beyond what any man should
have to bear, we get drunk or take LSD, buy a fur coat or have nervous
breakdowns, get an ulcer or file for divorce, revolting in all physio-
logical innocence or emotional desperation against the cultural strait
jacket imposed on the unrelenting demands of our genetic code.
    It is only during the last ten or twenty years, and a full 100 years after
Darwin and 50 years after Freud, that a growing number of enlightened
Scientists and authors have reacted against this homocentricity. Lorenz,
Tinbergen, and Harlow, Montagu, Dubos, and Dobzhansky, Ardrey's
Territorial Imperative, Morris' The Naked Ape, Hall's The Hidden
Dimension, and Storr's Human Aggression. Finally! Most of these discuss
human aggression, human territoriality, human behavior, but in terms of
animal ethology, animal ecology, animal evolution.
    Yet answers to other and more crucial questions are very slow in
coming. Many of these questions are not even being asked. We cannot
adequately provide for man's future until they are asked and answered:
    As a baby, how much cuddling do we need? How much touching and stroking?
How much imprinting? How much nursing at the breast? In short, how much love,
to grow into happy, healthy adults?
    As an adolescent, how much excitement and diversity? How much adversity and
adventure? How much chance to serve society - as young men once serve their tribe
in the harsh realities of the African plains?
    As an adult how much territory and of what kind? How much aggression, and against
whom or what? How much success? How much failure?
     How much of "nature" does man need? How much green and quiet? How much
art, music, and rhythm? How much color and the patterned mosaic of diversity we
call beauty?
     What genetic foundations, what inner needs, for the greatest of human experiences,
for the profoundest of emotions, many of which, tied not to the cities but to the
rapidly dwelling out-of-doors, are becoming more and more elusive?
    What happens if all these or other needs are consistently withheld? What will be
the effect on the modern female, for example, denied as she soon will be, the satis-
factions of more than two pregnancies?
    Who knows? And for many of these questions, who cares? Indeed,
man is unknown! There is so much we don't know, so much we do not

want to know, it seems, and are, in fact, not even studying. We seem
to worry about the thwarting of intrinsic needs only when the effects
are visibly lethal, when a corpse becomes a statistic. We talk about
human happiness as if one could buy it at the 5-and-10 cent store, when its
foundations are much too deep for words, foundations often rooted in
our intrinsic, subtle need for nature.
The answers to such questions can become the foundations of a New
Conservation, of a biologically sophisticated mechanism for rationally
maintaining man as an animal in his evolutionary environment, and for
preserving a viable environment to which all men have a most funda-
mental and inalienable right.

II. Environmental Vandalism
    A second factor prevents us more and more from better understanding
ourselves. And that is the continuously increasing destruction of nature.
Soon we will not be able to study man or his ape relatives in their original
evolutionary habitats. The settings will be gone forever, and so will the
apes. And caged animals in zoos will not do. Denatured man in de-
natured cities will tell us little about how he came to be what he is. With
his egotism and extravagance, man and his environment - unknown and
misunderstood - will go down together.
    Let us find a clue to this environmental vandalism and look at the
American environment of 150 years ago, to 1818, the year St. Louis
University was founded. The Missouri Gazette of Nov. 13, 1818 reports
that a steamboat, the Western Engineer, was being built in Pittsburg
to carry a U. S. military expedition up the Missouri River. At its source,
. . . "It is ascertained that there is a passage through the Rocky Moun-
tains, and at the distance of about five miles after you pass the moun-
tains, a branch of the Columbia River commences running to the Pacific
Ocean. It is intended to take the steamboat to pieces, and rebuild her
on this river. The expedition is to traverse the continent by water . . . "
    How wild was the imagination then and so much of this land, how
exciting its unknown flora and fauna!
    In 1818 also, Thomas Nuttall published in Philadelphia The Genera
Of North American Plants in two tiny volumes. He listed all the then
known North American plants, 834 genera and only about 2200 species,
about as many as are now known today from Missouri alone. He talked
of corn cultivated by the "aborigines of the Upper Mandan" and de-
scribed for the first time many of the endemic plants which modern St.
Louisians might yet find on cherry slopes in the Ozarks. And Nuttall,
like his contemporaries, marveled "at the wonderful Harmony of
Nature . . . "

