The American Biology Teacher, Vol. 34, No. 3, March, 1972

Shepherds Leading Sheep to Slaughter    (Parts I and II)
          The Biology Teacher and Man's
          Mad and Final War on Nature

                                                                      by Hugh H. Iltis

 
First part of a two-part article. The extensive
references, including those cited here, will appear
with the remaining text, in April. At that time, too,
the significance of the italic line in the title will be
more strongly apparent.


Walking the crowded streets of Chicago on the
first morning of the NABT convention, I picked one
of Mayor Daly's plastic flowers and wished for a
few real ones. I also wished for fewer people and
cars. After all, the topic of my address to the con-
vention, and one of the main concerns of NABT, as
it ought to be for all men, was the people - environ-
ment equation. And there is no better place in the
world to perceive the staggering imbalance so typi-
cal of modern civilization than downtown Chicago.
    I was reminded of a comment by Marston Bates
(1955), to this effect: Human population growth is
like cancer. The yearly annual increase is now about
________________________________________
This paper is adapted from the keynote ad-
dress to the annual convention of Biology Teachers, 14
October, 1971, in Chicago. Hugh H. Iltis is
professor of botany and director of the
herbarium, University of Wisconsin, Madison
53706. A 1948 graduate of the University of
Tennessee, he did graduate work at Wash-
ington University and the Missouri Botanical
Garden (M.A. 1950, Ph. D. 1952). He has taught at Wisconsin
since 1955. Iltis's field work has taken him to Costa Rica,
Mexico (maize studies), Hawaii, and Peru (potato studies).
His special interests are biogeography, evolution, and the
preservation of biotic communities. A devotee of back-
packing and camping, with a deep concern for the "optimum
human environment and human adaptations, especially as
they relate to children and the family," he has been active
in Nature Conservancy, the Sierra Club, the Wilderness So-
ciety, and other preservation groups.
70 million, or 6 million a month - the equivalent of
the population of Chicago. And whatever one may
think of Chicago, a new one every month seems a
little excessive.
     Excessive, too, is the general unawareness of the
significance of all the environmental turmoil: the
popular view that, on the one hand, man can some-
how adapt to pollution and crowding and, on the
other hand, that he can solve his environmental
problems solely by relying on technological advances.
    In a cartoon in Look magazine (Flagler, 1971) two
businessmen are walking down Fifth Avenue with
their attache cases; one is saying to the other: "The
way I look at it, there's a price tag on everything.
You want a higher standard of living, you settle for a
lower quality of life." The irony here  may not be lost
on you, but it seems to have been missed by many
economists and sociologists. Indeed, even Philip
Hauser, the eminent demographer at the University
of Chicago, seems to see nothing particularly incon-
gruous about giving up a biologically rich and hu-
manly decent environment for one with increased
urbanization and all that that implies - and using
almost the identical language of that cartoon to
do so ! He said, in an interview:

The romantic nostalgia that some town and country
planners have espoused is utter nonsense. Ferdinand
the Bull sitting under the trees and smelling the pretty
flowers just won't work in the modern world of the
present or the future. This could be accomplished only
at the expense of lower productivity and lower levels of
living. (Hess, 1971)


But the problem of man and nature cannot be so
cavalierly and sarcastically dismissed. Like so many



physicists, chemists, and sociologists, Hauser shows
an unfortunate misunderstanding of the nature of
human biologic conditions (cf. Etzioni, 1970). It is
this kind of misunderstanding that allows, for ex-
ample, the construction, in Chicago, of a nine-storey
high school building for 3,000 students - without any
windows. It is this kind of misunderstanding that
urges irrigation of the Sahara and destruction of the
Amazonian rain forest (Tobin, 1970). It is this kind
of misunderstanding that points up the modern prob-
lem of man's inescapable genetic needs, frustrated to
madness in the giant city, and of man's optimum
environment being destroyed before his very eyes
(Iltis, 1966, 1968; Iltis, Loucks, and Andrews, 1970).
    The French sociologist - theologian Jacques Ellul
put it well in his masterpiece, The Technological
Society (1954, p. 325) :

      The milieu in which man now lives is no longer his. He
       must adapt himself, as though the world were new,
       into a universe for which he was not created . . . . He
       was made to have contact with living things, and he
       lives in a world of stone.

