THE VOICE OF THE DESERT 



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the term. If you go beyond that to the extent of trying to 

 learn how this scientific knowledge may be useful to man 

 in his struggle to feed himself well or to preserve his health, 

 then your interest is both scientific in the limited sense and 

 also "technological." But as soon as you take the next step 

 and begin to ask yourself not merely what immediate prac- 

 tical use can be made of known facts but also what they 

 suggest to the speculative mind about the potentialities 

 and limitations of living matter; as soon as you begin to 

 find yourself thinking of what the human mind cannot 

 help caUing the "intentions" and "the standards of value" 

 which nature pursues, then you have entered the realm 

 of the metabiological. 



Any consideration of evolution, for instance, becomes 

 metabiological as soon as it abandons a mere description 

 of the evolutionary process to permit itself to refer even 

 cautiously to "higher" and "lower" forms of life, to cele- 

 brate "growth" and "change" and "survival value" as moral 

 concepts; at that point the consideration has gone "be- 

 yond" the narrow limits of the science of biology and 

 become metaphysical, or metabiological, no matter what 

 you may prefer to call it. Similarly; ecology is narrowly 

 scientific when it merely describes the interrelations of 

 living things. It is narrowly technological when, it seeks to 

 learn only how forests can be preserved and farms kept 

 fertile through the application of our knowledge. And so 

 long as it is interested in nothing except "land manage- 

 ment," for instance, it remains just technological and noth- 

 ing more. But when it begins to develop what Aldo Leo- 

 pold called a "land ethic," then it is "beyond" either science 

 or technology because any sort of ethic is metaphysical 



