THE ECOLOGY OF MAN—SEARS 395 
like our own Northwest, are deficient in iodine and calcium. Beaver 
dams, retarding the flow of water, tend to equalize it through the year 
and so enhance its ability to sustain life on land before it returns to 
the sea. Burrowing animals, vertebrate and invertebrate, aerate and 
enrich the soil. And so it goes, exemplifying the principle that as life 
has developed it has achieved an ever-increasing role in modifying the 
earth. But this it does by virtue of delaying—not reversing, as some 
would have it—the relentless increase of entropy in our system. In 
this process lies the margin of life over death. 
Now man, at the apex of evolution, is the inheritor and beneficiary 
of this magnificent pattern, He has at his disposal not merely the 
fruits of today’s biological activity, but of vast, though finite, stores of 
organic compounds formed by living communities in the past and now 
available as fossil fuel—coal, oil, and gas. He has had at his disposal, 
too, fertile soils formed and stabilized through preceding ages. More 
than this, he has, in modern science, the means to comprehend his 
position, as well as to intensify his use of what he has found, and 
devise a multitude of new uses for substances both familiar and 
previously unknown. 
If we may for the moment draw upon the poetic insight of ancient 
times expressed in the third chapter of Genesis, the promise of the 
serpent has been fulfilled to a measure undreamed. “Your eyes shall 
be opened and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” Humanity 
now has, as never before, the means of knowing the consequences of 
its actions and the dreadful responsibility for those consequences. 
Powerful as are the means that science affords in the way of relieving 
the human body and mind of effort, human beings are still confronted 
with the necessity of making decisions. And debate as we will as to 
the freedom of our choices, we have no better means at present than to 
designate this problem of choice as a moral problem. Even the indi- 
vidual who proclaims himself amoral has made a moral choice, that is 
a choice of values as well as means. 
Now values are qualitative and intuitive, largely, and hence assumed 
to be beyond the reach of quantitative science and none of its affair. So 
we have the spectacle of human life now being transformed by dy- 
namics thought to be quite independent of all the traditional controls 
that have been so painfully worked out through thousands of years of 
history, prehistory, and even prehuman evolution. It is like a vehicle 
of tremendous speed and power whose steering mechanism has no 
functional connection with it, or, at best, one not designed to control it. 
The dazzling success of quantitative exact science as an instrument 
makes matters worse by throwing into deep shadow those aspects of 
human experience that cannot be expressed by formula and diagram. 
This is not new. The inherent tendency of every human group has 