    There were vast herds of buffalo, hunted by bands of Indians. There
were passenger pigeons, in flocks of tens of millions which clouded the
skies for hours, and Eskimo curlews, fearless delicate birds, which flew
in the spring over the prairies and plains on their way from wintering
in the Argentines to their crowberried nesting grounds in Labrador.
Today, 150 years later, we have drastically changed the face of the Ameri-
can earth. There are no more Eskimo curlews in Missouri, no more
passenger pigeons; they are both extinct species, and a whole world has
died with them. The few buffaloes left have become semi-domesticated,
semi-extinct curiosities, and the Mandan Indians, which hunted them,
have been butchered into civilization.
     1968 is indeed not the same as 1818! Illinois is now all corn, sourthern
Wisconsin all cow! The prairie, which used to stretch from Indiana to
the Rockies, except for a few acres, is today no more. Hundreds of its
thousand species are on the verge of extinction, victims of cow and plow,
DDT and 2,4D. The surviving bits and pieces, along railroads and
barbed wire fences may well be doomed as well, fragmented as they are
into minute populations with no genetic future. "What a thousand
acres of Silphium looked like when they tickled the bellies of the buffalo
is a question never again to be answered and perhaps not even asked"
(Aldo Leopold). Neither corn field nor cow pasture will tell us much
of prairie history, nor of the genesis of its fertility. We are now richer by
far, but in a way also much poorer. I don't think it is necessary here
to list all the many species of plants and animals, and biotic communities,
which exist no more. But the public should be made aware that there
are tens of thousands of species of plants and animals which now, though
still alive, are on the verge of extinction, species which could and should
be saved from extinction, an event always irrevocable, irreversible, final.
     The loss of the whooping crane or the ivory-billed woodpecker is, to
some, of small concern. After all, though they are beautiful, they are
ecologically insignificant. We can't save them all! Some have to die.
But there are others whose extermination shall long be regretted. Florida
alligators make pocketbooks, green sea turtles, soup, leopards, fur coats
for parasitic ladies, and blue whales, the most efficient plankton har-
vesters nature ever invented, oil. All of these creatures are not only use-
ful, but are irreplaceable knots in the web of life. All will be dead in
this generation, dead and extinct through the avarice and stupidity of
man.
     And so will the fish hawks, peregrine falcons and the soaring bald
eagles, all extinct or nearly so in the Eastern United States. The death
of the birds of prey is a serious matter in the household of nature- who
will eat the rabbits and the mice? Yet, due to a technological accident,

a bad joke, these birds are innocent secondary victims of that chemical
Pandora's box, DDT. For we poison the fields to raise more food, and
poison the elms to keep the shade, and so put DDT into the air and
waters. It travels from shrimp to fish, from fish to eagle; and in the
eagle it induces enzymes that help activate calcium which is then ex-
creted; thus egg shells of eagles are now too thin and break in the nest.
And scrambled eggs will not hatch eagles! DDT affects fish and fowl,
butterfly and bee, and perhaps even the nervous and reproductive systems
of mammals, including man. How long will we have to wait before DDT
and all the chlorinated hydrocarbons are outlawed? How long? When
man himself becomes visibly sick?
    The Fate of the Tropics. - In the fragile ecosystems of the tropics, bi-
ologists can now witness the most magnificent diversity of plants and
animals smashed into extinction by progress, profit and increasing pounds
of humanity per acre. Now that the last virgin stands of redwoods and
Douglas firs are nearly all cut, the lumber companies are getting ready
for the rape of the Amazon, and its 16,000 species of trees. Here the tropical
rainforest, the richest and most complex biotic community in the world,
is falling prey to the axes of poor squatters and chain saws of the
lumbermen, as well as to the bulldozers of greedy exploiters and well-
meaning planners. In 50 years, the tropical forests will be no more, and
neither will its animals, its primitive human inhabitants, nor their
interesting cultures. In darkest Africa, Watusi cattle and the world's zoo
keepers are both competing to insure the mountain gorilla's extinction
in a few years! Sad, of course, but "so what!" many of you will say. Can
gorillas, should gorillas, stand in the way of civilization? Which are to
be considered more important, gorillas or people? Well, who indeed
knows? Perhaps the gorilla, for this untamed cousin of ours might yet
be a key to understanding of our very own being.
    One could go on for hours listing extinctions: the dams in the Ozarks
which kill endemic clams and fish, the fate of the Hawaiian fauna and
flora, the burnt-over, cut-over Guatemalan hillsides, the Blue Whale,
of which perhaps only 200 are left, the Tamarau, the Polar Bear, the
Vicuna, . . . but enough. Why all this extinction? Why this ecological
simplification all over the world? Are too many people in too little
space perhaps a contributing factor?
     Some statistics - In 1530, there were less than 500 million people in
the world! And it took the human species perhaps 2 million years from
its emergence out of the African landscape to reach that point. By 1830,
there were 1 billion people, a doubling time of 300 years, by 1930, 2
billion people, a doubling in 100 years! By 1972, there will be nearly
4 billion people, a doubling in only about 40 years. At the present rate

