Fighting to Save the Earth from Man

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(University of Georgia), Paul R. Ehrlich (Stanford), Kenneth E. F. Watt (University of California at Davis), and a few others. In terms of public recognition, perhaps the outstanding figure in the field is Barry Commoner of Washington University in St. Louis (see box, page 58), who has probably done more than any other U.S. scientist to speak out and awaken a sense of urgency about the declining quality of life. Last week he addressed 10,000 people at Northwestern University, where young activists staged the first of a series of major environmental teach-ins that will climax in a nationwide teach-in on April 22. In varying degrees, the once sheltered ecologists have become ardent advocates of seemingly radical views. They sometimes sound like new Jeremiahs. They do not hesitate to predict the end of the world, or at least the end of a life with quality. Yet they hold out hope too. "We are in a period of grace," says Commoner. "We have the time—perhaps a generation—in which to save the environment from the final effects of the violence we have done to it."

Web of Life

Ecology is often called the "subversive science." Only 70 years old, it avoids the narrow specialization of other sciences—and thus appeals to generalists, including people with a religious sense. Ecology is the systems approach to nature, the study of how living organisms and the nonliving environment function together as a whole or ecosystem. The word ecology (derived from the Greek root oikos, meaning "house") is often used in ways that suggest an attitude rather than a discipline. Anthropologists and psychiatrists have adapted it to their work. Poet Allen Ginsberg declaims it like a revolutionary slogan. But few yet grasp its subtle meanings—as Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska proved last summer. Arguing for fast development of his state's oil-rich North Slope, Stevens referred to his dictionary. "Ecology," he declared, "deals with the relationship between living organisms." Then he added triumphantly: "But there are no living organisms on the North Slope."

Stevens missed the whole point: the arctic ecosystem is full of life (including Eskimos) but is so vulnerable to pollution that the North Slope threatens to become a classic example of man's mindless destruction. The intense cold impedes nature's ability to heal itself; tire marks made in the tundra 25 years ago are still plainly visible. What most worries ecologists, in fact, is man's blindness to his own utter dependency on all ecosystems, such as oceans, coastal estuaries, forests and grasslands. Those ecosystems constitute the biosphere, a vast web of interacting organisms and processes that form the rhythmic cycles and food chains in which ecosystems support one another.

The biosphere (see chart, page 59) is an extraordinarily thin global envelope that sustains the only known life in the universe. At least 400 million years ago, some primeval accident allowed plant life to enrich the atmosphere to a life-supporting mixture of 20% oxygen, plus nitrogen, argon, carbon dioxide and water vapor. With uncanny precision, the mixture was then maintained by plants, animals and bacteria, which used and returned the gases at equal rates. The result is a closed system, a balanced cycle in which nothing is wasted and everything counts. For