WHAT ever happened to America the Beautiful? While quite a bit of it is still visible, the recurring question reflects rising and spreading frustration over the nation's increasingly dirty air, filthy streets and malodorous rivers—the relentless degradations of a once virgin continent. This man-made pollution is bad enough in itself, but it reflects something even worse: a dangerous illusion that technological man can build bigger and bigger industrial societies with little regard for the iron laws of nature.
The problem is much bigger than the U.S. The whole industrialized world is getting polluted, and emerging nations are unlikely to slow their own development in the interest of clearer air and cleaner water. The fantastic effluence of affluence is overwhelming natural decay—the vital process that balances life in the natural world. All living things produce toxic wastes, including their own corpses. But whereas nature efficiently decays—and thus reuses—the wastes of other creatures, man alone produces huge quantities of synthetic materials that almost totally resist natural decay. And more and more such waste is poisonous to man's fellow creatures, to say nothing of himself.
Man has tended to ignore the fact that he is utterly dependent on the biosphere: a vast web of interacting processes and organisms that form the rhythmic cycles and food chains in which one part of the living environment feeds on another. The biosphere is no immutable feature of the earth. Roughly 400 million years ago, terrestrial life consisted of some primitive organisms that consumed oxygen as fast as green plants manufactured it. Only by some primeval accident were the greedy organisms buried in sedimentary rock (as the source of crude oil, for example), thus permitting the atmosphere to become enriched to a life-sustaining mix of 20% oxygen, plus nitrogen, argon, carbon dioxide and water vapor. With miraculous precision, the mix was then maintained by plants, animals and bacteria, which used and returned the gases at equal rates. About 70% of the earth's oxygen is thus produced by ocean phytoplankton: passively floating plants. All this modulated temperatures, curbed floods and nurtured man a mere 1,000,000 or so years ago.
To primitive man, nature was so harsh and powerful that he deeply respected and even worshiped it. He did the environment very little damage. But technological man, master of the atom and soon the moon, is so aware of his strength that he is unaware of his weakness—the fact that his pressure on nature may provoke revenge. Although sensational cries of impending doom have overstated the case, modern man has reached the stage where he must recognize that real dangers exist. Indeed, many scholars of the biosphere are now seriously concerned that human pollution may trigger some ecological disaster.
Consuming Nothing