MAN AND NATURE
WITH the rapid industrialization of the world the need of the preservation of open spaces and of the protection of the lives of wild things grows constantly more urgent and presents problems of ever-increasing difficulty. What we are, perhaps, slow to recognize is that the process of industrialization itself is as irre- sistible as any other of the great evolutionary changes of past ages : as impossible to check as it would have been to prevent the development of vertebrate animals from the non-vertebrate or the growth of civilized man from the savage.
The history of evolution is the story of the coming into being, the multiplication and disappearance of successive species of living things. Some, we believe, disappeared because they were destroyed by other species which preyed upon them ; and the profound mistake which the German philosophers made was in supposing that this was the universal rule. Fitness to survive they imagined to be synonymous with ferocity and the strength to conquer ; a fallacy from which they would have been saved if they had considered the example of the ants and had learned that minute insects have continued to prosper and multiply when uncountable numbers of mightier species perished, and that among the most successful forms of vegetable life are some of the very frailest. Much more frequently species have succumbed to their inability to adapt themselves to new conditions, either of climate or food supply. Neither strength nor ferocity had anything to do with their failure. Size was often= a positive drawback.
Man at first had to fight his way to survival partly by the destruction of other animals ; but much more he has prospered by virtue of his intellect and ability to adapt himself to the varied conditions of his sur- roundings. Most conspicuously of all, for our present purpose, he himself changes those surroundings, modifies the environment, both for himself and all other creatures wherever he goes ; differing therein from all other living things, which (if we except some minute organisms like the coral insects) are content to live with nature as they find it, and whose influence on their environment is negligible. For the pioneer in a new country life is primarily a fight with the forces of nature. Forests must be uprooted and cleared ; the lesser vegetation destroyed by burning or ploughed under ; the wild things driven off the land and the land fenced against their return. Even if man with his weapons had never, either for food or sport, taken the life of a single wild animal, his mere occupation of the land must ulti- mately have wiped out the herds which peopled the prairies and the veld. The change which he is working in the conditions of life on the globe is hardly less than that wrought by the coming of the ice in -a Glacial Age. In his dispersion over the world, not yet completed, we see before our eyes the operation of one of the great phenomena which forge the links in the chain of evolu- tion, and it is only because it is under our eyes that we do not recognize it for what it is. Nor can mankind escape from doing what it is doing. It is, humanly speaking, predestined and inevitable.
Man, however, is equipped as no other thing or being, so far as we know, has yet been equipped, with an intelli- gence and a conscience. The ice felt no sorrow for the life which it extinguished ; nor were the early terrestrial mammals, presumably, deeply concerned at the dis- appearance of the dinosaurs. Even primitive man probably viewed the extermination of the last cave-bear or sabre-toothed tiger with a measure of equanimity. But civilized man, secure in his mastery of the, beasts, has come to feel a responsibility towards the creatures which are dependent for their lives on his forbearance ; and the better part of him is constantly at war with, and cries out in protest against, the results of his material activities. No day goes by in which we do not read some appeal to rescue this or that open space from the builder ; to save the wildcat or marten from extinction ; to protect the peregrine, kestrel or plover and its eggs ; to stop the extermination of orchids or primroses by the depredations of trippers. The latest appeal is for the salvation of certain kinds of butterflies.
All the things that we see in the British Isles, however; are but eddies in the sweep of the great current. Nothing that butterfly-collectors are doing in Great Britain approaches the slaughter of the lovely South American creatures whose wings make the "butterfly jewelry " of which shopfronts now are full. We have seen nothing here to compare with the persecution of the egret and birds of paradise, the mink, musquash and beaver, and of many another bird and mammal, for the sake of its feathers or its fur. The killing of fish by the pollution of our streams is trivial compared with the calamity threat- ened -by the defiling of the oceans with oil. From Africa come dreadful stories of the massacre of elephants. In every continent species after species of great animal is travelling surely to extinction. And every tale arouses our wrath and indignation : sentiments intensified by the knowledge of our helplessness.
Helpless we must be in the presence of a movement as irresistible and unpitying as some universal convulsion of nature ; and our helplessness is constantly brought home to us by our ignoranee of the details of the problem with which we are confronted. The wildcat and marten live by killing other creatures which we strive to protect. Every peregrine which, under our care, survives to its proper span of years kills and eats some thousands of lesser birds ; each black-backed gull accounts for its hundreds. There is no living thing, animal or vegetable, which does not prey upon or support the life of another ; and we, meddling with them at our peril, fumble clumsily trying to redress the balance which we are forever upset- , ting. It is as if some fragment of the ice writhed in agony at the desolation which it wrought. In the mass, mankind is but one of the blind forces which have been set to work out the development of the planet, to whatever end it may be tending, but individually our spiritual natures recoil in horror from the task that is appointed us.
Our intelligence, moreover, tells us that for our own sake we must modify, or at least delay, if we cannot avert, the result of our course. Selfish motives influence us in many minor details. We feel less sure that the peregrine needs protection when we consider how large a proportion of its victims are valuable horning pigeons. Our doubts about 'the gull are increased by the knowledge that it largely lives upon young grouse. But, though we may but dimly recognize it, there is a vastly larger interest at stake. We also are animals differing only in details of structure and acquired habit from the others ; and we live upon animal and vegetable foods as they do. The environment of bricks and mortar which we build up is, in its logical conclusion, as unsuited to us as it is to them ; and while we wipe out other things we are creating con- ditions fatal to ourselves. Access to nature, a renewal of our strength by contact with the earth, is as necessary to us as to any creature. In the degeneracy which marks a large part of the population of our larger cities we see the first stages of the road to extinction ; and the multi- tude of the appeals in behalf of the wild things, the intensity with which we strive to save this or that scrap of nature from the advancing tide of industrialization, is a measure of the awakening of our intelligences to the doom that we are working for ourselves. The cry for " more playing-fields " is only the utterance of the instinct of
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