The Ecology of Man’ 
By Pau B. Sears 
Chairman, Conservation Program 
Yale University 
[With 10 plates] 
MAN THE NEWCOMER 
Tue Livinc LANDSCAPE AND A New TENANT 
Man is a newcomer into our earth that is old. This being true, 
prudence suggests that man ought not be too self-centered. Instead 
of devoting himself completely to taking advantage of his surround- 
ings, he might do well to spend some effort getting his bearings. 
Unfortunately, as matters stand now, science is being appled to com- 
petitive and exploitive ends in far greater measure than it is to 
establishing perspective. Even the humane and laudable business of 
prolonging life and increasing food supply through science seems to 
be raising as many questions as it solves. 
We hear much these days about man’s conquest of nature. Suppose 
as a first step we examine the record. It is longer than we of the 
Western World had thought, for our ideas of eternity have reached 
into the future rather than the past, giving us a curiously bobtailed 
notion of time. We may thank the astronomer, the geologist, the 
evolutionist, and more recently the physicist for setting us straight. 
Owing especially to measurements of radioactive change we now have 
some fairly good approximations of the age of the earth and the an- 
tiquity of various geological events. 
What we know can be made graphic by taking a thick book of 
some 3,000 pages and assigning to each page the value of 1 million 
years, since the planet earth seems to be some 8 billion (3,000 mil- 
lion) years old. We would scan the first half of this book before 
we came to any very clear evidence of life. Then we would begin 
to read the fragments that tell us of slow and painful development— 
1 Condon Lecture, 1957, reprinted by permission of the Oregon State System of Higher 
Education, Eugene, Oreg. 
492520—59 25 375 
