Crowded Off the Earth

by FAIRFIELD OSBORN

PEOPLE the world over are coming to realize the essential unity of mankind. All nations are dependent upon others in varying degrees for products, materials, or goods that have become a necessary part of everyday living. The spoiling of the land and the ensuing destruction by floods in the great Yellow River valley of China soon or late, in one manner or another, impinge on the well-being of peoples a thousand horizons away. No longer is an American unaffected by the trends of living conditions of other peoples, whether those of a country in the Western Hemisphere or those on the opposite side of the earth. No longer can 3 million people in India die of starvation, as they did in 1943, without a specific and cumulative effect on an Englishman in Surrey. The peoples of the earth, whether they will it so or not, are bound together today by common interests and needs, the most basic of which is, of course, food.

In China live a people many of whom are gifted in agriculture and skillful in maintaining terraces and other good land practices, yet they have come up against an enemy within their own gates — that of overpopulation. The needs of teeming millions are being met at the expense of the future of the land. Hunger here is the constant enemy.

The Yellow River, its channel built up by silt carried from the eroded lands at its sources, flows between high embankments at a level well above the surrounding land, and threatens and indeed often floods and destroys vast areas of China. So numerous are the people that when disasters occur and numbers of lives are lost the world is scarcely aware. Losses are soon made up and the pressure of people increases daily, and as this happens the physical strength of the race inevitably declines. What can these people do?

India is in some ways worse off. The internal enemy here is the same — too many people for the land to support. India’s land has long since been depleted, yet her population continues to increase. Times of famine have reached almost cyclic regularity; scarcely anyone in India has enough to eat, and all the care spent on restoring a rich but wasted land goes for little, so long as there are too many people to live upon what the land can provide.

An observer serving with the Royal Army Medical Corps in World War II attempted a detached point of view on what he saw in Calcutta in 1943 and 1944. To him it appeared that in that city the dogs had the best time of it. They could and did cat human flesh before city authorities could carry away the bodies of those who died of famine in the city streets. On one occasion a single bag of rice was distributed from a relief station, doled out by the handful to thousands of people, not so much with the idea that it could save them from death by starvation as in the hope that since they were so far gone they would die conveniently near the relief station, so that their bodies might be gathered up with a minimum of effort.

Copyright 1948, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston 16, Mass. All rights reserved.

India’s wasted land will not support such a pressure of population, but the immoderate increase goes on, weakening lands and people, rendering them helpless in the struggle to keep alive upon the earth. Here is the extreme present-day example of man, ever increasing in numbers, ruining himself and the earth on which and by which he must live.

2

MAN’S problem in his earliest, dimmest, most faraway days was obtaining a living — from the forests, the soils, and the waterways. The wheel of human destiny seems to turn, but the basic facts of life remain constant. Man’s initial problem is still with him — can he obtain a living from nature?

The population of the earth has increased almost five times within the last three centuries and doubled even within the last century. Human civilization has permeated virtually every living area of the earth’s surface. Vast fertile areas in various parts of the earth have been injured by man, many of them so ruined that they have become deserts and uninhabitable. Flourishing civilizations have disappeared, their cities buried under wastes of sand, their inhabitants scattering to new lands. But now, with isolated and inconsequential exceptions, there are no fresh lands anywhere.

The productive soil of the world is now so limited that it is estimated there are not more than 4 billion acres of arable land left to fill the needs of more than 2 billion people — less than two acres per person. Two and one-half acres of land of average productivity are required to provide even a minimum adequate diet for each person. Many countries have less than an acre of productive land per person. No wonder there are world-wide shortages.

Students of population point out that by the end of this century there may be still another half billion people on the earth and that the world population in a hundred years may exceed the 3 billion mark. How are so great a number of people going to be fed; how are they to receive enough of the other basic resources of the earth to support life, especially in view of the fact that hundreds of millions of people today are undernourished and otherwise lacking in the basic requirements of existence that alone can be provided by the earth’s fertility?

