Humane Environment

The Board of IdT strongly believes a humane environment ranks high among the "other" unalienable rights not specifically enumerated in the Declaration of Independence. This is the third of eleven added by the IdT Board to Jefferson's "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Jefferson's three, plus "health" and "privacy," have been handled in previous issues of We The People. The remaining eight added by the IdT Board will be covered, in future issues. (Editor)

The factors of the human environment are divided into three categories. The first includes the physical, biological, and edaphic factors that apply to all of the animal world. The second includes the factors of language and language-based technology that apply to the human world.. The third category covers moral and ethical factors, which can transform the human society into a humane society.

The Factors

The physical factors are light, heat, atmosphere, water, gravity, etc. The biological factors are communal living, predators (wild and human), microorganisms, plants, etc. The edaphic factors are related to soil and the substrate. Much of what we eat is grown in soil. In many parts of the world some of the most important pathogens are soil borne. The animal environment reflects the ecology of Homo sapiens, another animal.

The human environment, unlike the environment of the rest of the biological world, also has the factors associated with language and language-based technology. Of these latter factors, education is the most important since it is the gateway to language which, in turn, is the entrance to all human knowledge and technology.

The third set of factors—morality and ethics—as noted, can change the human environment into a humane environment. Morality and ethics based upon animal behavior is the law of the talon—Lex Talionis, dog-eat-dog, or king-on-the-hill. It is based on the phenomenon of territoriality in animal behavior. Morality based upon property values is the system, more or less, on which our society is currently based—"Thou Shall Not Steal". Property based morality is founded on the contract and the future. The system of morality to which IdT subscribes is based upon the unalienable rights, which when attained by all citizens sovereign will lead to humane morality.

The environment of humans includes all these factors. All the factors are important and they all operate simultaneously as a system. If any one of the factors changes it tends to change all other factors. The humane environment promotes the health and well being of its human inhabitants. It gives them a feeling of security and well being within which they can find comfort. The humane environment begins in the womb.

In the Womb

When I was growing up, we thought the fetus was totally isolated and insulated from the outside world. The amniotic membrane and the placenta were the wonderful guardians of the womb and prevented all the bad influences of the outside world from reaching the fetus. We began to suspect strongly that this was wrong when the Rh blood factor was discovered and we realized that the fetus could be fatally injured by the mother's blood. We now know that many substances are transported across the membrane of the placenta and enter the fetus' blood stream. We should have known all along: Where else would the fetus get the nutrition needed to survive, grow, and develop?

A Poisonous Environment

A fetus developing in a chemically poisonous environment experiences severe development problems. The brain can be permanently injured; limbs can be deformed, eyesight, speech, and muscular development can be impaired. The list goes on. Children born to mothers addicted to alcohol and/or crack cocaine are exposed to these risks. Children born to mothers with AIDS (most of whom contract the disease from shooting drugs) are going to die sooner rather than later. Most mothers with AIDS contract the disease from shooting drugs. Drugs are the most obvious pre-natal threats. There are others more subtle but also threatening such as the use of tobacco and improper nutrition.

When we talk about conception and pre-natal development we are talking about starting conditions. We know that what appear to be minor changes in starting conditions can have profound changes in the end product. The genetic apparatus for the most part has instructions for healthy babies. Some genes have been altered by mutation or other cause and may result in faulty pre-natal development, but most genes are okay. As the genetic material is chemical, it can be affected by chemicals. Some chemicals are mutagenic and can cause cancer. Some chemicals are terrigenic (terri = terrible = monster) and they produce miscarriages or genetically deformed babies. These chemicals cause the development process to go awry with tragic or fatal consequences. The fatalities are tragic but of little biological consequence to the species since that is the end of it. Live births that have been abused prenatally pose severe burdens on their parents and society, since in most cases the births result in persons who will require great time and expense to keep alive. Once these babies are born the society has no choice—they must be cared for. Fortunately for society as a whole, most parents are willing to do whatever they have to in order to care for prenatally handicapped children. The tragedy is that alcohol and crack syndrome babies are born at all; women who are alcohol or cocaine dependent should not get pregnant in the first place. A program of women's health would get to these women with effective contraceptives. If these women should become pregnant in spite of all, the same program should get to them with a contragestive, and if necessary, mechanical abortion.

I said in the discussion on health that the focus of our nation's health program should be young women and their children. I reiterate that here. The major focus of medicine should be women and their children, pre- and post-natal. This would be the most efficient investment we could make in medicine. Secondarily the rest of us should have adequate medical care.

