THE VOICE OF THE DESERT 



204 



extent to whicli we can exercise a biological control ex- 

 clusively in our own interest, then it is certainly worth- 

 while to ask how we might know when we are approach- 

 ing that Hmit. 



It will hardly do to say simpily that the limit has been 

 passed when a society is obviously sick. Too many differ- 

 ent reasons have been given to explain that sickness, and 

 several of them can be made to seem more or less con- 

 vincing — indeed, several of them may be partially correct. 

 But there is a criterion which it seems to me not wholly 

 fanciful to apply. 



Might it not have something to do with nature's own 

 great principle, live and let live? Might it not be that 

 man's success as an organism is genuinely a success so 

 long, but only so long, as it does not threaten the extinc- 

 tion of everything not useful to and absolutely controlled 

 by him; so long as that success is not incompatible with 

 the success of nature as the varied and free thing which 

 she is; so long as, to some extent, man is prepared to 

 share the earth with others? 



If by any chance that criterion is vahd, then either one 

 of two things is likely to happen. Perhaps outraged nature 

 will violently reassert herself and some catastrophe, per- 

 haps the catastrophe brought about when more men are 

 trying to hve in our limited space than even their most ad- 

 vanced technology can make possible, will demonstrate 

 the hollowness of his supposed success. Perhaps, on the 

 other hand, man himself will learn in time to set a reason- 

 able limit to his ambitions and accept the necessity of 

 recognizing his position as the most highly evolved of liv- 

 ing creatures but not, therefore, entitled to assume that 