Population pressures have long been recognized as one of the major causes of war, yet there is scarcely any recognition of the fact that such pressures are the major cause of the world-wide depletion of the natural living resources of the earth. Most people still have the notion that the living resources of the earth are illimitable and that they can be drawn upon as if there were an endless reserve. A capable American businessman recently made this naïve remark when his attention was called to the fact that the forests of his country were being rapidly exhausted: “Oh well, we don’t need to worry — if we use up our forests, we can get all the timber we want from Mexico.” Let him go to Mexico and see what is happening there.

Mexico is in the main a mountainous country and consequently is unusually susceptible to violent erosion. Less than one third of the land area is level or even approximately level, with the result that only a relatively small portion of the whole country can safely be used for agriculture in the absence of extraordinary precautions that are not now being taken. Because of this scarcity of arable land, the people of Mexico have extended the cultivation of crops to increasingly steep slopes, resulting in severe and widespread erosion. Much of the country was once heavily forested but Mexico is now actually beginning to face a forest famine, with the usual afterresults of deforestation in the form of disastrous floods, the disappearance of springs, and the failure of regular water supply.

Within the last fifteen years Mexico’s population has increased by about one third and now stands at more than 22 million. The pressure of an increasing population, combined with the mounting injury to existing cultivable areas by erosion, is forcing people to use land that is totally unadapted to the growing of crops, and at the same time is compelling the country to rely on imports for much of its basic food supply. It may be recalled that land hunger was one of the principal dynamics of the Mexican Revolution.

The industrialization of the country depends to such a considerable extent on its water resources that the reckless deforestation now taking place is cutting at the roots of Mexico’s industrial programs. One of the reasons for forest destruction is that this country, like others in Central and South America, is handicapped by a scarcity of coal. Consequently there is a lot of timber cutting to produce the charcoal so widely used as fuel for cooking and heating.

Years ago more than forty National Parks were established. These areas are now being invaded by lumbermen and cattlemen.

There is general ignorance of the important part that animals of every kind play in the life complex of nature. Not only have the larger forms of wild life been reduced almost to the vanishing point, but non-game birds, as well as small mammals, are shot “for the pot.” The monetary cost of the destruction of insect-eating birds is just another item of “loss” in the economy of Mexico.

A distinguished Italian botanist with a profound knowledge of southern Mexico has stated categorically that the state of Oaxaca will be a desert within fifty years. The Chief of the Conservation Section of the Pan American Union believes that if present trends are allowed to continue, most of Mexico will be so severely denuded within a century that the country, at best, will be able to maintain its people only at the barest subsistence level. Few people recognize that Mexico today is engaged in a desperate struggle for survival.

The pattern of land use still follows that of the ancient populations: Cut, burn, plant, destroy, move on. It is a method known as milpa, common not only in Mexico but in most other countries in Latin America and, for that matter, elsewhere in the world. Such a system is possible where there are limited numbers of people who have plenty of room to move on from one place to another, leaving the wounds on the land behind them for time and nature to heal. Under the pressure of tremendously increased populations, and with the growth of cities and towns and the disappearance of new and unspoiled land, the eventual results of the system are fatal.

3

MANY people have the notion that lands which have been misused and have become sterile can be restored to fertility by the use of chemicals. Nowadays we are so impressed by the “wonders of modern science” that we are apt to consider it capable of any accomplishment — even of patching up nature. We move, live, and have our being in a world of gadgets and inventions. That is, about a billion of us do — the other billion live on the land trying to produce a subsistence for themselves and sufficient surplus for the rest of us in towns and cities. There is a general impression that all that is needed to make worn-out land productive is to apply fertilizers. There could be no greater illusion.

The treatment of soil by chemicals and fertilizers is, it is true, of considerable help in preventing land from becoming sterile. Under existing methods of rapid crop production, the mineral elements that nourish plant growth are removed from the soil faster than they can be replaced by natural processes, and consequently fertilization of the soil with such chemicals as lime, phosphate, and potash is an accepted practice in agriculture today. Further, the organic matter of which soils have been depleted can be restored in large measure by the application of animal manure or by means of so-called “green manuring,” which consists of plowing leguminous plants and grasses into the surface.