A Special Responsibility
    Exacerbated by the population explosion, the tech-
nologic revolution has produced and inevitable and
unprecedented environmental crisis, which thrusts
the biology teacher, especially, into a position of
crucial responsibility and fateful power. Who among
you would have dreamed, not so many years ago,
when you were catching your first frog or picking
your first flower, that the very survival of beast and
flower, as well as of man and civilization as we know
it, would depend on the biology teachers the world
over ? For no chemist or sociologist, no senator or
president, can understand biology as well as you do
or is able to defend the living world as effectively.
     Look at it as one may, there is no technologic fix,
no political panacea, that will extricate us from the
environmental crisis - but your insights from biology,
together with the acceptance of evolution and ecology
by your students and by the population at large, just
possibly might.
     Indeed, only the biologists can lead a sick, con-
fused world back to health. Take just one example:
the training of medical doctors. Biologists are the
ones who will teach evolution and ecology to the
medical students, who are the very ones who will be
acting as human ecologists all over the world. Not
only that: your presentation will be the only one in
which these future M.D.s will ever hear of evolution,
of diversity - and of the long and tortuous winnowing and
sifting of natural selection, which produced man and
mouse alike. If medical students have a good under-
standing of evolution, they will become a potent force
for human good; if they lack it, they will continue to
prepare the world for disaster.
    (Allow me an aside. The moral obligation of biol-
ogy teachers is to teach biology, to teach of the fabric
of life. And more and more it becomes apparent that

every teacher has an obligation to spend a summer
at a field station to learn what to teach youngsters
about this fabric of life and to be able to answer the
searching questions of the young. If you don't un-
derstand why this is so crucial, then either quit - or
else go forth and learn field biology ! )

Politics and the Environment
     With all the concern for environmental teaching
in American Biology Teacher, two topics are covered
by thunderous silence; namely, politics and extinc-
tion. Concerning politics, two things must be obvious
to anyone who is sensitive to the environment:
   1. Continued development and economic growth
are one thing; preservation of the environment and
steady-state ecology are another. It should be quite
clear that, for the most part, preservation and devel-
opment are two mutually exclusive concepts. You
can't eat your cake and have it too; you cannot get
something for nothing. These are two cliches, to be
sure, but they represent the most fundamental of
ecologic laws. Prudence, therefore, would dictate that
choices today be immediately redirected toward long-
range aims: more outright preservation and strictest
restraint in using resources. This is what Earth Day
is all about. This is what ecologists and everyone
must expect from intelligent and responsible leaders.
    2. The present leadership of the United States
refuses to accept this or any other ecologic law. Lip
service notwithstanding, the political, financial, and
military power structure, including the present ad-
ministration, is primarily committed to those ex-
ploitative industrial interests that wish to make big
money at all costs, and not to those that wish to pro-
tect the environment and its ecosystems. Consider the
evidence:
    
     We are still at war - 80 billion dollars' worth a
          year - and not at peace.
     We are still waiting for the five-year birth-control
          program demanded of HEW by Congress, and
          we still do not have, nationwide, liberal abortion
          and birth-control laws.
     We are still dragging our feet on pollution, and the
         20 billion dollars a year it will take in each of
         the next five years merely to clean up past
         messes is not forthcoming.
     We are still, as a nation, not committed to the
         absolute necessity of recycling.
     We are still squandering resources as if they had
         no end, are destroying large and magnificent
         parts of the earth to get or grow them, and are
         encouraging and even bribing other nations,
         especially the underdeveloped, to copy our en-
         vironmental insanities.

     And the administration does not really care. It
shows no signs of earnestly committing itself to the
solution of the overwhelmingly serious ecologic and
social problems of today. In fact, the antienviron-
mental mood in the administration is becoming






stronger. It was most clearly reflected by the Presi-
dent himself in his appearance before the 5,000 mem-
bers of the Detroit Economic Club, on 23 September
1971. The industrialists there loved him, particularly
when he talked reverently about profits. They loved
him even more when he promised them, in brazen
sincerity, that "We are not going to allow the en-
vironment issue to be used in a demagogic way to
destroy the industrial system that made this great
country" (Nixon, 1971). No wonder they applauded
wildly! Free license to continue to exploit, to develop:
how nice for them! But how bad for us - and for them
and their families too, in the not-so-remote future.

Subverters of the Movement
     The President's comments are only too typical of
an insidiously innocent but dangerous tendency gain-
ing momentum: the current counterrevolution
against the environmental movement. The cynical
denigration of the ecologist, the continual bombard-
ment of the public by misleading advertisements in
magazines and newspapers, the deliberate circum-
vention of laws by managers and officials, the
naive cornucopic pronouncements of the technologic
bamboozlers such as Buckminster Fuller (1971) and
Constantinos Doxiadis, of many, often well-meaning,
scientific experts such as Philip Handler (1971) of
the National Academy, Alvin Weinberg (1970) of
AEC, Athelstan Spilhaus of AAAS, and Nobel laure-
ate Norman Borlaug, and of such agencies as
FAO (Tobin, 1971) - all these and, unfortunately,
many others have contributed towards a simplistic
assessment of the crisis. All these are pushing "prog-
ress," "growth," "food production," and the sweet
nonsense that we can have both unlimited develop-
ment and adequate preservation.    
     For how long can we afford to be this innocent?
What if this madness lures us out on the slender
limb of biotic simplicity from which there is no
retreat, but only the inevitable collapse of the eco-
system? For how long can we afford to listen to so
many biologically innocent "experts," whose ponti-
fications will cost us the extinction of biotic diversity?
What if the diversity of life continues to become less
and less and the options for sound ecomanagement
thus become fewer? What if, in fact, these experts
are all wrong?
     It is indeed no accident that "experts" tend to be
the butt of many a joke, and for good reason: they
are so wrong so often. The definitions alone (and they
are legion) of what an expert is are not only
humorous but are often very revealing. What is an
expert?
     He is a man from out-of-town with slides.
     He is a man whose ignorance is superbly organized.
     In Marshall McLuhan's definition, he is a man who
         does not make the slightest error on the road to
         the grand delusion.
     What if unlimited energy, unlimited wealth, un-
limited growth, unlimited development, and unlimited