of 2% increase per year there will be over 8 billion people by the year
2000. Every minute of this hour 140 persons are added to the world's
population, every year 70 million more mouths have to be fed.
    There is little question that the world is getting crowded beyond
belief. Just look at New York or Los Angeles, Lima or Mexico City,
Calcutta or Hong Kong! Or Sao Paulo, in Brazil, which expects 20
million inhabitants by the year 2000, and had only 20,000 in 1818!
    It is this overpopulation, this having to provide for man's minimal
needs in the under-developed countries, coupled with a blindly ex-
ploitative and destructive, profit-seeking technology insisted on by the
overdeveloped countries, which is destroying our environment at an
unprecedented rate. It is unlimited reproduction and exploitation, in
a world with limited resources. It is the unholy alliance of medicine,
politics, religion, and sheer madness and greed which has given man
death control without birth control.
    In the long run, of course, this becomes an ecological impossibility.
The city slum, the eroded Mexican hillside, the polluted Mississippi,
and the extinction of all the many useful or beautiful mammals, birds
or plants - they are all multiple effects of the same basic cause - too
much environmental pressure by too many people !
    Reverence for Life or Reverence for Its Diversity. - Adlai Stevenson
once compared humanity to travelers on a frail and small spaceship called
earth. It is the only earth we have and ever shall have. We need to treat
it with reverence and love. Thus, many thoughtful people use "Revernce
for Life," "Dignity of Man," or "Sanctity of the Human Being" as ulti-
mate standards to judge the value of nature; man dominates, nature looses.
    But herein lies a paradox. For in ecological terms, the greatest threat
to the dignity of the Human Being is shown by an uncontrolled human
population. Their tomorrow will be crowded with 40 billion people
(this is an optimistic Russian figure). There won't be much reverence
in that kind of life! What will be left to sustain the human spirit of
Homo post-sapiens?
    Clearly, we need not "Reverence for Life" as such, but "Reverence
For the Diversity of Life," a slim but crucial distinction. It is diversity
In animals and plants that gives harmony in nature, the diversity of
cultures, people, and cities that gives joy to living. It is this diversity
that makes life so fascinating, why travel gives so much pleasure. But,
what do animal and plant extinctions mean for the question of reverence
for the diversity of life? Once the gorilla is extinct, the wolf, or a rare
catfish, a prairie flower, a wild river, or the culture of the Eskimos,
nothing can ever bring them back to life. Insuring biotic diversity and

completeness is, in the long run, a much more farsighted ethic for man
than insuring his ever-increasing dominance and abundance. For the
human species today it is easy to make more humans. For the sake of
humanity, the survival of the gorilla may well be more important that
the survival of a million men.