There can be no argument concerning the fact that manures and chemical fertilizers are necessary aids in maintaining soil fertility, but at best fertilizers are corrective supplements. In no sense should they, especially chemical fertilizers alone, be thought of as substitutes for the natural processes that account for the fertility of the earth. In the long run, life cannot be supported by artificial processes. The deterioration of the life-giving elements of the earth, which is proceeding at a constantly accelerating velocity, may be checked but cannot be cured by man-applied chemistry.

Fertile soil is alive in the sense that it harbors many different kinds of living organisms that function in relationship to one another and provide, in effect, the health and productivity of the soil itself. Ingenious as man is, he cannot create life. Stated simply, soil is fertile largely because of the living organisms that are within it — in combination, of course, with its mineral nutrients. Nowhere on this earth has nature provided a more intricate pattern of interrelated life than in the soil. There is an immense variety of animal life, ranging in size and kind from burrowing rodents, insects, earthworms, down through the scale to animals and life forms of microscopic size such as protozoa and bacteria.

These living things make two basic contributions to soil fertility, one as important as the other. The first is soil cultivation, including the letting in of air and water through the soil made by the passage of their bodies, whether large or small. The second contribution comes through the fact that animal life and living bacteria are the media by which organic remains are mixed with the minerals in the soil. These living elements — innumerable hosts of them, invisible to the eye — are, in effect, the soil chemists.

There is an almost endless number of other characteristics of fertile soil. For instance, iron is a necessary element for living cells; no matter how minute the quantity, it is required for the growth and well-being of all plants and animals. In the complete absence of iron, green plants will fade to a yellow and finally die. If such a condition develops, it may indicate a slow or improper bacterial activity of the soil. Certain soil bacteria are able to take up iron and accumulate it on the surface of their cells, where it is quickly changed to some more soluble form of iron compound which is then taken up by the plants.

Another important constituent of living matter is phosphorus. This element is also tied up with proteins. The bony framework of man and animals consists largely of calcium phosphate. This material is insoluble, but despite this fact it is converted to a soluble form of phosphate by the action of soil bacteria, the solvent action being largely due to carbonic acid produced by these bacteria.

In addition to the four major chemicals of soil — nitrates, lime, phosphates, and potash — there are a number of other essential elements such as copper, manganese, zinc, and boron, known as “minor” or “trace” elements. Only in recent years has the essential nature of these elements become known. Previously it was erroneously assumed that the amounts used by plants were too small to be important. There is no room for doubt that most of them, perhaps all of them, are vital to health and strength, even though they are supplied by nature in minute volume. The mere fact that they exist and appear to have a definite part in the life scheme emphasizes the extreme complexity of earth fertility. The relationship between land health and the health of human beings, as well as other animals, is actually no more than another aspect of the delicate and complex relationship of all life. How, in the face of these things, can we accept the idea that “science” is capable of providing for the continuity of human life by substituting its methods for those of nature?

4

THE old saying that “a man is what he eats” is acquiring a considerably greater meaning than it had at the time the phrase was coined. Our energy and well-being, physical and even mental, are dependent in the main upon the composition and quality of our diet. All of it, except fish and other food taken from the ocean or inland waters, is derived from the soil, whether in the form of grains, fruits, or vegetables, or in the form of meat and the milk of animals that in turn live upon plant life.

Not only man’s well-being but his actual survival is dependent upon the preservation of the health of the earth. We are, in truth, of the essence of the earth. Our bodies, as well as those of all other animals, are composed of chemical elements that are derived from the air, from water, and from the soil.

A dramatic example of the relationship between land health and animal health is provided by the decline and rebuilding of the fortunes of one of the great thoroughbred racing and breeding stables in this country within the last fifteen years. This establishment for decades had been one of the most consistently successful in the history of the American turf. The bloodlines of its stallions and of its brood mares had, over a long period of time, produced racing horses of unusual stamina and speed. Almost every horse that was started under its colors was home-bred on a large farm located in the heart of the Bluegrass country in Kentucky.

