Tags
Allan Temko, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Archaeology, Bill Charmatz, Buckminster Fuller, Cadbury Castle, Center for Population Studies at Harvard University, Christopher Hibbert, E.M. Halliday, Ecology, Franklin Russell, George Perkins Marsh, Glastonbury Tor, Henry David Thoreau, King Arthur, Lewis Mumford, Lyndon Johnson, Milton Viorst, Population, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Roger Revelle, Transcendentalism, Urban sprawl, William Garnett
A letter from the editors introduces a special section, ‘Man at War with Nature: Three Articles on the Crisis in our Environment’. It focuses on ‘the ideas of four thinkers who, in different ways and disciplines, have devoted their lives’ to ‘a total examination of the permanent relationship of man to his environment – or “ecosystemics,” as scientists are beginning to call it.’ The section includes portraits by Paul Davis.
In ‘The Vermont Prophet: George Perkins Marsh’, Franklin Russell writes about the founder of the science of ecology:
When urban Americans feel nostalgic for the simple life, they invoke Henry David Thoreau. There was, however, another American, born sixteen years before Thoreau, whose union with nature was equally mystic and whose impact on this century is likely to be more important. George Perkins Marsh, a Vermont lawyer, created the concept of modern ecology, or the study of the interrelationships between organisms and environment. He cut through the Victorian complacency of his own age to prove that men were no asset to the earth: they were wrecking it. Indeed, Marsh anticipated many of the crises in resources, pollution, and overpopulation that plague our century…
Marsh’s genius, and his relevance to the present, were that he saw the earth as a single unit, a giant orchestra being conducted by Homo sapiens – and making agonizingly bad music. He was obsessed by the intricate chain of cause and effect. (The invention of the silk hat by a Parisian, he observed, caused the formation of many small lakes and bogs in the United States because it almost obliterated the demand for beaver fur, thus allowing the beavers to make a comeback.) He saw the earth as a series of environmental systems, which in Man and Nature he broke down arbitrarily into ‘The Woods,’ ‘The Waters, and ‘The Sands.’ All were governed by geographical rules that, Marsh noted acidly, man did not understand. Today these environmental systems have a name – ecosystems, or a series of ‘living and nonliving units interacting in nature,’ as one definition puts it. An ecosystem can be almost anything – an ant colony, Chicago, Africa, or two people in love. It is the interaction and interdependence of the parts of the system that are important.
In ‘Which Guide to the Promised Land: Fuller or Mumford?’, architectural critic Allan Temko writes about R. Buckminster Fuller and Lewis Mumford: ‘They both understand the crisis; they both know all the facts; they are both brilliant and thoughtful men. It is a measure of our ecological crisis that they disagree utterly on where to go from here.’
[Fuller] never came to regard the city, as Mumford has, as a ‘time-structure’ that itself is a formative factor in civilization. Fuller, the inventor, has sought to create an utterly new urban environment. Mumford, the historian, has seen the city as an institution that is the expression of social as well as political forces – ‘history made visible’ – and that transforms man as he transforms his surroundings. Yet by paradox Fuller is much more at home in contemporary America than is Mumford.
Nevertheless these two Americans share many of the highest values of the national heritage…Each of them retains deep affinities with an older, more spacious, less mechanized, relatively unspoiled, and in part wild and almost unpeopled America in which individuals counted for more than organizations, which industrial technology has now changed forever. Yet each carries on the American intellectual adventure today, headed for different destinations but really voyaging outward to the world at large, following the great circle course of nonconformity, self-reliance, and transcendental awareness charted by Emerson and Thoreau…
What each of them has done, really, has been to write philosophical poems celebrating a world that does not truly exist, and perhaps can never exist, even though the poems are true. Mumford is an epic poet, as grave, as moral, as grandly tragic, as John Milton; Fuller is a lyricist, and his bright, luminous structures had best be taken as lovely technological songs. Someday, from somewhere on the unified earth, a new poet may emerge to combine their gifts; but that supreme poet, as Santayana wrote at the end of his appreciation of Lucretius, Dante and Goethe, is in limbo still.
In ‘Too many born? Too many die. So says Roger Revelle,’ Milton Viorst writes about the then head of the Center for Population Studies at Harvard University: ‘If population growth is the root of ecological evil, how can it be stopped? A demographer finds a clue in a paradox: the birth rate is out of control because the death rate is out of control.’
What societies must do, Revelle says, is to shift cultural patterns to minimize the benefits of having large numbers of children and to reduce, where possible, the dependency on surviving sons. He suggests such changes as these:
¶ Institute compulsory education for eight or more years. This would mean that children, who require parental support during their school years, would become productive only at a much later age.
¶ Provide jobs for women. Their earnings would give them an incentive to work instead of incapacitating themselves by bearing or rearing children.
¶ Make consumer goods available. The opportunity to raise living standards would deter many parents from spending whatever money they have on larger families.
¶ Establish a strong social security system. By reducing the fear people have of being abandoned without support in old age, there would be less need to have children, particularly sons, as a form of insurance.
¶ Shift more of the population from agriculture to industry. In most instances industrial workers produce fewer children. This is probably because in an urban society, where skilled labor is in demand, there are fewer opportunities for children to work – as compared to rural areas, where unskilled labor is the rule. Too, wage earners must learn to plan for family support within the limits of known income.
An aerial picture by William Garnett depicts the urban sprawl of Los Angeles:
In ‘A Short Primer of Style’, E.M. Halliday satirises the ‘elegant and precise’ language in the report of a seminar on poverty issued by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The ‘nine characteristics of poor populations’ are illustrated by Bill Charmatz:
In ‘The Search for King Arthur,’ Christopher Hibbert explores the origins of the Arthurian legend, beginning in fifth century Britain as the Roman Empire was collapsing, looking at both the accounts of mediaeval historians and archaeological excavations at Cadbury Castle and Glastonbury Tor:
The sources of this legend have roots that stretch back far beyond the birth of printing to those Dark Ages of Britain’s history when barbarian invaders were driving the people of the island to seek safety in the Welsh hills and across the channel in that part of France that became known as Brittany. These British refugees told tales of a great leader who had fought to save them from the heathen hordes; and their stories, repeated and embellished, became entangled in later generations with the fables of the people in whose lands they had settled. Centuries later, when the Normans conquered large tracts of Brittany and invaded England, the tales of King Arthur came to the ears of French poets, who set them down in epic verse.
[Standing] on the hill at Cadbury, shutting your eyes to the neat English fields below, imagining instead the haunted, misty swamps that Arthur would have known, it is possible to see him and his companions riding out to battle along the rough and narrow causeway. They ride down, not in the glittering panoply of medieval warfare, but with embossed cuirass and close-fitting helmet, carrying whitewashed shields, long spears, and heavy iron swords, wearing gold collars and strings of beads; men rough and hard and violent but fighting in a noble cause, stemming the tide of Saxon paganism, so that when at last they were defeated, they left behind them a legend that was one of the lasting inspirations of the English Christian kingdom.