III. The Ecological Responsibilities of Man
The prime concern of mankind from now until the end of human
time will be the conservation of the diverse environment, the only one to
which man is adapted, the only one in which he can live. How is he
to achieve this?
    In a brilliant essay, Lynn White discussed the "Historical roots of our
ecological crisis" - roots that go far back into early Christianity, if not
beyond. Today, he suggests, we need new religious concern for the
environment, an ecological morality or theology, integrating man with
his known evolutionary past.
    The trouble is that neither technology, science, nor western religion-
All faiths in their own way - consider nature sacred. By none is it con-
sistently revered, and all think of it only as it benefits man materially.
What stands, then, might a revitalized eco-religion take, a modernized,
environmentally-conscious Catholic Church in particular? The problem
is desperately urgent and we must face it now. It cannot wait until to-
morrow, for the plants and animals are dying, the concrete and pollution
are spreading, and alienated man is howling in his man-made wilderness.
     Pope Paul's Encyclical on Birth Control - A Theological Regression.
-The latest Papal encyclical on birth control are clearly tragic ecological
irresponsibilities. Viewed against the background of a net increase in
world population of 70 million per year, Pope Paul's recent pronounce-
ments are not only medieval and without scientific validity, but are
unethical from a personal or family viewpoint, and impossible from an
ecological viewpoint. They mislead the innocent and support those who
place their hopes in purely technological, rather than evolutionarily and
therefore biologically moral solutions to human ills, solutions diametric-
cally opposed to any religious ethic. They thwart, especially in Catholic
Latin America - a continent about to explode with overpopulation - and
the Philippines, those who wish to see our children inherit a meaningful,
livable, beautiful earth.
    The encyclicals will never persuade anyone, thinking Catholics or
non-Catholics alike, that the church can be a source of light, liberty and
love. For the predictable outcome of any increase in world population
is famine and war on a gigantic scale, and a decimation of biotic diver-
sity. Except for legally encouraged or enforced birth control there is no

way out of this mess - Mars or Jupiter included, or the much-touted
Agricultural Green Revolution which is, in the long run, a hoax!
     It is simply just a question of time, and sooner or later, civil laws
will, in fact, enforce what is now needed in the religious ethic. If we
act now we can yet build an ecologically responsible behavior into our
political and religious ethic, and escape the spectre of a "Brave New
World" and of cruel personal coercion. If we continue on our present
course, the dictatorship of population control will come and do it for
us. Then, children will be by permit of the community law only. A family
may at most be permitted no more than two children needed to re-
place their parents.
    The modern church, like many other organizations fulfilling public
needs, must redefine its role regarding population counseling, unless
it wishes to be guilty of the blindest irresponsibility. The church must
not remain, in part through archaic population doctrines, in part
through faith in technology, the official spokesman for the most materi-
alistic philosophies - the ever-expanding economy, the frantic exploita-
tion of non-renewable resources, the development of every wild corner
of the earth, and the damming of every river - all related to the exploding
population. Just as the days of the Monkey Trials in Tennessee are now
over, one may hope that the day is not far distant when priests will send
mothers and fathers with too many children to clinics for surgery, when
Catholic hospitals will prescribe birth control devices on request. Or
will we have to rely on the International Sterilization Act of 1984?
    The church must not, in its ecological blindness, remain insistent
to the very bitter end on its population policies, and help man push
the environment, and thus himself, towards utter destruction, to the
biological "Gotterdammerung" waiting around the corner.
     The New Ecological Morality. - Morality is as irrelevant in an over-
crowded technological slum or a completely denatured environment as
it is in a concentration camp, because the human mind, body and soul
cannot harmoniously function here as they were meant to by evolution.
The eco-morality, the eco-religious rebirth we must seek if we are to
survive, is not to be based on an acceptance of such impossible environ-
ments. Neither is it to be based on some blindly self-negating, masochistic
or romantic altruism, be it towards our fellow man or to the environ-
ment. Rather, it must be based on a vital and joyful life-affirmation,
which will meet the indispensable physiological and psychological needs
of humanity. It must be based on the clear knowledge that to be healthy
and happy, we must preserve this environment, this earth.
    It should then be clear by now that population control measures must
be rethought only within the context of a broad and all-inclusive ecologi-