Commencing with the year 1933 the fortunes of the enterprise, as to both racing and breeding results, began to dwindle. Each year fewer and fewer races were won despite the fact that some sixty thoroughbreds were maintained in training. Further, and even more alarming, breeding results began to decline; fewer mares each season came in foal, and mares began to drop stillborn or deformed colts. So bad did the situation become by 1941 that the owner was told by various racing experts that it was apparent that the bloodlines of his stallions and mares had “run out” and that there was nothing for him to do but dispose of his horses for the best prices he could get and start anew.

He could not bring himself to believe this. It so happened that his manager had studied at an agricultural college and had some familiarity with the matter of land and soil conditions. One day the manager came to the owner and told him that he had an idea that the trouble might perhaps be traced to the condition of their land. He suspected that the long use of the fields as horse pasturage, with constant cropping and perhaps the hardening of the ground by the hoofs of the horses, might be proving harmful.

As a result of this conversation, plans were made at once for the study of the land by soil chemists and other agricultural experts. It was found that the soil had in fact slowly and insidiously lost its natural fertility. Analysis indicated that the soil was lacking in some of the chemical and mineral elements for which the land in this region was so well noted. It was observed that scarcely an earthworm was left on the entire property. A major program of soil rebuilding was then undertaken. Cattle were introduced, manure was widely used, green crops were grown and plowed under; and even, when the time was right, earthworms were reintroduced.

Within two years the results on the track and in the breeding farm took a marked turn for the better. Improvement thereafter was consistent and rapid and by 1946 the stable was the third highest winner of races in the entire country and the breeding results had returned to their earlier excellent standard of mare fertility and sound colts.

One authority, chairman of the Department of Soils at the University of Missouri, has reached the conclusion, as a result of innumerable studies of farmlands in the Midwest, that soil fertility on an individual farm can be depleted enough, through failure to return manure, crop residues, and other enriching elements, to shift that farm within a single human generation from a place of good health to one of deficiency diseases for the farm animals and for the families that live upon it.

He further observes that the same crops, still growing after decades of farming, may have shifted from protein-producing, mineral-supplying sustenance to vegetation mainly of fuel value and markedly lacking in the nutrients that are required to maintain health. The shifts may occur without any diminution in the bulk of the crops or, in other words, the tonnage output of the farm. This shift to foods having in the main merely fuel value is aggravated still further by present-day processing methods, which tend to retain the starches and sweets and to lose the natural minerals and vitamins. Another provocative observation from the same source is that the deterioration of our soils is “pushing domestic animals towards the dangerous precipice” with the result that decreased reproduction, increased diseases, more body deformations, and other irregularities are compelling early marketing of these animals.

It was a bright day when, through the growth of the science of bacteriology, the causes of communicable diseases became known. The marvelous progress of the medical sciences in discovering methods of coping with infectious diseases has in large measure removed the terrors of plagues and pestilences that once took such a heavy toll of human life. At the end of the last century it looked as if mankind were about to enter into a new era of health and happiness.

It has not happened so. While the life span in many countries has increased, yet even in these, there appear to be a whole series of “new” illnesses that suggest a slow, pervading deterioration of human health. These degenerative diseases affect many of the organs as well as the structural parts of the body, such as the heart, liver, teeth, and bones. Their causes are little understood — medical records of the distant past throw little light on the matter — and consequently the medical profession is comparatively helpless in either preventing them or curing them.

It would be a careless generalization to state that what appears to be the physical degeneration of people in our own country and elsewhere is being caused by nutritional deficiencies resulting from declining soil fertility. Civilization has brought with it many conditions of living that are anything but healthful. However, the supposition cannot be dismissed that the alarming increase of degenerative diseases, including psychological and neurological illnesses, may be related, in a manner yet to be defined, to the steady deterioration and wastage of topsoil, the precious sensitive earth cover through which life flows.

