1 95 conservation is not enough 



grimly literal fact that unless we share this terrestrial 

 globe with creatures other than ourselves, we shall not be 

 able to live on it for long. 



You may, if you like, think of this as a moral law. But 

 if you are skeptical about moral laws, you cannot escape 

 the fact that it has its factual, scientific aspect. Every day 

 the science of ecology is making clearer the factual aspect 

 as it demonstrates those more and more remote interde- 

 pendencies which, no matter how remote they are, are cru- 

 cial even for us. 



Before even the most obvious aspects of the balance of 

 nature had been recognized, a greedy, self-centered man- 

 kind naively divided plants into the useful and the use- 

 less. In the same way it divided animals into those which 

 were either domestic on the one hand or *'game" on the 

 other, and the "vermin" which ought to be destroyed. 

 That was the day when extermination of whole species 

 was taken as a matter of corn's e and random introductions 

 which usually proved to be either complete failures or all 

 too successful were everywhere being made. Soon, how- 

 ever, it became evident enough that to rid the world of 

 vermin and to stock it with nothing but useful organisms 

 was at least not a simple task — if you assume that "useful" 

 means simply "immediately useful to man." 



Yet even to this day the ideal remains the same for most 

 people. They may know, or at least they may have been 

 told, that what looks like the useless is often remotely but 

 demonstrably essential. Out in this desert country they 

 may see the land being rendered useless by overuse. 

 They may even have heard how, when the mountain lion 

 is killed off, the deer multiply; how, when the deer mul- 

 tiply, the new growth of trees and slirubs is eaten away; 



