First Need of All: Population Control
Dr. Cole made another point. I'd heard it made before by virtually every ecologist I had interviewed.
"One of our basic errors," he said, "is that we always equate growth with goodness. Everything has to keep growing—the population, the cities, the industries. We have to stop growth somewhere. And, if we don't stop the population explosion, there's very little chance of solving our other problems. It's the key to the whole thing.
"We have to recognize that we're dealing with systems," he continued. "For example, the World Health Organization went into Ceylon with pesticides to knock down the high mortality rate from malaria. It did a very good job of it. But its success has also contributed to Ceylon's severe overpopulation problem and strained economy.
"The human race," the ecologist continued, "may be in even more trouble than we think. Very possibly, man won't know he has passed the point of no return until it's too late."
A horrible idea! I asked him to explain.
"Life depends on quite a few microorganisms doing their job," Dr. Cole replied. "For example, at least six types of bacteria in soil and water are absolutely essential to keep nitrogen circulating from air into organic material, then back to the air again. If any of the bacteria stopped working, nitrogen in the atmosphere would be depleted—or possibly replaced by ammonia."
He shook his head slowly. "We're playing a kind of Russian roulette. We keep pouring new chemicals into the environment without testing to see what effect they'll have. If one or a combination of them should ever poison the nitrifying bacteria on a worldwide scale, the air would become unbreathable."…
What about nuclear power plants? Do they pollute the air with radioactivity? I asked the question of Mr. Harlan K. Hoyt, superintendent of Commonwealth Edison's Dresden Nuclear Power Station, 55 miles southwest of Chicago, Illinois.
"Some radioactivity is present in our stack gases," Mr. Hoyt said. "But if you lived at the fence line downwind of that stack, you would absorb only one-twentieth as much radioactivity in a year as you would get from one chest X-ray."
But environmentalists worry about any increase in atmospheric radioactivity, and note the growing number of nuclear power plants. When man takes something from his planet, they point out, there may be hidden costs involved. A town lures a new industry by allowing it to contaminate the local river. A jet speeds 150 people across the country, and cloud cover may increase imperceptibly.
"We ecologists have a word for bargains like those," Dr. Cole said. "We call them trade-offs. Often the bargains are bad ones."
He paused, searching for the best example. "Take the Aswan High Dam on the Nile," he said. "It was put there to expand irrigation, to generate electricity, and to control the annual flooding of the Nile Valley. Actually, those floods had helped keep the farms productive by fertilizing the land with silt. The dam has virtually ruined a sizable sardine fishery along the Nile Delta, because the nutrient supply has been choked off. The catch has fallen from 18,000 tons a year to less than 500 tons. And there's another problem, too: Snails are spreading through the irrigation ditches, carrying the debilitating disease schistosomiasis."
If Lamont Cole seems to take too jaundiced a view of man's attempts to conquer nature, be assured that he has much company among his ecologist colleagues. Dr. Barry Commoner, Director of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, sums up the matter in speeches on college campuses. Dr. Commoner's three laws of ecology are these: (1) Everything is connected with everything else. (2) Everything goes somewhere. (3) There is no such thing as a free lunch.
Innovations Can Backfire
"It's time that we scientists begin making sure we've asked all the right questions," Dr. Donald W. Aitken said to me in Palo Alto, California. Dr. Aitken is chairman of environmental studies at San Jose State College.
"Too many times, some technological or engineering advance is conceived and immediately implemented, and ends up having harmful side effects," he continued.
Dr. Aitken cited the Welland Ship Canal as an example. "Lamprey eels moved into the Great Lakes through the canal and seriously damaged sport and commercial fishing. What will happen, I wonder, if we build a sea-level canal across Central America and let predators from the Pacific and Caribbean invade each other's realms?"…
In Washington I interviewed Dr. Lee A. DuBridge, former President of the California Institute of Technology and until recently President Nixon's Science Advisor. I brought up that matter of asking all the right questions. Had they all been asked before long-lasting pesticides were put into use?
"The side effects of something like DDT show up only after massive use." Dr. DuBridge replied. "Similarly, the smog-creating qualities of automobiles weren't apparent until traffic had built up."…
Dr. DuBridge subscribes to the "no-free-lunch" theory. "There seems to be a law of nature that every benefit that is introduced to improve our happiness, our welfare, or our security has a cost factor someplace.
"Sometimes it's a dollar factor," he went on. "Sometimes it's an environmental factor. And that's the real job for human ingenuity today—to develop concepts that will let us measure the benefits against the risks."