In the Home

Outside the womb the next critical environment is the home. Here I am assuming that people have homes, although today this is not a valid assumption, as so many people are homeless.

The home is a physical environment and one that is especially critical for small children, since they may lack judgment to discern the hazards in their environment. Of course the home environment is important for everyone who lives in it. Some potential hazards in the home environment are cited below.

The kitchen stove may produce carbon monoxide and the nitrogen oxides...the first from incomplete combustion of carbon-containing fuels, the second in the high temperature flames of the average cook stove. In a high temperature flame, the nitrogen of the atmosphere (78% of air is nitrogen) which is normally non-reactive will unite with the oxygen of the air (20% by volume) and produce nitrogen oxides which are toxic.

Parents who smoke in the home expose themselves, their non-smoking spouses, and their children to the stimulant effects of nicotine and to the cancer-producing tars and other chemicals of the burning tobacco. The second inhaler of cigarette smoke is at risk for emphysema and lung cancer just as is the primary smoker.

The use of lead based paints in the home is an invitation to lead poisoning, particularly for children who have a tendency to mouth, bite, chew, and eat things from their immediate surroundings. Toxic chemical and cleaners in the home, usually in a closet under the sink within easy reach of children, also pose significant threats.

Fashionable houses with expensive wallpaper or with expensive painting may expose their owners to arsenic, chromium, and other toxic heavy metals. With the use of new plastic and synthetic materials, we are subject to new threats from the new furniture and carpeting we buy. Headaches frequently arise from the contamination of the home by chemicals used to size, dye, or treat the fabric of our new furniture or rugs.

Under the Kitchen Sink

Under the kitchen sink, in most homes, is a veritable armamentarium of death-dealing chemicals: caustic cleaners, pesticides, detergents, soaps, silver polish, and other poisonous substances all within easy reach of children. The family liquor closet, while the hallmark of many successful families, is also the source of addicting drugs that may adversely affect adults and children alike.

The Home as Hazard

The house itself can contribute to good or bad environment. Steep, narrow steps or deep pile carpeting on stairs are constant hazards. Bathroom showers with glass doors pose danger to the unwary. Low window sills on second story windows are inadvertant invitations to falls. Poorly installed or overloaded electrical circuits pose electrical shock and fire hazards. The tools, particularly the power tools, in a doit-yourself household pose grave dangers to the untrained user. Carelessly stored firearms are often the lethal toys of unsuspecting children, as well as the weapon of choice of the angry or infuriated householder. Most murders are committed by people who are on close or intimate terms with their victims.

Among the greatest hazards of the home are abusing parents, spouses or siblings. Neither child nor spouse abuse is confined to any one social group but occurs at all levels of society. Abused children grow up to be abusing parents and abusing spouses. The abuse can be pyschological but more often is physical brutality, and too often leads to death. Most murderers are the children of abusing parents.

Technology in the Home

Our homes, neighborhoods, places of employment, cities, the whole world of our common being are technological systems. Humankind has imposed cultural and technological systems onto a biological system and we call it human society. Most of the things we take for granted in our daily lives are technological devices or systems of devices that we employ for our benefit. These technological devices, mechanisms, and processes differ from those of the biological world because they have their basis in human language not in genetics, as is the case with the rest of the biological world. As humans, we have our genesis and operating basis in genetics. However, we bought our kitchen table, telephone, television, and automobile. These items did not produce themselves as we, or as the lettuce in our salad, the meat in our hamburger, the cotton in our clothes, the leather in our shoes, the wood pulp of our newspaper did.

We have to be careful to distinguish the natural biological world from the natural technological world. The biological world is governed by genetics, our technological world by language. Language, written and spoken, whether as words, music, or mathematics, is the "genetics" of our society, whereas DNA contains the "language" of our genes. Humans have used language and technology to change the environment of the earth to suit themselves. Through technology humans have reduced the death rate but have yet to seriously tackle the problem of the ensuing increased birth rate. Population is a biological problem caused by technology. A humane solution to the population problem is possible with humane technology. (The secret ingredient to the humane solution to the population problem is the education of women, worldwide.) A humane technology considers not only the impact on the natural, genetically controlled environment, but is also benign in terms of the humans in the system. Environments designed for the operation of technology, without regard for their impacts on humans, are potentially damaging and hazardous to human life.

