474 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1964 



some thousands of years of man's most fertile years of culture, and you 

 may agree with me that in any synecological studies it is difficult to 

 exclude man or to be a plant or an animal ecologist. There is only one 

 ecology. If we are to follow an ecological approach to the study of 

 society — be it liistorical, sociological, agricultural, anthropological, or 

 economic — we must keep in mind that man's habitat and human so- 

 cieties are not static. The cross section presented by a socioanthro- 

 pological study needs amplification in time. Cultures are altering 

 continually, progressing or retrogressing, and these trends, though 

 subject inexorably to natural laws, are also the results of human be- 

 havior. Such action may have been unseeing of consequences in the 

 past, but if ecology is to concern itself with human influences, and 

 take its place at the council table of human affairs, it should accept 

 the premise that our species has in many parts of the world arrived 

 at the stage of mental evolution at which it is possible to foresee the 

 consequences of various kinds of direct and indirect modifications of 

 habitats and their biological communities. The well-being of the 

 habitats and the human communities therein can be influenced and 

 sustained by understanding the interrelationship of the biological 

 communities in which we coexist. 



I have put forward the thesis that man has been able to enjoy 

 gregariousness and civilize as a result of learning how to tap the stored 

 wealth of ecological climaxes — soil fertility, timber and other plants, 

 and animals. His agriculture of annual or biennial plants sets back 

 ecological succession and demands a high skill to maintain fertility; 

 the general history of animal exploitation is of over-use. Are we faced 

 with the proposition that civilization is a contradiction in terms ; that 

 civilization carries its own seeds of decay because ecologically retro- 

 gressive processes once begun cannot be checked? I believe there is 

 some danger of this, but there need not be in an ecologically conscious 

 world. The suffering planet has immense power of natural rehabilita- 

 tion if given its chance and we are also learning how these wonderful 

 integrated processes of healing take place. As I said earlier, ecology 

 is the physiology of community. Understanding it we can avoid 

 undesirable consequences. Perhaps it is necessary to say that I am 

 not crying "back to nature"; our growing imderstanding of the 

 physiology of community gives power of planned manipulation, find- 

 ing other ways round to desired ends. The history of the Nature Con- 

 servancy in this country is a vivid example of men learning how to 

 manage biological conmiunities in a manner simulating the natural. 



Man often reminds me of the Irish elk in that the elk's antlers could 

 develop nonadaptatively in evolution as a byproduct of increase in body 

 size, what Julian Huxley calls heterogonic growth. The enormous 

 drain on the organism of growing so much nonfunctional calcium 

 phosphate every year was too much once the prodigality of the 



