Shepherds Leading Sheep to Slaughter: The Biology Teacher and Man's Mad and Final War on Nature

Abstract

W alking the crowded streets of Chicago on the first morning of the NABT convention, I picked one of Mayor Daley's plastic flowers and wished for a few real ones. I also wished for fewer people and cars. After all, the topic of my address to the convention, and one of the main concerns of NABT, as it ought to be for all men, was the people-environment equation. And there is no better place in the world to perceive the staggering imbalance so typical of modern civilization than downtown Chicago. I was reminded of a comment by Marston Bates (1955), to this effect: Human population growth is like cancer. yearly annual increase is now about 70 million, or 6 million a month-the equivalent of the population of Chicago. And whatever one may think of Chicago, a new one every month seems a little excessive. Excessive, too, is the general unawareness of the significance of all the environmental turmoil: the popular view that, on the one hand, man can somehow adapt to pollution and crowding and, on the other hand, that he can solve his environmental problems solely by relying on technologic advances. In a cartoon in Look magazine (Flagler, 1971) two businessmen are walking down Fifth Avenue with their attache cases; one is saying to the other: The way I look at it, there's a price tag on everything. You want a high standard of living, you settle for a low quality of life. irony here may not be lost on you, but it seems to have been missed by many economists and sociologists. Indeed, even Philip Hauser, the eminent demographer at the University of Chicago, seems to see nothing particularly incongruous about giving up a biologically rich and humanly decent environment for one with increased urbanization and all that that implies-and using almost the identical language of that cartoon to do so! He said, in an interview: