-
2. War and Nature: Fairfield Osborn, William Vogt, and the Birth of Global Ecology
- Rutgers University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
36 2 The Furnace of War Malthusian worries about overpopulation-driven scarcities exploded in the United States after World War II, even more strongly than after World War I. “The ghost of a gloomy British clergyman, Thomas Robert Malthus, was on the rampage last week,” Time magazine announced in November 1948. “Cresting a wave of postwar pessimism, it flashed through the air on the radio [and] rode through the mails.” Publishers, Time went on, “opened their arms and presses to ‘Neo-Malthusian’ manuscripts prophesying worldwide overpopulation and hunger.” Time could also have pointed to the hundreds of newspaper articles on Malthus and overpopulation, the references to conservation in the 1948 presidential election, or the theme that editorial writers adopted for their annual conference in 1948: the “national problem of natural resources.” In 1948, the Economist noted, American Malthusianism had taken on the “virulence and high excitement of a fever.”1 No one exemplifies this Malthusian rampage better than Fairfield Osborn and William Vogt, two conservationists who, drawing from Aldo Leopold and Raymond Pearl, among others, published separate bestsellers in 1948 warning about overpopulation and resource scarcity. “The tide of the earth’s population is rising,” Osborn, the quirky director of the Bronx Zoo and New York Zoological Society, argued in Our Plundered Planet, and “the reservoir of the earth’s living War and Nature Fairfield Osborn, William Vogt, and the Birth of Global Ecology “Greater production is the key to prosperity and peace.” —President Harry Truman, Inaugural Address, 1949 “[I] wonder if we shouldn’t properly call production destruction and try to do something about it before we all starve to death.” —Angus McDonald, New Republic, 1948 WAR AND NATURE 37 resources is falling.” “Where human populations are so large that available land cannot decently feed, clothe, and shelter them,” Vogt, an outspoken ornithologist , wrote in Road to Survival, “man’s destructive methods of exploitation mushroom like the atomic cloud over Hiroshima.” Appearing within months of each other, these two books created a stir. “Glowingly reviewed and selling like hot cakes,” Time remarked, “Their influence has already reached around the world.”2 Strikingly, although Osborn and Vogt’s books focused on a traditional conservation concern—resources—they exhibited many features that would define the environmental movement of two decades later: a distrust of progress and human technology, a sense of apocalyptic urgency, and a focus on overconsumption , sustainability, and limits to growth. Indeed, at the heart of their thinking lay a set of ideas that many historians believe separated postwar “environmentalism ” from prewar “conservation”: ecology. Because of Our Plundered Planet and Road to Survival, one American editor noted in 1948, “citizens everywhere have been consulting dictionaries to learn the meaning of such words as ecology.” Ecology is the study of how organisms—including human beings— relate to and depend on the organisms and physical materials around them. “Man,” Osborn wrote, “has been, is now and will continue to be a part of nature’s general scheme.” Too many Americans, Vogt stressed, think “in compartments,” and therefore miss the “dynamic, ever-changing relationships between the actions of man and his total environment.” Ecology helped Osborn and Vogt highlight the imbalance of people with resources that Malthus had outlined, yet emphasize a part of Malthus’s thought that others overlooked: an understanding of environmental degradation. Man is not just running short of resources, Osborn noted, he “is destroying his own life sources.” Vogt and Osborn articulated these proto-environmental views—and found a broad audience for them—fifteen years before the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the book historians normally credit with launching the “age of ecology.”3 At the time, however, many of the problems most associated with the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s—pesticides, radioactive fallout, suburban sprawl, roadside litter, and polluted streams—were almost unknown. Instead, Osborn and Vogt’s ecological focus on human society must be seen in the larger political and social context of the Great Depression and especially World War II. Concern about war was crucial, as it had been for East, Pearl, and Leopold. Extending the lessons of wildlife ecology developed in the previous two decades by scientists such as Leopold and Charles Elton to the human world of poverty and war, Osborn and Vogt blamed World War II on overpopulation and overexploitation of nature, and offered a strong warning about the new world order emphasizing consumption and economic growth that was emerging under America’s growing dominance. They stressed...