Biologists and Political Issues

Abstract

The letter by Anderson (Ecology and Politics, BioScience 18: 7, July 1968) provides a meritorious suggestion in urging concerned individuals to organize toward more effectively presenting ecological problems as political issues. Personal communication with Dr. Anderson reveals a discouraging response from readers of BioScience, of whom only four individuals replied. As an environmental physiologist, my concern is primarily with air, water, and soil contamination and the decrements in human adaptive capacity to physical-chemical pollutants induced by the psycho-social stress of crowding, nutritive state, or genetic endowment. Although the consequences of these deleterious effects are not readily sensed because of the gradual but inevitable accumulation of noxiousness, it becomes increasingly clear that planet Earth is a self-contained spaceship with a closed cycle environmental control system. Current technology assumes a favorable economic advantage from increasing production and consumption of goods without due regard to the disposal of concomitant waste. The traditional notion that the Earth represents a waste receptacle of infinite capacity might hold true if all that waste were biodegradable at a rate that is commensurate with its production. This notion must yield to the potential correlation of cumulative noxiousness in the environment with human chronic disability and altered metabolism or lethality in certain animal and plant species of the total ecosystem. If the biological community does not believe this, I would desire an expression of rational thinking for the disbelief. If the biological community agrees with the thesis, then their inactivity toward problem resolution is inexcusable. Must the biologists, too, in concert with the rest of humanity, wait for the calamitous onset of irreversible damage; or might we assume a communicative leadership to our legislatures toward providing a base for adequate legislation and effective urban planning for a continuing expanding population. Is the biologist also a citizen? The issues are political ones, and the candidates for office at the presidential level and below should be urged to express their viewpoints in a forthright manner. I would further suggest that regional organizations of concerned biologists be implemented throughout this Nation and patterned after the Committee for Environmental Information, the publisher of Scientist and Citizen. I'm certain that this Committee would provide advisory inputs for such an expanded effort. ROBERT S. POGRUND Associate Professor of Public Health University of California, Los Angeles