The first mistake is to think of mankind as a thing in itself. It isn’t. It is part of an intricate web of life. And we can’t think even of life as a thing in itself. It isn’t. It is part of the intricate structure of a planet bathed by energy from the Sun.
The Earth, in the nearly 5 billion years since it assumed approximately its present form, has undergone a vast evolution. When it first came into being, it very likely lacked what we would today call an ocean and an atmosphere. These were formed by the gradual outward movement of material as the solid interior settled together.
Nor were ocean, atmosphere, and solid crust independent of each other after formation. There is interaction always: evaporation, condensation, solution, weathering. Far within the solid crust there are slow, continuing changes, too, of which hot springs, volcanoes, and earth-quakes are the more noticeable manifestations here on the surface.
Between 2 billion and 3 billion years ago, portions of the surface water, bathed by the energetic radiation from the Sun, developed complicated compounds in organization sufficiently versatile to qualify as what we call “life”. Life forms have become more complex and more various ever since.
But the life forms are as much part of the structure of the Earth as any inanimate portion is. It is all an inseparable part of a whole. If any animal is isolated totally from other forms of life, then death by starvation will surely follow. If isolated from water, death by asphyxiation will follow still faster. If isolated from the Sun, animals will survive for a time, but plants would die, and if all plants died, all animal would starve.
It works in reverse, too, for the inanimate portion of Earth is shaped and molded by life. The nature of the atmosphere has been changed by plant activity (which adds to the air the free oxygen it could not otherwise retain). The soil is turned by earthworms, while enormous ocean reefs are formed by coral.
The entire planet, plus solar energy, is one enormous intricately interrelated system. The entire planet is a life form made up of nonliving portions and a large variety of living portions (as our own body is made up of nonliving crystals in bones and nonliving water in blood, as well as of a large variety of living portions).
In fact, we can pursue the analogy. A man is of 50 trillion cells of a variety of types, all interrelated and interdependent. Loss of some of those cells, such as those making up an entire, will seriously handicap all the rest of the organism: serious damage to a relatively few cells in an organ, such as the heart or kidneys, may end by killing all 50 trillion.
In the same way, on planetary scale, the chopping down of an entire forest may not threaten Earth’s life in general, but it will produce serious changes in the life forms of the region and even in the nature of the water runoff and, therefore, in the details of geological structure. A serious decline in the bee population will affect the numbers of those plants that depend on bees for fertilization, then the numbers of those animals that depend on those particular bee-fertilized plants, and so on.
Or consider cell growth. Cells in those organs that suffer constant wear and tear—as in the skin or in the intestinal lining—grow and multiply all life long. Other cells, not so exposed, as in nerve and muscle, do not multiply at all in the adult, under any circumstances. Still other organs, ordinarily quiescent, as liver and bone, stand ready to grow if that is necessary to replace damage. When the proper repairs are made, growth stops.
In a much looser and more flexible way, the same is true of die “planet organism” (which we study in the science called ecology). If cougars grow too numerous, the deer they live on are decimated, and some of the cougars die of starvation, so that their “proper number” is restored. If too many cougars die, then deer multiply with particular rapidity, and cougars multiply quickly in turn, till the additional predators bring down the number of deer again. Barring interference from outside, the eaters and the eaten retain their proper numbers, and both are the better for it.
The neat economy of growth within an organism such as a human being is sometimes—for what reason, we know not—disrupted, and a group of cells begins growing without limit. This is the dread disease of cancer, and unless that growing group of cells is somehow stopped, the wild growth will throw all the body structure out of true and end by killing the organism itself.
In ecology, the same would happening if, for some reason, one particular type of organism began to multiply without limit, killing its competitors and increasing its own food supply at the expense of that of others. That, too, could end in the destruction of the larger system—most or all of life and even of certain aspects of the inanimate environment.
And this is exactly what is happening at this moment. For thousands of years, the single species Homo sapiens, to which you and I have the dubious honor of belonging, has been increasing in numbers. In the past couple of centuries, the rate of increase has itself increased explosively.
At the time of Julius Caesar, when Earth’s human population is estimated to have been 150 million, that population was increasing at rate that it would double in 1000 years if that rate remained steady. Today, with Earth’s population estimated at about 4000 million, it is increasing at a rate which, if steady, will cause it to double in 35 years.
The present rate of increase of Earth’s swarming human population qualifies as an ecological cancer, which will destroy the ecology just as surely as any ordinary cancer would destroy an organism.
The cure? Just what it is for any cancer. The cancerous growth must somehow be stopped.
Of course, it will be. If we do nothing at all, the growth will stop, as a cancerous growth in a man will stop if nothing is done. The man dies and the cancer dies with it.
How can the human population explosion be stopped? By raising the death rate or by lowering the birthrate. There are no other alternatives. The death rate will rise spontaneously and finally catastrophically, if we do nothing—and that within a few decades. To make the birth rate fall, somehow, is surely preferable, and that is therefore the first order of mankind’s business today.
Failing this, mankind would stand at the bar of abstract justice as the mass murderer of life generally, his own included, and mass disrupter of the intricate planetary development that made life in its present glory possible in the first place.
1. According to the article, which of the following statements is true?
2. According to the author, the analogy between the entire planet and the human body is based on all of the following EXCEPT ______.
3. According to the article, what is NOT true about the population in the world?
4. In “Failing this, mankind would stand at the bar of abstract justice” (last paragraph), which of the following does “this” refer to?
5. “The neat economy of growth within organism” (12th paragraph) means ______.