human adaptability prove to be grand delusions,
which every ecologist knows they are? What then?
Indeed, there are only two things that are unlimited,
Einstein said: the universe and human stupidity.
     What then, if, as a society, we stumble and make
a grand mistake? What if Mr. Nixon is wrong? And
what if, in fact, the environment does come first and
the industrialist's profit second (Iltis, 1970a) ? What
if the only viable course left to this country is a
decrease in the GNP and an enforced limitation of
its economic growth?
     The Environmental Protection Agency is one of the
few federal organizations that tend to take exception
to the officially sanctioned policy of economic laissez-
faire. Its embattled administrators Russell Train, Wil-
liam Ruckelshaus, and Lee Talbot have attempted to
do a fine job, but more often than not they are being
sabotaged by the White House or the State Depart-
ment. Thus, in the present administration these men
are almost accidental anomalies; and where they
have succeeded it was because of public backing-
not because of the administration, but in spite of it.
This is to these men's great credit; their agency was
in part created as an administrative smoke screen for
business-as-usual exploitation.
     It is good also that we have the courts, where
citizens and organizations alike can sue, and are now
suing in ever-increasing numbers, as they attempt to
insure that both government and industry do the
environmentally right, the humanly moral, thing.
The decision of Judge J. Skelly Wright and his asso-
ciates in Calvert Cliff's Coordinating Committee, Inc.,
v. Atomic Energy Commission (Wright, 1971) shook
that blindly power-mad organization to its very foun-
dations by demanding that it behave responsibly
toward the environment.
     Yet, all in all, there is little to be optimistic about.
Therefore it is of paramount importance for biology
teachers to be able to explain to their students pre-
cisely why, in spite of efforts and laws to the con-
trary, the environment is continuing to deteriorate;
why we continue to permit short-term profit and
long-term disaster; and why solutions are not forth-
coming. The answer can be simply stated: the powers
that be are not very bright, either in their short-
sighted, essentially  selfish view of economic gain or
in their superficial attitude toward the environment.

Nixon's Men-at-Arms
     Other factors must be considered, by biologists and
citizens alike. What of the character of the men whom
we delegate to represent us in government? Biolo-
gists, who are supposed to know something of the
determinants of behavior, should be concerned when
they discover that Secretary of Commerce Maurice
Stans enjoys playing the part of a Great White
Hunter in Africa. He not only slaughters animals
belonging to species that are on the shadow line of
extinction but has himself photographed with his



