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No less troubling is the belief that economic growth is worth any effort. Until recently, neither capitalist nor Communist seriously questioned the whirling-dervish doctrine that teaches, in René Dubos' words, "Produce more than you can consume so that you can produce more." This leads to ecological mismanagement. For example, says Barry Commoner: "Every day we produce 11,000 calories of food per capita in the U.S. We need only 2,500 calories." At the same time, while most of Latin America is suffering from protein deficiency, the U.S. is taking thousands of tons of protein-rich anchovies from the Humboldt Current off Peru and Chile. The anchovies are ground up for chicken feed in Arkansas—food energy that could have gone more wisely to hungry human beings. Worse, some of the fish meal is made into cat food. "And," says Commoner, "we don't even eat the cats!"
What most appalls ecologists is that technological man is so ignorant of his impact. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Britain's Lord Ritchie-Calder recently pointed out that neither the politicians nor the physicists who developed the first atomic bomb were fully aware of the consequences of radioactive fallout. The men who designed the automobile helped to annihilate distance as a barrier between men. Yet the car's very success is turning cities into parking lots and destroying greenery in favor of highways all over the world.
Each year the U.S. alone paves over 1,000,000 acres of oxygen-producing trees.
"Once you understand the problem," says Barry Commoner in one of his gloomier moments, "you find that it's worse than you ever expected." Yet even LaMont Cole, a charter member of the doomsday school of ecologists, is not entirely discouraged: "There has been so much progress in the past five years that if I'm not careful I'm liable to become a little optimistic."
There is certainly no lack of hopeful ideas for balancing the environment, and the most encouraging change to date is the groundswell of U.S. public opinion. The nation is at least starting to combat gross pollution. Even so, real solutions will be extremely difficult and expensive. To wean farmers away from pesticides and chemical fertilizers, for example, would cause at least a temporary decline in farm productivity and a hike in food prices. Fortunately, ecologists are developing reasonable replacements; there is nothing wrong with organic fertilizers or the prechemical method of crop rotation. Much is also being learned about the biological control of pests. To kill the leaf hopper Dikrella, which destroys grapes and is now immune to DDT, California ecologists have employed a tiny wasp—and the cost of controlling leaf hoppers has declined by 87% since the wasp buzzed into action.
Ideally, the entire environment should be subjected to computer analysis and systems control. Whole cities and industries could measure their inputs and outputs via air, land and water. By making cost-benefit choices—for example, between new plants and old marshes —they could balance the system. But this is a far-off dream. Far more knowledge is needed about how ecosystems work. Even the simplest is so complex that the largest computer cannot fully unravel