cal morality. Birth control is, in itself, not an end. It is simply an indis-
pensable means to allow a life-giving morality, in the truest and most
human sense, to survive, to be possible. It is simply a means to save this
earth and its life-supporting environment.
    In this great task, all of us must unite. To do their part, the younger
and more progressive clergy and laymen, alike, might well disturb the
old entrenched Catholic oligarchy into rethinking their ecological re-
sponsibilities to this world. After all, on many very basic issues, the
church has had to modify its stand before, as it did with the heretical
teachings of a Copernicus, a Galileo or a Darwin. It is time for modifica-
tion again. It is time now for a responsible church to say, with Abraham
Lincoln, "The dogmas of the quiet past are insufficient to the present
struggle."
    Believers in a Divine Being and in the Creation can yet, if they must,
have religious answers consistent with ecological ethics. Why all the
flowers, birds, and beasts? Was not Adam put in charge of them? Does
this not imply, symbolically at least, a responsibility for their survival?
Were they not created to give pleasure, use and meaning to human life?
Was man not created to respond to their beauty by feeling pleasure? Is
it for us, by blind population philosophies, by errors of commission or
omission, to destroy all this awe-inspiring evolutionary splendor? Shall
we leave our children nothing but a dull biotic desert?
     Can we not reinterpret and rethink the scriptures and our old traditions
with new vision? Can we not find thoughts and passages other than
"Be fruitful and increase, fill the earth and subdue it." Without doing
damage to dogma, and with a new religious reverence for the diversity
of life, could we not subdue the earth with responsibility, could we not
populate it within reason?
     Surely, the Catholic Church must explicitly redefine, in a new Encycli-
cal on Human Dignity and Natural Philosophy, the place of man in
nature and the place of nature in man, and declare the population
policies of the past outdated. Nothing less will do. And in a new
Encyclical on Production, Profit and Technology bluntly reject the
ancient out-dated religious justifications for blindly expanding econo-
mies and exploitative imperialism, which, hand-in-hand with overpopula-
tion, are leaving our children a raped and tortured earth.
     Surely, what the world needs today is a faith built on the limitations
of man and of the earth and on the quality, not the quantity, of the
human experience, and a demography aimed towards an ultimate popula-
tion of perhaps one-half or one billion people, and no more. There
are no virtues in higher numbers, none whatever.
     Surely, what the world needs today is a clear legal codification of
environmental ethics, a solemn sanctification of ecological responsibilities,

to guide man to do his duty by his children and by his environment in
a scientifically sound, ecologically moral way.
We have, then, but two choices, a miserable world overpopulated and
headed for extinction - or a rich, balanced ecosystem with few people,
great natural diversity and beauty, and above all, human dignity in
biological diversity. Let the church rise to the occasion.

A Suggestion: The New Brothers and Sisters of Ecology
     Today holy orders of nuns and priests have fewer adherents - yet recuits
would come if they could respond to a real need. The need for havens
for alienated humans surely is great, perhaps now greater than ever, but
not great enough to overcome the inherent sterility of mechanical
contemplation. It seems to me, then, that A MEANINGFUL CATHOLIC CON-
TRIBUTION TO THE RESOLUTION OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS COULD WELL
BE THE TRAINING OF TEACHERS OF ECOLOGY.
     Let the Catholic Church explain THE WORKS OF GOD TO MAN. There
was a time, in the days of St. Francis of Assisi, when the church did have
this role. Let us, as Lynn White suggests, make this great man the
Patron Saint of Ecology. Why not Franciscan or Teilhard de Chardin
Orders, dedicated to teaching ecology, where young men and women
could study the marvelous interrelationships of nature on which we shall
have to depend for all time to come - and then go out and teach and teach
and teach - so that light and understanding can come to those who,
innocently dig a grave for life - be they poor squatters in the Amazon
who cut or burn down forests of endemic trees, trees whose names
are not even known, or be they businessmen or bishops, presidents or
Popes, who by their private acts or self-serving public pronouncements
help to destroy this beautiful earth?
    Whatever fate the unknown tomorrow brings, let us use the frontiers
of biology and religion in a CONSRUCTIVE way.
LET THE CATHOLIC CHURCH USE ITS LATIN AMERICAN LAND HOLDINGS OR
THOSE IN THE UNITED STATES FOR "PAX IN NATURA ET DEO" PARKS - to give
rest to the uneasy refugees of overcrowded cities, to teach them ecology,
so that they can go back to rebuild the cities closer to their genes' desires.
Let the Catholic Church rejuvenate itself into a religion meaningful
for the 20^th century, which can lead man along the path of ecological
righteousness to religious humility before the works of evolution, the
Great Composer man calls by many names. Let man learn to appreciate
and preserve that marvelous living symphony of which he is a part.