dead quarry as well. Stans, speaking to business
leaders attending the Financial Executives Institute
held in Houston, Texas, suggested that we must not
act in the face of "ecological hysteria" and that en-
vironmental risks must be weighed against the na-
tional interest (Stans, 1971). The problem, of course,
is this: precisely what does he mean by national
interest? Does he mean the preservation of an ancient
assemblage of natural things, which gives joy and
meaning to life? Or, perhaps, does he mean the
preservation of laissez-faire and a suicidal plunge
into materialistic expansionism, which will end only
when the last iota of matter has been transformed by
economic man into money?
     Secretary of the Treasury John Connally is also a
great hunter. His African safari after he left the
Texas governorship was well covered in all the Texas
newspapers, complete with photographs of Connally
amid mountains of bleeding flesh. Is this sort of
behavior appropriate today? Should people wih en-
vironmentally destructive hang-ups run the economy
of this great country? We could barely put up with
this butchery in Teddy Roosevelt's day, when there
was much game and fewer people; today, to blast
away at sable antelopes or African leopards reflects
a moral callousness, an elegant corruptness, or, at
best, a blind foolishness that is not lost on our stu-
dents. To hunt, yes - satisfying, as it does, some very
basic and primeval human urges (Tiger, 1970); but
to hunt, with such a pathologically acquisitive drive,
the rare and vanishing members of this ancient fauna
indicates, in the Connally case, that we are being led
in the delicate field of international economics by a
man whose pattern of existence shows him to be
dangerously ignorant. The question, then, is: should
such men, who lack any environmental or social com-
mittment except to their own power, be our leaders?
    Small wonder, then, that our leaders in govern-
ment are still talking about putting "economic im-
pact" ahead of "ecologic impact." Says Stans (1971) :
"Isn't it time for someone to say 'Wait a minute?' "
He chides the "vocal" and "impatient" eco-alarmists
that jobs are at stake, that plants will be shut down
if we enforce the laws too rigidly. He says we need a
slowdown on the banning of DDT, of phosphate de-
tergents, of polluting automobile emmissions. He says
we need to encourage the building of new power
plants and off-shore oil-drilling. Would anyone who
knows Stans' propensities in Africa be surprised
at these and similar sentiments? And again, should
this kind of man have the power that he has?
     The one ray of hope in Nixon's cabinet was Walter
Hickel, a tough, outspoken, and honest man, who got
fired, ostensibly for writing a letter - a thoughtful,
courageous letter defending today's disenchanted col-
lege students. Hickel is a self-made Alaskan, who
grew in his job almost from the day he arrived in
Washington and who threatened to become one of the
best secretaries of the Interior and defenders of the
public trust since Stewart Udall and Harold Ickes.
That fact alone was intolerable to the President and,
especially, to the oil industry. Hickel had to go if
exploitation was to stay.
     I wish to apologize to Hickel. I fought his appoint-
ment bitterly, for he looked like a run-of-the-mill
environmental exploiter. But most of his actions as
Secretary of the Interior were courageous and re-
flected a deep concern for nature, a love for the land
and its people. When a man can say, as in the case of
the California condor controversy, "it was a choice
between rare birds and pumping oil, and I chose for
the birds" - that is quite something!
    
Alaskan Oil : Whose Is It ?
     Unfortunately, both Hickel and his successor,
Rogers Morton, support the Alaskan ol pipeline, a
project that is clearly an environmental and aesthetic
monstrosity. May I suggest to both of these men and
to the President, who are all so anxious to have the
oil come out of the ground and produce profits, that
there is a simple alternate solution to the Alaskan
oil problem - a solution that is both ecologically
sound and environmentally prudent. What clearly needs
to be done is to nationalize the Alaskan oilfields and
keep them locked up for 100 years. This action makes
sense for the following reasons:
   1. We do not need the oil now. But, given our
chemical (especially the plastic) industries and our
whole technologic civilization, so utterly de-
pendent on oil, in 100 years man will be deperately
oil-hungry and glad to have this rich field available.
The locking-up of these oil reserves is the best kind
of wisdom and foresight. It will insure energy and
chemical supplies for our grandchildren.
   2. The immediate pollution of the Arctic Ocean
and of the Alaskan ecosystem is certain to occur if
the pipeline is built now. In 100 years, however, we
might have the technology to remove the oil without
damage.
   3. The moratorium will prevent us from sending
the oil to Japan, for which most of Alaska's oil is in
fact slated. The denial of oil to the booming economy
of Japan might, in turn, slow down its insane yet
deliberate economic growth and avoid the collision
course with the United States on which Japan is in-
escapably set. We might thus help to prevent World
War III.
     It is time to defend ecologic right over financial
might. The erstwhile Secretary of the Interior has
written a most interesting book, Who Owns America?
(Hickel, 1971). The title impels me to ask: who owns
Alaska's Arctic oil? This oil is beneath publicly
owned land - a public resource in the public domain.
Why then should not the oil be under public owner-
ship and administration for public long-range benefit
and use? Surely the oil can wait, safe in the frozen
Alaskan ground. Nationalization - the creation of a
National Oil Resource Park, if you will - is the
answer that makes eminent ecologic sense.




                                                                                        

War on Nature
      Despite his misguided stand on Alaskan oil, Hickel
is a man who has shown great capacity to learn. I
wish him well. I hope that he will learn all the ecology
and biology that he must; for his is an important
voice, which  has given both students and biologists,
as well as the public, faith that even this government
might possibly work or might even change, given an
honest man. Abraham Lincoln was made of similar
rough stuff, and he became a great President.

     We will never get to the root of our environmental
crisis by picking up tin cans. Only by changing the
very institutions that have allowed our crisis to de-
velop, by placing in high government office men who
have an honest concern for ecology, is there hope for
plants and animals, and for us, to survive. Let us
quickly dismiss from positions of power those who do
not understand the ecologic limitations of the earth.
Let us replace them with people as environmentally
concerned as Ralph Nader, William Ruckelshaus, 
Gaylord Nelson, Walter Hickel, and Robert Pack-
wood. And let us, as individual biologists, do our ut-
most to make sure that such  men are elected to the
highest positions in government.
     Let the biology teacher become politically active.
Let him join with the Sierra Club, the Environmental
Defense Fund, the Wilderness Society, the National
Parks Association, and any other organization willing
to hire lawyers and fight the smoke screen of the
antienvironment campaigns.
     The National Association of Biology Teachers must
speak out,  too. It should hire representatives in
Washington - eco-lobbyist lawyers who would repre
sent its members' wishes (Iltis, 1969, 1970b) . The
issues are not only questions of politics or biology;
they are issues of simple human decency. The biology
teacher, more than any other professional, has the
answers to many of today's problems. You must not
remain silent.

