110 Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Balance of Nature 



rial or energy are lacking the process stops. If the raw products can- 

 not be converted into usable form, there is nothing to distribute and 

 consume. Should distribution break down, no matter how ample the 

 supply the consumer is in want. I saw precisely this happen in the 

 early 1930's when there were heaps of unmarketed wheat in western 

 Kansas and bread lines a few hundred miles east of them. 



At the present time, to a degree never before known in history, 

 the fabrication of goods has been developed out of all proportion to 

 other phases of the sequence. The dynamic no longer comes solely 

 from the consumer and his urgent needs. Instead of this pull from 

 those who want, we now have a push from those who produce and 

 whose chief problem is disposal of what they have produced with 

 such facility. 



Man, whatever else he may be, is a biological organism. The se- 

 quence I have just mentioned reveals some interesting features in 

 terms of biological analysis. The process in nature from which it 

 derives is as follows: 



Materials and Energy (Sources) -» Organic Synthesis (Elaboration) 

 -^ Food Chain (Distribution) -> Utilization (Consumption) 



In nature, however, the process does not end there but is cyclic. It is 

 geared to the reuse of materials following utilization at a fairly stable 

 rate, so that, as Darwin long ago pointed out, species populations 

 remain fairly constant. 



What technological man has done is to introduce a vast change 

 into the tempo rather than the character of this cycle. He has, as we 

 have said, vastly speeded it up in the intermediate stages, while at 

 the same time through his dissipation of reserves, enormously slowed 

 it down at the phase of return for reuse. It is this inevitable trend of 

 human activity, rather than any transient inventory of resources or 

 any promise of new sources or technological expedients, that con- 

 cerns the ecologist so profoundly. 



But since physical analysis seems to be at present more convinc- 

 ing than biological, how does it apply to the sequence sketched 

 above? So far as we can tell, during the billion and a half years that 

 life has existed on earth the dynamic system approximated that 

 known as a steady state. Activated by the income of solar energy, a 