The Culturally Enriched Home

All homes must provide the basic needs of comfort, well-being and security. Clean, well kept, tidy homes that have space adequate to the needs of the inhabitants will meet the requirements for humans as biological entities. Technological humans have more than just biological needs—they have cultural, (art, the humanities, music, literature, religion) needs as well. In our society, poor home environments are culturally impoverished. Good home environments are culturally enriched. Culture is another name for language and language-based technology. A culturally enriched home imparts positive societal values and norms so that the young internalize them and have a baseline upon which to make judgements. It also has cultural artifacts that gratify the quest for learning, satisfy as entertainment, fulfill the needs of efficient living, please the senses, and provide contentment. A culturally enriched home is designed and equipped to provide service throughout the entire human life span, benefits adults as well as children.

The Culturally Enriched Home

The culturally enriched home complements the school system, and supplements all other cultural institutions of the society, such as the libraries, museums, art galleries, theater (movies and stage), concert hall or the rock festival. The culturally enriched home provides distinct advantages for the education of the young and their incorporation into the work force of the society. All citizens sovereign should be able to live in culturally enriched homes as a normal part of living in a humane environment. The culturally enriched home also is the environment for the acquisition of moral and ethical values. This latter process can be assisted by church, school, the Boy and Girl Scouts, etc., but moral and ethical values have to be rooted in the home as part of the humane environment in order to be effectively transmitted.

What constitutes a culturally enriched home environment? First of all, educated parents. Parents who are not only educated to make a living, although that would be great for starters, but educated in parenting, and homemaking, as well as in art, literature, history, science—natural, physical, and social, and health and sports. This education need not be obtained in a formal setting, but parents must acquire reading and writing skills, and be able to obtain information from common sources at hand—TV, radio, newspapers, magazines and books, either borrowed from the public library or purchased. Records and tapes make the entire world of art and literature available, again either through borrowed tapes and records from the local library or friends or through purchase. Transmitting the love of our culture is not just the job of the schools, but is a function of the home and the society at large.

What Makes Neighborhoods?

The bulk of the nation's population lives in villages, towns, and cities—urban and suburban. The rest live in rural America. Almost everybody lives in communities of one sort or another.

The term community, while having universal recognition and acceptance, is nonetheless quite difficult to define either from a biological or a social point of view. In reality the terms "community" and "neighborhood" are best used in context, without any attempt to employ a precise definition as we all know what we mean when we say community and neighborhood. Put ecologically the words have usefulness because they are vague and can apply to many circumstances. For instance, I live in an urban neighborhood in Washington, DC, we also have a farm in a rural community in Ohio, and we have neighbors in both places. Humans manipulate environmental factors to suit themselves, factors affecting life requirements as well as the requirements of technology.

Humans tend to organize their lives around institutions and social processes. Family, education, work, leisure, worship and marketing are perhaps the commonest elements that structure human lives.

We lived in a neighborhood in Bethesda, Maryland, not too far from the Naval Medical Center when we first moved to the Washington area. Our children were bussed to school and the neighborhood had no sidewalks, even though it was an old neighborhood by Washington suburban standards. The kids were cooped up on the bus, they were repressed at school, and when they got home they hit the place like a cyclone. When we moved to a more permanent residence, we insisted on a location where the children could walk to school. It made a big difference. Neighborhoods are often thought of as the area limited by the walking distance to the local elementary school.

Organized Around Work

In the middle ages entire villages and sections of cities were organized around work. Leonardo da Vinci had a plan for the city of Milan that would divide the city like a pie with each section organized around a different trade or occupation. Rural Villages still service farm communities in modern times, as they did in ancient times. These working districts of old are now some of the most desirable city addresses. Since they were organized around work, all services are near at hand. Many central areas of cities that were abandoned during the "white flight" of the 1940s and 1950s now are being gentrified and are desirable exactly because they have many of the same characteristics of the working districts—shopping and marketing, restaurants, and services within walking distance of residences.

Suburban sprawl is organized around schools and shopping centers. Life in the inner city is possible without an automobile, but life in suburbia is impossible without an automobile.

Churches act as another community organizer, particularly in rural areas. The area served by the church may be larger than walking distances since churches serve people at all levels of the society and from all walks of life. Many churches have organizational efforts to involve their members in social and recreational activities as a means of solidifying them as a religious community.

Humane Neighborhoods

Human communities, settlements, or neighborhoods are humane to the extent that the inhabitants are able to exercise their unalienable rights. In many places such exercise is not possible. Crime, poverty, pestilence, and deprivation are all too common in the United States as well as in the rest of the world. In many common measures of well-being, such as infant mortality and health care, the United States lags behind most of the developed world. It shares with the Union of South Africa the distinction of being one of the only two developed nations without national health care.