         (To be concluded in the April issue)


The American Biology Teacher, Vol. 34, No. 4, April, 1972 

Shepherds Leading Sheep to Slaughter

                     The Extinction of Species
              And the Destruction of Ecosystems

                                                                                                           by Hugh H. Iltis

 Second part of a two-part article. The first part
(with biographic footnote) appeared in the March
issue.


The widespread and catastrophic extinction of
species and ecosystems occurring on all continents
but especially in regions previously untouched by
technology - the tropics and the oceans - is the
second concern I wish to discuss. To stop this im-
mense calamity has acquired an urgency absolutely
beyond belief. If you pick up Vincenz Ziswiler's
Extinct and Vanishing Animals (1967), Fisher,
Simon, and Vincent's The Red Book: Wildlife in
Danger (1969), or any of the many similar studies
you will find pages and pages with nothing but lists
of animal species and subspecies close to extinction.
Here are some figures for surviving individuals: blue
whale (including the pygmy blue whale) about 6,400
in the Antarctic, 1,000 to 2,500 in the North Pacific
(Gambell and Brown, 1971); mountain gorilla 1,000
to perhaps 5,000; tamarau ( a water buffalo of the
Philippines) 200; Florida Key deer 235; giant sable
antelope 500; Sumatran rhinoceros 150; Indian rhi-
noceros 600; Indian tiger 1,700; and on and on into
the night of everlasting extinction. Plants are equally
vulnerable, and, as a forthcoming book edited by R.
 Melville of the International Union for the Conserva-
tion of Nature and Natural Resources shows, there
is no time to loose. Not only are species by the thou-
sands threatened with a fate as irrevocable as that
of the marvellous dodo, but whole ecosystems of
___________
This paper (in its entirety) is adapted from the keynote
address to the annual convention of the National Association
of Biology Teachers, 14 October, 1971, in Chicago. Author's
address: Botany Dept., University of Wisconsin, Madison
53706

great ecologic and economic value are being "devel-
oped" - a euphemism for exploitation with hardly
a thought to the future.

The Forests of the Amazon
     One can only shudder at the devastation of tens of
millions of acres in western Australia, heavily subsi-
dized by a major American bank; at the destruction
of parts of Africa by the ill-conceived British peanut-
sunflower scheme; of Russia's disastrous plowing of
the virgin prairies; and especially of the devastation
of the vast Amazonian rainforests, recently described
in Time and Newsweek magazines (1971). Amazonia
may be Brazil's last frontier, but it is as well the
world's richest ecosystem: it contains fully 30,000
species of flowering plants, of which over 5,000 are
trees (!), and about 200,000 insects -  a diversity that
staggers the imagination. It is estimated that a very
large number of species (in some animal groups
80%) are yet to be described. Yet Peru, Venezuela,
Colombia, and Brazil, with urging from the United
States, the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization
(FAO), and private exploiters are all at work,
blindly and rapaciously obliterating the Amazonian
rain forest from the face of God's good earth.
    Said a Brazilian minister: "We have to conquer
Brazil completely and [building roads and cutting
the forest] will do it" (Time, 1971, p. 36). With U.S.
support, and no doubt much industrial interest from
U.S. Steel - the world's largest deposit of iron ore is
here - Amazonia may cease to exist (Time, 1971).
Unbelievable? Read what William Denevan, a Uni-
versity of Wisconsin geographer, recently wrote in a
paper (in press) entitled "Development and the Im-
minent Demise of the Amazon Rain Forest":



Within one hundred years, probably less, the Amazon
rain forest will have ceased to exist. It will have been
replaced, for the most part, by grassland and scrub
savanna, with some second growth forest. The prospect
seems inconceivable to those of us who have flown over
the endless vastness of Amazonia, but I believe it is just
a matter of time given current and projected trends in
Amazonian development.


