Book Review : The Science and Politics in Ecology
The Machinery of Nature by Paul R. Ehrlich (Simon & Schuster: $18.95)
Ecology is the science of how life interacts with other life and with the physical world around it. There is no word in English that means “life and the physical world around it,” so the word ecology has been perverted somewhat to fill the void, as in, “DDT has harmed the ecology.”
There has been great demand for such a word because ecology also has political overtones. Starting with Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” a generation ago, society has become aware of the value of its fragile environment and of the need to protect it. In recent years, under a Republican administration, the pendulum has swung back some, and no longer are environmental interests routinely accepted over economic ones.
In any case, the various uses of ecology overlap because the science of ecology and the politics of environmentalism overlap, and there is something more than vaguely disquieting about that. To be sure, scientists should not ignore the non-scientific aspects of their work. But neither should they give the impression that the purpose of their scientific work is the furtherance of their political views.
For anyone who has ever wondered what ecologists do, “The Machinery of Nature” will amply satisfy the curiosity. Paul R. Ehrlich recounts much about the research that he has engaged in for three decades, and, in the process, describes how scientists go about doing what they do. The interested reader will find out how experiments are devised and carried out, how results are analyzed and how answers remain tentative and subject to disproof.
In 1959, Ehrlich began a limited demographic study of Bay checkerspot butterflies (a subspecies of Edith’s checkerspot butterflies) on the campus of Stanford University. That research has provided a significant portion of Ehrlich’s scientific work, and it continues.
Ecologists have made many fascinating discoveries about how life has evolved to fill niches in the biosphere and developed strategies for living. “Each of some 900 species of fig plant, for example, is pollinated by its own species of fig wasp,” Ehrlich tells us. Did you know that bears don’t really hibernate in the winter but that squirrels do? Did you know that a potato-eating fungus caused the Irish potato famine of 1848? Did you know that malaria is increasing through the world as mosquitoes that carry the disease and blood parasites that cause it have become resistant to pesticides and quinine?
Lively Debate
As in every science, more is unknown than is known, and there is lively debate among practitioners for and against proposed hypotheses for unexplained phenomena. No one knows why the tropics contain so many more species of all forms of life than the temperate zones do. No one knows why evolution has developed so many different ways of accomplishing the same ends. No one knows how important direct competition among species is in determining which are the fittest and will survive. As in all science, the more closely phenomena are studied, the more complex they become, and one doesn’t ask too many questions before coming up against the answer, “We don’t know.”
As science, the book is fine, though it is dryly written and lacks a sense of the motivations of the people involved. Still, if nature shows on television appeal to you, this book is likely to as well.
Ehrlich should have left it at that and not gone on to the political conclusions that the science leads him to. The tone clashes with the dispassionate tone of science that characterizes the heart of the book. Nuclear winter, for example, is a subject he starts with and ends with and comes back to many times. Once would have been enough to establish the importance of the threat to all living things posed by a thermonuclear exchange.
It really isn’t necessary to keep throwing in nuclear winter at every mention of how fragile is the biosphere and the chain of life. Everyone agrees that nuclear winter would be terrible. Everyone agrees, for that matter, that nuclear war would be terrible apart from its wintry consequences. What is to be done to prevent it? No one knows.
Ehrlich is also four-square against the pervasive use of pesticides to increase agricultural yields, preferring instead the system of integrated pest management, which uses both chemicals and natural predators to control unwanted insect populations. “Ecologists are now able to design programs of integrated pest management that avoid the pitfalls of the dominant spray-spray-spray programs beloved by the pesticide industry and its subsidiary, the United States Department of Agriculture,” Ehrlich writes.
“It remains to be seen whether people will gain the ecological wisdom required to constrain their growing power before their own life support systems are totally destroyed.” Yes, everyone could agree with that. It certainly does remain to be seen. Of course, we didn’t have to read a whole book to get to that point, but it was interesting reading along the way. The most interesting part was the science.