5

ALL the component parts in the machinery of nature are dependent one upon the other. Remove any essential part and the machine breaks down. There are four major elements that make possible not only our life but, to a large degree, the industrial economy upon which civilization rests: water; soil; plant life, from bacteria to forests; animal life, from protozoa to mammals.

The last two of these elements, being alive and capable of reproduction, are referred to by conservationists as “renewable resources.”

Water is fundamental to all life. Vegetation is composed mostly of water; more than 70 per cent of our own human body weight is water. Consequently, water must be generally available, and at all seasons, in habitable areas. Vegetation of all kinds, from trees to tomatoes, must have it regularly and adequately; animal life, including human beings, must similarly be able to depend on it, in season and out.

Regular and adequate water supply is dependent upon the preservation of extensive forests, especially in the watershed areas where streams and rivers have their sources. Water supply is also dependent upon vegetation cover in open country. When these natural conditions are too greatly disturbed, water supply diminishes or disappears. Springs dry up owing to the lowering of the underground water table. Further, rains falling upon exposed lands, which have been improperly stripped of forest or other vegetation cover, are not held in the soils and consequently rush to stream or river beds so that violent fluctuations of drought and flood conditions are started, becoming cumulatively more severe.

The surface of all the habitable or cultivable areas of the earth is — or rather, in its natural state, was — covered with a layer of productive topsoil. This covering varies considerably in thickness, but the average thickness over the earth as a whole is computed to be not more than one foot, and probably is less. In the United States, for example, topsoil is estimated to lie originally at an average depth of about seven or eight inches over the face of the land. As nearly as can be ascertained, it takes nature, under the most favorable conditions, including a good cover of trees, grass, or other protective vegetation, anywhere from three hundred to one thousand years or more to build a single inch of topsoil.

Yet what may have taken a thousand years to build has in places been removed by erosion in a year or even in a single day. Wherever nature’s balance is too greatly disturbed, accelerated erosion occurs, and man is continually upsetting the balance of nature, because of what he considers his immediate need, not looking even a few years into the future; or because of ignorance or greed.

Erosion comes about through the exposure of land by wrong use or by overuse, by the careless removal of its protecting cover of grass or forests, or by denying it the constant water supply which it must have for the growth of protective vegetation. Any or all of these practices expose the topsoil, so that it can be blown away by winds or washed away by rainstorms. Thus land is often gullied into useless badlands that may be and frequently are impossible to restore.

Perhaps the most widespread, and certainly the most insidious, sort, of erosion is called sheet erosion, which, as its name implies, is the more or less even removal of soil in thin layers, a little at a time, by the steady action of wind or water. Often it results from the gradual movement of soil material from higher land to lower. Inconspicuous in its immediate consequences, it is a type of erosion most difficult to guard against.

To produce food, man makes clearings in forests or, in areas of natural grassland, turns the protective sod for planting. He plants his grain or other crops one year, and then the next year, and then the next, too often leaving his fields bare and unprotected from the elements in the stormy seasons between harvests. In flat country the processes of erosion are less apparent though still present. On sloping lands, comprising the great majority of the earth’s cultivable areas, erosion is active and eventually fatal unless man controls it, which he too rarely does. As man’s yield of food from a field dwindles with each harvest, he looks about for a new place to plant, leaving the old one to the fate that erosion will complete. Proper agricultural methods, now well understood, are capable of preventing this destructive cycle of events.

Yet over great areas of the earth, man, until recently, still moved from place to place, wearing out the land without a thought save for his immediate physical needs, or because of a desire for quick profits to be robbed from the soil that might have served him permanently. Faulty methods of agriculture, overgrazing of grasslands, and indiscriminate cutting down or burning of forests have seriously weakened our own country, as I shall show in my next article.