   Equally inconceivable is the recent report that one
man, the multibillionaire Daniel K. Ludwig, has pur-
chased 10,000 km2  (3,750  square miles, or 2.4 million
acres! ) of Amazonian forest, which he plans to cut
and plant with trees of the Asiatic genus Gmelina
(Verbenaceae). THe United Press International story
(Pope, 1971) called this devastator the "most creative
of the billionaires." But the enormity of this crime
against humanity speaks for itself. Where is the In-
ternational Environmental Crimes Tribunal that will
convict a man who controls three billion dollars?
Where is the ecologically responsible government
that will restrain such men for the good of man?
    No matter if a Brazilian geographer (quoted by
Denevan) warns that "a disaster of enormous pro-
portions" is imminent; no matter if the lateritic soils
are miserably poor for agriculture and will lose
nearly all their fertility in a few years (as has been
shown again and again in the tropics of both the Old
and the New World); no matter if mankind will lose
an incalculable biologic resource (Richards, 1952;
Aulie, 1965) - there has been no voice raised in pro-
test in the biology establishment, nor in NABT, nor
in AAAS. Certainly no voice has been raised against
such blind exploitation in high government circles
or in the liberal establishment of enlightened human-
ism, which more often than not combines genuine
goodwill with stupidity in these matters. A prime
example is the glowing editorial "Jungle, Deserts,
Icebergs - and Hunger" in Saturday Review (Tobin,
1971) - an editorial that not only accepts the demo-
graphic prediction of 36 billion people a century from
now but accepts them as a manageable inevitability
for which solutions are available. Said this editorial-
ist: "Scientists at the Food and Agriculture Organi-
zation of the United Nations have forecast that 100
years from now the earth will be able to sustain a
population of thirty-six billion people and feed them
well on a diet similar to that now prevailing in North
America and Western Europe, without recourse to
synthetic food." This is to be accomplished by means
of such "practical" solutions as "steamy tropical
jungles [ Congo, Amazon] made into controlled year-
around farmland, arid desert country [ Sahara] artifi-
cially watered into a new Garden of Eden, icebergs
towed up from Antarctica to furnish irrigation for
Death Valley." There is no point in refuting these
utterly irresponsible views nor in asking where the
energy is going to come from, where the wastes are
going to go, and what scraps of ecosystems, if any,
will be permitted to exist for man in the future.
     Surely even to promise the possibility of such com-
pelling insanity will hasten the death of many a but-
terfly and wildflower at the hand of technocratic be-
lievers. But, just as surely, may not man need butter-
flies and flowers, mountain lions and caribou, blue
whales and pelicans, prairies and deserts, and Ama-
zonian forests with parrots, monkeys and Morpho
butterflies - all that blooms and flies and crawls - not
only to give biologic stability to the ecosystem but in
order to be happy and healthy and to have some per-
spective? Our grandchildren will need them too! Not
the destruction but the preservation of nature must
be the prime concern of mankind, from now until the
end of time.

The Genetic Landscape of Cultivated Plants
    Extinctions are of many sorts: biotic, cultural, and
economic. One that combines all three factors, one
of great immediate importance to man, is the subtle
disappearance of diversity in cultivated plants and
their wild and weedy relatives, especially among
technologically undeveloped peoples.
     Natural selection, and thus the continuation of
evolution, is dependent on the amount of variability
present in a population. Variability in cultivated
plants allows selection for valuable goals, such as
disease resistance and high yield; therefore, consider-
ing man's absolute dependence on his food plants,
variability needs absolute protection. In a cultivated
plant, or cultigen, variability is usually greatest in its
evolutionary "cradle region," where wild, weedy, and
primitive cultivated forms tend to mingle in  very
heterozygous hybridizing populations, which have
great scientific and practical value. They are in fact
irreplaceable. In primitive societies and out-of-the-
way places these nodes and webs of variability have
persisted unimpaired for millenia, even after a crop
had become highly evolved elsewhere. Today, "pro-
gressive" agriculture, the "Green Revolution," and
massive technology, often blindly conspiring with
greed, hunger, population pressures, and ignorance,
deliberately replace this low-yielding primitive di-
versity with high-yielding inbred uniformity. The
corn blight of 1970 in the U.S. was an omen of the
disasters such crop uniformity may bring to man in
the future (Chedd, 1970; Frankel, 1970).
    Biologists must counteract this ill-advised trend,
not only by doing sound work on the origin of culti-
vated plants but by explaining the biologic issues of
preservation to the scientific and lay public and by
urging drastically new approaches to the preserva-
tion of genetic variability. The widely supported
storage of diversity in gene banks, where the seeds
are literally frozen, as in the government seed collec-
tion at Fort Collins, Colo., has short-term utility for
research but is easily susceptible to accidents, such
as power failures, and to loss of seed viability
(Frankel, 1970). The only way we can save the
dynamic evolutionary potential of a crop is to pro-
tect the diverse "ancestral" genotypes in their cradle
region. This means protection as well from modern
agricultural interference. As in the case of truly wild
Photo-
Summer-green tropical thorn forest with understorey of Yucca, Mimosa, Bursera, and Plumeria and, rising majestically
above them, telephone-pole cacti, Neobuxbaumia mezcalaensis (H. Bravo) Backeb. The scene is 19 km southeast of Matamoros,
de Izucar, Puebla, Mexico, at an altitude of about 1,500 m. This photo was taken by the author in August 1960; will anyone
be able to take a similar picture a few years hence? Magnificent spreads of vegetation, such as this, are rapidly being de-
stroyed throughout the tropics, worldwide, in order to make room for more corn, cows, and people. Only the most determined
and vigilant efforts toward out-and-out preservation can insure their survival.

