It is perfectly clear, when we come to think of it, that we are indissolubly one with nature and depend completely on the natural environment. Anybody can do a simple experiment to find out how much he depends on the natural environment even though he lives in a world of television and automobiles. He merely has to put a clothespin on his nose and tape up his mouth to find out that he can’t do without his natural environment for more than about sixty seconds.
Not only are we physically dependent on the outward environment, but we are also psychologically dependent on it in a very interesting way. This has been shown by the experiments conducted in recent years by D. O. Hebb at McGill University in Canada and John C. Lilly at the National Institute of Health in Washington on the effects of what is called ‘limited environment’. If individuals are completely cut off from external stimuli, the most extraordinary things begin happening—mostly very unpleasant. Curiously horrifying visions and nightmare thoughts invade the mind, so that we discover that stimuli from the external world are required just to keep us sane.
It is not only that we need the external world to keep us alive, we need the external world to keep us from going mad. When we go into the matter more thoroughly we find that this direct psychological and physiological dependence is not merely upon our immediate environment, it is upon environments very remote, both in space and time. It is obvious, for example, that our entire life depends upon physical events taking place in the sun. It is also quite clear that our continued existence depends upon events taking place in distant mountain ranges and in the tropical and polar regions where our weather is made.
Over-populated countries such as England and most of the Western European countries depend for their very existence on events taking place far away and completely outside their political jurisdiction. What is going to happen to Western Europe when the New World has no more exportable surpluses? (Professor Paul Sears of Yale foresees that this will probably happen by 1980.) Nobody knows, but clearly the problem is of extreme importance in our political thinking.
We are also dependent on events which took place in very remote periods of time. Most of the world is still immensely dependent upon coal and oil, both of which are the products of events which took place in the distant past; thus we find ourselves bound up with the world in the closest possible way. The details of this binding up of ourselves with the world, and of all parts of the world, in a single quasi-organic whole are studied in the science of ecology, which is an extremely recent science—the word was invented by Ernst Haeckel less than a hundred years ago—and has unveiled the basic facts that living organisms exist in exquisitely balanced communities and that this balance can be very easily upset.
What has become abundantly clear from the study of ecology is that man has rushed in where angels feared to tread and in ignorance and stupidity and arrogance has everywhere upset these balances in a very alarming way. In the previous lecture I talked abut deforestation and erosion, which are the more conspicuous examples, but similar examples on a smaller scale abound. The interesting thing is that we discover after the balance has been upset how delicate it was; and we also realize that it is incredibly difficult for us to foresee what the results of our actions are going to be when we upset the balances of systems where the disturbance of any one element will throw the whole system out of gear.
Take a simple example of a few years ago, when the Forest Service attempted to do something on behalf of a special variety of deer which lived in the Kaibab Forest on the north rim of the Grand Canyon. There were only a few thousand of the deer left. The Service thought that the poor things were being persecuted by too many mountain lions, and men were sent out to slaughter a great number of the mountain lions. The result was that, in a few years, the deer population went from four thousand to nearly a hundred thousand. The deer ate up the entire range in the Kaibab Forest; then there were frightful epidemics and they began dying like flies. Only when mountain lions were reintroduced and had killed off the more sickly deer was a stable balance re-established. Gradually the forest recovered from its over-grazing, and the deer flourished fairly well.
This kind of thing has happened again and again. In Scandinavia, hawks were killed off because they killed game birds. The game birds multiplied, they got diseases, they almost became extinct, and the hawks had to be reintroduced. Much odder still is the result of the elimination of hippopotami from large areas in Africa. The fish population in the lakes and rivers where they lived depended to a large extent for nourishment on the minute animals which came from the excrement of the hippopotami. Since the hippopotami have been destroyed the whole fish population has gone too, and the natives have much less protein to eat. So we realize that in dealing with these extremely delicate ecological balances, we come in in the clumsiest way, without really knowing what we are doing.
Not only do we upset the balance by destroying elements, we also upset it by introducing new elements. The introduction of the Chinese crab into Hawaii and the West Indies was a disaster, and a still greater disaster was the introduction of the rabbit into Australia, Patagonia, and other parts of the world. The only place where the introduction of the rabbit didn’t result in a disaster was Ceylon, where fortunately they were kept down by poisonous snakes—animals which may be extremely useful to us and do us much more good than harm in spite of the fact that we don’t happen to like them.
All this shows how immensely careful we must be in relation to the world. It is only by a combination of love and knowledge that we can get on in the world, and it is only on condition that we act with love and knowledge that we can dominate nature. We must remember that man is a paradoxical creature: he is one with nature, but he is a completely unique animal inasmuch as he can become conscious of his position and inasmuch as he can influence nature in an enormous and sometimes terrifying way. Whether we like it or not, it is quite clear that henceforward we have to take responsibility for what is happening on our planet, because if we don’t take responsibility and if we don’t act according to our knowledge of and affection for nature, we shall destroy the ground on which we are living and finish off our species.
I have said that with Darwinism we have returned to the primitive position, but on a higher level: we now recognize our oneness with nature and try to act upon it in a rational way. I think it is worth making a digression here to point out that the modern conception of nature has a great deal in common with the traditional views of the Chinese, that in a non-scientific, intuitive way, the Chinese anticipated modern scientific thought in many respects. The Chinese way of thinking about nature has always been very different from that of Western man. In the first place, unlike European philosophers, the Chinese have never thought in terms of substance. European philosophers have always asked, What is so-and-so? The Chinese have never asked this question; they’ve always asked, What are the relations between so-and-so and so-and-so? Now thinking about relationships rather than substance is quite characteristic of modern science. Not only did they think in terms of relation, the Chinese thought in terms of pre-established harmonies, of mutual action and reaction within fields of force.
These notions go back in China to the foundation of Taoist philosophy, probably in the sixth century b.c.; already in Chuang Tzu, in the fourth century b.c., we see the very clear formulation of a philosophy which is extremely close to modern organicism. The Chinese idea was that things are what they are and act upon one another in the way they do act by virtue of their position within a system of patterns. The Chinese spoke about individual patterns being subsumed in the Great Pattern, the Tao. They haven’t been bothered with the idea of mechanical causation (which is extremely difficult to apply to biological entities) and have been able to think in organic terms from very early times.
Strangely enough, this organic, organismic conception of life was carried over to Europe in the eighteenth century and had a profound influence on the European philosopher Leibniz, who became interested in the translations of Chinese philosophy which the Jesuit fathers brought back from China, especially in the philosophy of Chu Hsi, a twelfth-century neo-Confucian who had combined the notion of Taoism with those of Confucianism. Leibniz’s philosophy in turn has had a profound influence on such modern organicist philosophers as Whitehead, Needham, Bertalanffy, Smuts, and Lloyd Morgan. The fundamental Chinese idea of the Tao has been likened to a kind of cosmic field of force, which is a field of force not only in the physical world but in the spiritual world: things are what they are and