There is another major cause of loss of the interdependent resources of forests and soils. In a way it is one of the crowning ironies of human life today. This is the warfare of man with himself. The urgency of demand for forest products during the war just ended has accelerated the destruction of fast-vanishing forest reserves in many countries, while the pressures upon agriculture for high-speed crop production have been so great that they have led to the mining of croplands for quick returns rather than encouraging their orderly use. The aftereffects will be felt for decades, and in many areas the loss will be irreparable because of the denudation through erosion that follows the stripping of forest covers and the misuse of agricultural lands.

6

THERE could be no situation that better exemplifies the dire consequences of overusing the land for purposes of trade or profit than that of the growth of the sheep industry in Australia, which has been an effort to gain from the land more than it is capable of producing. From a temporary point of view, the Australian people have gained quick returns from the sheep industry, but the long-term or permanent health of the land has suffered greatly.

In the early part of the nineteenth century, England had become the world’s most important center for the production of woolen goods, and the spindles and looms of Yorkshire were demanding greater and greater quantities of wool. At that time English manufacturers were buying most of their wool in Europe either from the Spaniards or from the Germans. Spanish wool, however, was not retaining its quality and English buyers were switching to the wool of excellent quality that came from the Saxon Merino sheep. Woolgrowers of northern Europe, however, had to struggle with the rigors of a severe winter climate and this situation pointed the way to Australia’s great opportunity whereby the then most wretched of British colonies could pay its way and even win its position as a commonwealth by contributing to the stupendous energy of England’s economic expansion.

By 1882, following a couple of decades of experimental breeding, the wool of Australian sheep was judged equal to the finest Saxon. The boast was made by Australian colonizers that their country “contained tracts of land adapted for pasture so boundless that no assignable limits may be set to the number of fine wool sheep which can be raised,” and from that time on English manufacturers depended increasingly upon Australian wool, and English capital assumed great influence in the development of this industry. In effect wool provided the economic impulse that opened up the Australian continent and, incidentally, provided one of the reasons for the early overcutting of forests in the illconsidered attempt to get more pasture land at so great a cost to Australia’s present-day land economy.

Anyone who has not seen herds of sheep, each numbering several thousand animals, has no conception of the damage to the land of which they are capable. Both sheep and goats are close-cropping animals and unchoosing in their readiness to eat all kinds of living plants, even to their roots. Further, the plant cover that is not consumed is trampled and injured by the thousands of hoofs. When their numbers are not properly balanced or controlled, these animals are one of the major causes of injury to the surface of the land, of erosion, and of eventual desolation. So it has been since before the days of Christ. So it has proved in many parts of Australia and of New Zealand.

It was a sorry day for Australia when an early colonizer from England packed a few innocent-looking rabbits aboard ship and sailed for his new home in the land “down under.” This individual, whoever he was, together with occasional others who did likewise, has unwittingly cost the Australian people monetary losses that run into hundreds of millions of dollars and have caused injury to the land resources of Australia, much of it even of a permanent nature, that is beyond computation. Each and all of these men were blind to the fact that the predatory animals that existed in Australia, such as dingoes and several species of hawks, would be incapable of acting as automatic natural controls in keeping a rabbit population in balance. The subsequent importation of wild foxes, as a control measure, proved a complete failure. Nothing short of a thorough advance knowledge of the intricacies of wild-life ecology could have prevented the avalanche of trouble that continues even to this day.

The first record of the existence of rabbits in a wild condition in any Australian state appeared in 1827, but the menace really dates from 1859 when the clipper Lightning arrived in Hobson’s Bay with twenty-four wild rabbits for Thomas Austin of Barwon Park near Geelong. These were liberated and within three years rabbits first began to be referred to as a pest. Six years later Austin had killed off some twenty thousand rabbits on his own and adjoining properties but was confounded at being forced to estimate that there were at least ten thousand left. At about the time of their introduction into Victoria there is recorded the ironical touch that a man was charged at the Colac police department with having shot a rabbit, property of one John Robertson of Glen Alvie, and was fined ten pounds, in accordance, no doubt, with the old poaching laws of England, where game was the property of the landowner. A few years later Robertson’s attempt to stamp out the rabbits cost him £5000.

