THE VOICE OF THE DESERT 



196 



and how, when the hills are denuded, a farm or a section 

 of grazing land many miles away is washed into gulleys 

 and made incapable of supporting either man or any other 

 of the large animals. They may even have heard how the 

 wonderful new insecticides proved so effective that fish 

 and birds died of starvation; how on at least one Pacific 

 island insects had to be reintroduced to pollinate the 

 crops; how when you kill off almost completely a destruc- 

 tive pest, you run the risk of starving out everything which 

 preys upon it and thus run the risk that the pest itself 

 will stage an overwhelming comeback because its natural 

 enemies are no more. Yet, knowing all this and much 

 more, their dream is still the dream that an earth for 

 man's use only can be created if only we learn more and 

 scheme more effectively. They still hope that nature's 

 scheme of checks and balances which provides for a varied 

 population, which stubbornly refuses to scheme only from 

 man s point of view and cherishes the weeds and "vermin" 

 as persistently as she cherishes him, can be replaced by a 

 scheme of his own devising. Ultimately they hope they can 

 beat the game. But the more the ecologist learns, the less 

 likely it seems that man can in the long run do anything 

 of the sort. 



"Nature's social union" is by no means the purely gen- 

 tle thing which Burns imagined. In fact it is a balance, 

 with all the stress and conflict which the word implies. In 

 this sense it is not a "social union" at all. But it is, never- 

 theless, a workable, seesawing balance. And when it ceases 

 to seesaw, there is ti'ouble ahead for whatever is on the 

 end that stays up, as well as for those on the end which 

 went down. 