"ancestral" species, we can preserve then by protect-
ing, and in some cases by manipulating, their habitats,
as in a wildlife preserve.
     Only by such deliberate and permanent local
preservation - that is, by the "freezing" of selected
genetic landscapes - is there any hope for long-range
success in continuing the evolution of our crops. This
protection is scientifically justified and politically
negotiable, and it should be internationally subsi-
dized. By placing specific crops in specific geographic
regions "off limits" to agricultural improvement, the
slow processes of primitive cultigen evolution could
continue without marked loss of variability.

Examples: Potatoes and Corn
    Potato and corn crops are in dire need of exactly
this sort of genotypic protection.


The introduction of modern potato varieties and clean
cultivation methods to the Andean potato fields may
someday have a deleterious effect upon the future devel-
opment of our own varieties. If the primitive Andean
potato stocks are lost, our modern, artificially produced
varieties will become completely isolated from their an-
cestral base, and it may then require extraordinary efforts
to keep our higher-yielding but more inbred clones free
from extinction. Although it is inevitable perhaps that
some native potato populations will be lost in future
years, it is vital that we at least preserve the more
critical or ancient centers of potato variability, and guard
these against the encroachment of the modern varieties.
(Ugent, 1970a; cf. 1967, 1968, 1970b)

     That such potato-genotype preservation would be
of immense human value is beyond question. The
protein content of potatoes, for example, varies tre-
mendously. European and American domestic pota-
toes average 1.89% crude protein of fresh weight,
with values up to 3.26%. Solanum andigenum, the
common Peruvian-Bolivian cultivated form, averages
3.24% with the highest value 5.83%. There is, in
addition, a great deal of variability among the named
native varieties, of which there are fully 500 just in
the Lake Titicaca basin (Hawkes, 1945).
     How can we preserve these cultivars? One could,
for example, set aside the whole of the Lake Titicaca
basin of Peru and Bolivia as an International Potato
Diversity Preserve. Protected here would be not only
the potato fields of the Indians, containing innumer-
able cultivars, but the adjoining weedy and wild
populations as well. Agricultural experts who push
the introduction of high-yielding strains would here
be excluded. This does not mean that one would be
condemning the local population to poverty. It simply
means that only this one crop - the potato - will here
be deliberately retained in its primitive condition.
     In the case of corn (maize) there is need to protect
several local regions of high diversity from improve-
ment and from hybrid corn. The most important
regions are in Mexico and Peru. According to Paul
Mangelsdorf (1951) the indegenous varieties,
    from which all inbred strains are ultimately derived,
    may . . . become extinct. Already more than 99 percent
    of the corn acreage in several of the [U.S. ] Corn Belt
    states is in hybrid corn; in Iowa it is 100 percent hybrid.
   The loss of original source of breeding material
   would mean not only that improvement of the present
   strains would be restricted but that new types of hybrid
   corn could not be developed to cope with new diseases
   or insect pests suddenly become rampant.

Even more eloquent is the plea of Paul Weatherwax
(1950) to preserve the vast genetic pool of the indi-
genous corn of Latin America:
   Another chapter in the history of corn is just now in
   the making, and, unless steps are soon taken to turn it
   in a new direction, the ending may be something of a
   tragedy. The entire complex of maize varieties now
   grown in various parts of the world comprises a vast
   pool of characteristics, and basically of genes, from which
   the individual corn plants of the future will be built.
   As long as selection in open-pollinated lines was the only
   method of corn breeding, the chances of actually losing
   any specific gene were not very great. But in developing

  the inbred lines from which hybrid corn is produced,
  we ruthlessly eliminate any gene which, for the moment,
  does not fit our purpose. Some of these might have
  economic values in some other setting, and all of them
  are of such biological interest that none should be lost.
  So far the loss has not been great. In modern agriculture
  there is still enough open-pollinated seed produced to
  insure the preservation of practically all of these varia-
  tions; and primitive Indian races are still carrying
  along a great wealth of unexplored genetic material of
  corn. As the economic advantages of hybrid corn become
  better known, however, and as undeveloped areas are
  opened by better means of travel, much of this primitive
  material will be discarded in favor of more useful stocks.
  It is not too soon for large research organizations to be
  giving serious thought to measures for conserving this
  great heritage.