Within the next thirty years the animals multiplied to such a degree and migrated so widely that they became a pest of the most critical kind practically throughout the Commonwealth. In the seven years from 1883 to 1890 the New South Wales Government was forced to spend not less than £1,543,000 in its attempt to control the scourge, and today rabbit control both in Australia and in New Zealand is a financial load upon every community. Many methods of eradicating this pest have been attempted. In Western Australia more than two thousand miles of fencing was erected at a cost of almost £500,000, but after it was all up it was found that some rabbits were already on the other side of the fence! Unfortunately, with the compulsory use of poison for rabbits, there has been a very great destruction of wild life as well as livestock, and phosphorus poisoning, employed for rabbit control, has been one of the principal causes of death among the marsupials and native birds.

The feeling of concern and apprehension regarding rabbits as a pest has even had psychopathic effects, as is illustrated by the testimony of a witness before one of the parliamentary commissions. This witness, who happened to live in one of the arid regions of South Australia where rabbits were a real curse, stated that the rabbits in his part of the country had developed a long neck and miniature hump indicative of their capacity of living for long periods without water.

These animals actually, when pressed to it, can live on bark and thus have been the cause of widespread killing of scrub growth by ringbarking it, in addition to consuming millions of seedlings. Another observer has pointed out that rabbits eat the hearts out of pastures by their habit of selective feeding, taking the best grasses and leaving the worst, and have in effect been the cause of creating new deserts. A writer in the Australian Encyclopedia estimated that “with the removal of the rabbit the capacity of the Commonwealth in carrying livestock would be increased by 25 per cent.” This may be somewhat of an exaggeration, especially now that in the better pastoral lands the rabbit is fairly well under control.

There are at least a few entries on the credit side of the rabbit ledger, such as the use of the animal for its fur as well as for its food value, as evidenced by the fact that in the decade ending in 1924, 157 million frozen rabbits were exported and in the same period Australia exported more than 700 million skins. But the harm done to Australia by the unwitting actions of a few of the early colonizers is and will continue to be irreparable.

The essence of man’s situation is slowly becoming obvious. His physical adaptability, in the pattern of biological history, provided until recently its own guarantee of his survival. Today one cannot think of man as detached from the environment that he himself has created. True, one never actually was justified in doing so. Yet even as recently as the latter years of the last century, the projections of man’s mind in the form of the physical changes he was effecting on the earth itself were not of sufficient extent to be recognized as a new and profound change in the evolution and even in the destiny of mankind.

The groundwork had been laid in earlier centuries. The explosion, world-shaking, has occurred in this one. The mechanical, chemical, and electrical sciences, man’s mind-extensions, are changing the earth. A concept lately expressed speaks of man as now becoming for the first time a large-scale geological force. The present world-wide disturbances in human civilization can at least partially be accounted for by the havoc that man is working upon his natural environment. These disturbances will unquestionably increase in violence, even to the point of social disintegration, if the present velocity of destruction of the earth’s living resources continues.

Man has it in his power to stop this havoc. He also still has it in his power to remedy enough of the damage that he has caused to permit the survival of his civilization. The question is, Will he do it and will he do it in time?

The tide of the earth’s population is rising, the reservoir of the earth’s living resources is falling. Technologists may outdo themselves in the creation of artificial substitutes for natural subsistence, and new areas, such as those in tropical or subtropical regions, may be adapted to human use, but even such recourses or developments cannot be expected to offset the present terrific attack upon the natural life-giving elements of the earth.

There is only one solution: Man must recognize the necessity of coöperating with nature. He must temper his demands and use and conserve the natural living resources of this earth in a manner that alone can provide for the continuation of his civilization. The final answer is to be found only through comprehension of the enduring processes of nature. The time for defiance is at an end.

(In the April Atlantic Mr. Osborn will continue the discussion in his article entitled “The Country That Can Feed the World.”)