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 act as they act simply because of their position in the cosmic pattern.
An ethic and a philosophy are very important in creating a suitable mental atmosphere in which we can act in the right way towards our natural surroundings, but we need more than an ethic and more than a philosophy. We need an aesthetic, an organized sensibility which will polarize our feelings and thoughts in an artistic way towards the world. I am an old and unregenerate Wordsworthian; I regard Wordsworth as among the four or five greatest English poets and as a man who contributed insights of enormous importance in regard to what our relationship towards the world should be. Wordsworth’s whole idea was that man and nature are closely interlinked, that morality goes right back into our relations with the world, and that our sense of the divine can be most powerfully mediated through our relations with the world of nature. He says, for example:
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
And he speaks in The Excursion of being
Rapt into still communication that transcends
The imperfect offices of prayer and praise
He felt very strongly this spiritual relationship of man with nature, and he felt its importance. He felt also that in nature man could discover his own deepest mind, that in his relationship with nature he could discover his spontaneity and an immediate, unsophisticated experience of life.
The quite recent development in European poetry and art which Wordsworth represents has a close relationship with the literature and art of the Far East. In Chinese and Japanese poetry and landscape painting we find images that are curiously prophetic of the Wordsworthian attitude towards nature; in that strange art form of Japan called the haiku, a tiny poem in seventeen syllables, we find it again and again expressed in an abbreviated and elusive way. Consider for example a poem by Basho, which goes like this:
The hanging bridge
Creeping vines
Entwine our life
A bridge of living substance links man with the material world, as Wordsworth says in his memorable words in the ‘Tintern Abbey’:
… a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.
This idea, which is characteristic of the nineteenth century in the West, was commonplace in the Far East many centuries before. We see it not only in poetry, but in the rise of