Drugs are Changing the World

Drugs have made a shambles of many neighborhoods in the major cities of the country. Joblessness, poverty, and ineffective education have teamed up to make the environments of these neighborhoods hostile and dangerous. Drug-related murders are committed in the District of Columbia at the rate of more than one a day. It is not that the government, local, State or Federal is unable to understand the problem. These governments are unable to cope with the reality of widespread corruption, including cocaine addicts on the police force, a cocaine using mayor, and the vast amounts of money associated with drug trafficking. Alcohol changed the world of our immediately preceding generations, and drugs are changing our world. While alcohol changed the United States, drugs are changing the world.

The automobile changed the world also. Before the automobile the fastest individual transportation was the horse. The train replaced the carriage and the wagon. Other than these there were river boats and ocean-going vessels. Mass individual transportation with millions of people in automobiles is a phenomenon of the late 20th Century. The automobile has had a profound influence on the way we live and where we work and how we recreate. The jury is out on whether the bad aspects of the automobile outweigh the good aspects, but it is certain that the automobile is not an unmixed blessing since, for starters, it is responsible for more urban pollution than any other single source.

Everyone has the right to live in a wholesome, clean, safe community or neighborhood—rural or urban. Everyone has the right to work in a safe work place.

The Urban Environment

What makes the urban environment humane are its dimensions and the activities that take place in it. If the urban environment is scaled in size to humans it has a good chance of being humane. If the urban ecology is scaled to modern technology there is a high probability that it will be inhuman. The industrial areas of old cities make attractive, safe, and humane environments today because the old cities had human-scaled industry with habitations and services readily at hand. When the old industry was phased out because of industrial progress what was left was the habitation with its services. If the people living in such an area can support themselves by work in the locale or can commute to and from such a neighborhood, they will have the benefit of living in a community scale-sized to human beings. These neighborhoods are highly sought after places in which to live. Georgetown in Washington, DC is such a neighborhood. Most towns and villages in rural America fit such specifications until real estate developers move the business areas of such towns to the outskirts where mini-malls and parking lots can accommodate people and their cars.

Four-lane, separated highways as an environment are hostile to anything except high speed automotive traffic. If the human guidance system is not adequately functional or protected it can perish as a result of miscalculation or misjudgment. Humans, animals, birds, or slow moving traffic such as bicycles are completely out of place in such a system and pose lethal hazards to themselves and the operators of the automobiles. Granting safe, alert operation of vehicles, the superhighway is benign to automobiles. But who does not know that size is a matter of great importance on a super highway even with high speed vehicles? Who wants to dispute the road with a high speed 16-wheeler? In any event, environments such as high speed highways are not compatible with humans on foot, nor anything less than an automobile in good working condition.

Impact of Technology

Industrial areas are not humane environments. Again it is technology that is being accommodated, not humans. The result is that industrial areas can be hazardous to humans. It is a repetition of the auto. Industrial areas are dominated by machinery that may or may not be operated by humans. These places were not built to serve human needs; they were built to serve the needs of machinery with humans serving as links between the machines. New automated factories need only a few humans to set the machines right when they go astray—they also are not humane environments.

Technological ecosystems should provide environments for machinery and industrial processes as well as to provide requirements for humans. This means that our technological ecosystems have to provide habitat for humans—comfort, well-being, and security, as well as the amenities of language-based technology, i.e., culture. The humane technological ecosystem will satisfy all these requirements and benignly produce wealth as well.

The natural world, the world without technology, the world driven by self-generating, self-regulating genetic, biological, chemical, and physical decision systems pose some but not great hazard from pollution, toxic wastes, and hazardous substances. Pollution, by definition, is technology generated, but some natural environmental systems are dangerous. For instance on the Yellowstone Plateau certain springs have great concentrations of arsenic, enough to fatally poison a person casually drinking from the springs. Also in the same area is radioactivity of such magnitude that ground squirrels if splayed over a piece of film will make a radiograph of themselves. The vents of volcanos, such as those found on the island of Hawaii, contain enough sulfur oxides to be toxic. People haven't died as a result of exposure to the volcanic fumes, but the fumes do cause headache and nausea. It is because the fumes can be avoided that they are relatively harmless.

In contrast, much in the way of industrial, automotive, and agricultural pollution cannot be avoided except at great personal cost. The air pollution in Mexico City can be avoided by not going to the city. For the 14 million people who live there it is unavoidable. The single most important cause of this toxicity—the exhaust from automobiles.

