This Is Our World
by
[University of Oklahoma Press, $2.50]
MANY students of life would recoil at the thought of studying two creatures at once, or even one creature as the sum of all its parts and processes. Only the ecologist ventures to understand a multitude of creatures in their manifold relationships to their environment and to one another. Combining the breadth of view of the old-time naturalist and the objective techniques of the modern biologist, he is peculiarly equipped to speak realistically of life. No ecologist can speak more vividly and persuasively than Paul B. Sears. Like Gilbert White before him, Mr. Sears thinks of life as a symphony that moves towards a perfect synthesis of instruments and themes. Like Rousseau, he thinks of civilized man as the major dissonance.
‘ In nature undisturbed by man,’ he writes, ‘the universal trend is towards stability, balance, permanence; it. is constructive in terms of energy.’ Civilized man reverses this trend by inserting his culture patterns between himself and his environment. Through the instrumentality of one culture pattern, for example, forests and grasslands are being exchanged for floods and dust storms. Through the combined instrumentality of many such patterns, the environmental reserves of the human species are rapidly disappearing.
The problem of human maladjustment is enhanced by the tenacity with which men cling to accustomed pursuits. ‘All of the great continents bear witness with abandoned cities, mines, and fields, drifting dunes and denuded hills, to the fact that human activity can persist in a suicidal course . . . until the means of survival are exhausted.’ Men have been clever at evading the piper through invention and migration, but they cannot evade him forever. The only way out, according to Sears, is to cease reckoning resources in the terms of illusions. The average man must be jarred loose from his apathy and ignorance and made to face realities. This Is Our World was designed us a contribution to that end.
Unfortunately, in being aimed at both the apathy and the ignorance, it fails to score a direct hit on. either. Many of its random comments on different subjects, though interesting in themselves, tend to weaken its impact on the apathy. Not a little of its exposition of scientific facts and principles is too elementary and superficial to damage the ignorance. In the opinion of this reviewer, the book does not gain enough as a personal essay on things in general or as an outline of the natural and social sciences to compensate for what it loses as an argument.
Despite all this it succeeds in conveying a feeling for ‘the almost forgotten world in which human beings live,’ a world that is ‘knit tight together by its common activity.’ It conveys a sense of the folly of replacing time-honored devices which work in that world with new ones that can never work. And it does so, on the whole, with such wisdom, wit, and grace as to merit a few evenings of anyone’s time.
JOHN HODGDON BRADLEY