THE UNITY OF ECOLOGY — DARLING 465 



duced crops of errors where good botanists were less good zoologists, 

 and good zoologists very inadequate botanists. In such an atmosphere 

 of the titter behind the hand, it was not easy to embrace man and his 

 possible ecology as well. 



But for several reasons the intellectual climate is changing. The 

 archeologist has shown in recent years that protocivilization is several 

 thousand years older in the Old World than we had thought, and the 

 primitive Folsom Man in the New World was much earlier than the 

 accepted Quaternary immigration from northeast Asia. As we have 

 learned how man lived, what he ate, how his houses were built, and 

 what his devotional buildings signified, what movements he made, 

 we have been compelled to speculate on the influences man has had 

 on his environment through many thousands of years. Also, the dy- 

 namic world of this century, particularly of the past 20 years, has made 

 us intensely and often painfully aware of change in the landscape. 

 We have been rather roughly pitchforked into a world of democracy, 

 so-called; into a world of human population explosion, into a world 

 of mobility made possible by the invention of the internal combustion 

 engine and the exploitation of fossil fuels. Land use has changed 

 in character and so much more land has been used, often uncritically, 

 following earlier patterns in different climates. The immense plan- 

 etary buffer and reservoir of wilderness has shrunk in area and influ- 

 ence. Quite suddenly in these past 25 years and particularly since 

 the last war there has been a shaking of confidence. The all-conquer- 

 ing technological man whose mind had the same characteristics as the 

 bulldozers employed to grow groundnuts on a prodigious scale in Tan- 

 ganyika is already out of date, although the breed is highly inventive 

 and has in no way accepted defeat. There is apparent in politicians 

 an unsureness: they look longingly and hopefully at the extreme 

 technological man, but now it is perhaps as well to listen also to the 

 biologists, not merely the ones who overcome noxious insects with 

 magical rapidity, but ecologists as well. 



What do ecologists offer? No panaceas or quick returns, so much 

 as a point of view which restrains, shows the consequences of different 

 types of action, and possibly how mistakes in land-use can be rectified ; 

 and why they were mistakes. Ecology is a science of identifying 

 causes and consequences. 



Here, I think, is where we may consider the place of history : the 

 political situation and the changes brought about by individuals and 

 ideas are the stuff of history and it is difficult to find out what influ- 

 ence man was having on his environment and what accommodations 

 the organic world of nature was making. But it can be done to a 

 considerable extent if we will give time to it and reconsider history 

 in ecological terms for enrichment of our experience in making future 

 decisions. 