     In corn there is not only the necessity to preserve
the hundreds of cultivated races; in addition, Wilkes
(1967) has pointed out the urgent need to protect the
five major forms of Zea mays L. ssp. mexicana
(Schrad.) Iltis (= Euchlaena mexicana Schrad.)  -
the teosinte of the Mexicans. According to Darlington
(1956), one or several of these taxa, over the past
10,000 years, gave rise to the cultivated Z. mays ssp.
mays. The only congener, Z. perennis, of Jalisco,
Mexico, is already extinct in the wild; like the ginkgo
it exists only in cultivation. In the case of the annual
Z. mays mexicana, erroneous taxonomic doctrine
produced a veritable "maize mystique" (Iltis, 1969),
which so confused evolutionists' understanding that
the wild ancestral taxa were considered for the past
30 years to be nothing but rather inconsequential
weedy hybrids. Many local populations are now close
to extinction and none is under protection; in fact,
these immensely interesting wild grasses are some-
times considered harmful weeds to be gotten rid of.
Yet we cannot even measure their eventual (and
probably immense) value, for the genetic potential of
the populations may well be the key to successful
corn-breeding of the future (Wilkes, 1971). It is not
significant here that botanists made errors in inter-
pretation of morphology and genetics; what matters
is that by making these errors a group of very valu-
able species or subspecies was placed in peril of ex-
tinction.
    Experience has shown again and again that taxa
once considered worthless to man may become cru-
cial to the understanding of the evolution of a crop -
crucial not only to its improvement but to its very
survival. We will never reach a point where we shall
know which organisms are going to be of value to
man and which are not. We cannot even predict the
future value of museum collections, whether living
or dead (Hailman, 1971). The only alternative for
intelligent planning is to save all the pieces; that is,
to preserve sufficient diversity of species and of eco-
systems in their purest states, so that we will never
have to be regretful of their loss. Let us always re-
member Aldo Leopold's (1953, p. 147) wise admoni-
tion: "To keep every cog and wheel is the first pre-
caution of intelligent tinkering."
   Whether the crop be corn or rice, potatoes or



wheat, it is clear that to neglect the genetic gold
mine, which the unassuming wild or weedy relatives
of cultivated plants represent, would be a great mis-
take. Here again we must change our values and our
ways, especially in our well-intentioned but short-
sighted foreign-aid programs in agriculture (whether
carried out by governments or by private research
organizations, such as the Rockefeller Foundation) -
the Green Revolution notwithstanding.
    The protection of specific regional genetic land-
scapes (or World Genetic Resource Areas, in Wilkes'
sense) should get top priority in international agri-
cultural and environmental planning. Only by the
prudent protection of all the earth's biotic resources
may man be able to preserve the vast array of po-
tentially valuable genotypes and phenotypes and give
crop-breeding a solid future. To make sure that na-
ture's diversity survives, its protection and preserva-
tion must become sanctified and codified in law. The
biology teacher as well as the researcher has here a
crucial and indispensable role.

Loving and Caring
  It is appropriate to end with a quote from NABT's
eminent past-president Bentley Glass, who in Science
and Ethical Values (1965, p. 33-34) pleaded for our
concern and social responsibility:
  In the second and third chapters of Genesis is the story
of the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man. Too much
dust has already been stirred by debates about its his-
toricity, for in such controversy the deeper moral truths
the story reveals usually lie forgotten. The tree whose
fruit Man was forbidden to eat was not the Tree of Life.
It was the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. For
indeed, in his ignorance, man was once innocent. Yet
when, in the agelong evolutionary ascent, man came to
foresee the consequences of at least some of his actions,
when he could distinguish the good from the evil and
the better from the worse, then it became to him sin to
choose the evil, to do the worse . . .

   One thing is certain. We cannot turn the clock back. We
cannot regain the Garden of Eden or recapture our lost
innocence. From now on we are responsible for the
welfare of all living things, and what we do will mold
or shatter our own heart's desire.


   You, who are teachers of biology - loving plants
and animals and caring about your students - have
the tremendous reponsibility of leading a sick and
insane world back to health. The watershed is here,
now. It is now or never! And the problem is specially
yours, because it is so largely biologic. It is yours also
because of your love of nature - the love affair that
led most of you into biology in the first place. By
making students instruments of your love and your
wisdom and by teaching them the implications of
evolution and diversity, by showing them the evil
and greed as well as the good of technologic and agri-
cultural power, you will give them the judgement they
will need if they are to preserve diversity and beauty
on this earth.
   But I say to you clearly and loudly: if you and

your professional organizations insist on being polly-
annas, if you continue to ignore the touchy subjects
of politics and agricultural stupidity, of war and the
anonymous monster of the technologic corporate
state;  if you neglect to inform your students - the
very students who care and who are our only hope -
of the price we pay for our affluence and of the price
the rest of mankind pays for our greed and our un-
willingness to change our culture and values . . . then
may all the fates help us and you! For then you will
be guilty - guilty of being sheperds leading inno-
cent sheep to slaughter.

Acknowledgements.- James L. Sawyer, of the University of
Wisconsin, Madison, and George Van Schaack, of the Morton
Arboretum, Lisle, Ill., provided much help and stimulation
in the writing of this paper.

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