THE UNITY OF ECOLOGY — DARLING 473 



cated animals. Just as the Ukraine country of the Scythians came 

 ultimately to wheat, so did the Middle West prairie become a bread 

 basket. The Indians of the Middle West have gone the way of the 

 Scytliians. 



We will not pause to consider the 19th-century calamity that befell 

 the bison and the Indian, but what must be pointed out is that the 

 sudden disintegration of this nomadism imposed by the wanderings 

 of the bison, hit hardest those tribes which had specialized most 

 in this way of life. Even today the observer can see that the horse 

 tribes have come off worst in social and economic adaptation. The 

 tribes which remained in the forest or at the forest edge are now woods- 

 men and construction men; the Pueblo Indians of the Eio Grande 

 valley may be anything that the white man is, because of their urban 

 tradition ; but the horse tribes who accepted the exhilaration of liberty 

 of distance and became what we have come to call Plains Indians, 

 have found themselves in the deepest bondage of the drastically 

 changed economic base. Now, as pastoralists, they are finding move- 

 ment cut down, and yet a dawning ecology of land use is demonstrat- 

 ing the old truth, that the pastoralism of wild lands imposes movement 

 of the animals. There is the continuing paradox of political ten- 

 dencies to restrain the movement of people on wild lands, and scientific 

 evidence that animals on wild lands must be kept moving. Only wild 

 animals conduct this aspect of their lives without human direction, 

 and on this shrinking planet of exploding humanity even the wild 

 animals are having their necessary movements constricted. The threat 

 to the elephant in Africa is not the killing that goes on but the merci- 

 less restriction of range and movement. Without the movement, 

 habitat is destroyed and other species of wild animals suffer in train. 

 A dramatic example of this trend has been the build-up of elephants 

 in the sanctuary of the Tsavo Royal National Park in Kenya. De- 

 struction of trees and bush by the elephants endangered the food 

 supply of the rhinoceros, so that a period of long drought made this 

 painfully apparent in the starvation of over 200 rhinoceroses. They 

 were not short of water themselves, for the river never dried, but 

 they died with their bellies full of indigestible cellulose fiber. I saw 

 some of these creatures die and helped in the post-mortem examina- 

 tions. I saw the wreck bush which would not even become a fire- 

 climax savannah. I did not put the blame on the elephants. 



I began this address with the statement that ecology was the obser- 

 vational study of communities of living things in time as well as space, 

 and I repeated Charles Adams's dictum that it was essentially con- 

 cerned with process. I have allowed myself to range about the world 

 seeing man, plant communities, the communities of his own domesti- 

 cated animals and some wild animals in dynamic process through 