The people living along the Ohio River in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, get their water from sand beds under the river. When oil or toxic substance spills occur in the river, the immediate water supply of hundreds of thousands of people is directly affected. This pollution is difficult to avoid. Toxic chemical waste dumps that contaminate ground water and, subsequently, drinking water supplies are difficult to avoid. Toxic substances—pesticides—that are applied to agricultural crops and then find their way into the food supply are difficult to avoid. Steroids that are used to stimulate the growth of food animals and that persist in the meat are difficult to avoid. The textbook of entomology that I used as a student listed the acceptable limits of arsenic and lead on apples which could be legally marketed. As a student I worked summers on a Japanese beetle control project that used DDT by the ton to control the beetle. The previous program treated the soil in which the Japanese beetle grub lived with as much as 1000 pounds of arsenic per acre. A harmless beetle pheromone (sex hormone) will trap the beetles out of extensive areas and successfully control the beetle, leaving the food products fit to eat.

Global Import

We know that industrial activity, including personal transportation, can affect our immediate environment detrimentally. What do these technological systems do to the global system—the biosphere? We got our first concrete evidence that the atmosphere was a single system when radioactive fallout from atmospheric atom bomb testing was carried around the world in the Earth's atmosphere. The presence of DDT in the Waddell seal, a pelagic species, told us that DDT could move through the ecosystems of the lands and seas. The smoke from the burning of high sulfur coal in the midwest of the United States is carried to Earth as acid precipitation—wet and dry, rain and dust. Acid rain has killed lakes in New England and Canada. Freon and freon-like substances used as aerosol propellants and as the working fluid of refrigerators has migrated to the upper atmosphere where it is causing the loss of ozone. The ozone of the upper atmosphere acts as a shield, absorbing large quantities of ultra violet light, which would otherwise penetrate to the Earth's surface. Ultra-violet light is ionizing. It can strip the electrons off molecules causing them to be reactive. One of the consequences of ultra-violet radiation is skin cancer. Another effect may be to destroy the photosynthetic apparatus of the terrestrial green plants. As for human cancer, broad brimmed hats and sunglasses might suffice, as a recent Secretary of the Interior suggested, but in case of green plants the answer will not be that simple and the results could be catastrophic for all terrestrial life on Earth. The burning of fossil fuels has added to the atmosphere gases (the so-called "greenhouse" gases) that trap infrared radiation near the Earth, causing the temperature of the Earth to rise.

We have stopped using DDT; we have confined nuclear testing to underground sites, although we have lots and lots of nuclear waste from power plants to dispose of. Acid rain is still a problem and so are the uses of freon and the accumulation of gases causing global warming. There is a move in United States agriculture to reduce pesticide use. This should be considerably encouraged by the U.S. Department of Agriculture with substantial money for research and demonstration. Propellants from aerosols have been devised that do not destroy the ozone layer. Less progress has been made with freon or refrigeration. Although the evidence is pretty compelling on acid rain, few politicians will own up to the problem and we as a nation have not made much progress on solving the problem. The production of greenhouse gases continues unabated and the problem of reducing them seems to boggle our best minds.

Pollution is no Longer a Local Problem

Pollution, through the ages, may have been a problem, but in the past it was a local problem since no enterprise or combinations of enterprises could inflict sufficient insult to the environment to be felt outside immediate neighbor hoods. Today we have industry and transportation systems that can inflict environmental insults that can be felt around the world. Acid rain and global warming are not local problems. The major problem has been the failure to recognize the true nature and magnitude of industrial pollution. We have focused upon the productivity of industrial activity, neglecting the disproductive nature of the waste products of industry and technological development. Treatment of human sewage is in the same category. We are proud of our steel mills, aircraft, and automobile factories. We brag about how many telephones we all have and about our dishwashers, refrigerators, and everything else that contributes to our life style. The waste and pollution was swept under the rug. Well, now the rug isn't big enough and the waste and pollution are beginning to affect our daily lives. Each summer in Washington, we live through pollution alerts when the pollutant level is so high, usually because of an inversion trapping auto emissions, that people with respiratory problems are warned to stay indoors. This is not a benign environment, nor is it humane.

Waste Management

Solving acid rain will cost money, either for efficient scrubbers to remove the pollutants from the smoke stack or to use "clean" fuel. Using clean fuel may help acid rain but it will not help with global warming. For global warming we have to reduce fossil fuel use or trap the greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide in non-gaseous form at the surface of the Earth or in the depth of the oceans. The peculiar nature of these problems is exemplified by disposable diapers and other plastic materials. The Minneapolis city council passed a law mandating the use of recyclable (glass) or biodegradable (paper) containers. The reason was that the landfills were filling too rapidly and space for waste disposal was becoming scarce. The diapers were estimated to persist for at least two hundred years in a land fill. If you want to avert global warming that's what's needed—carbon compounds trapped on the Earth. If you are looking for land fill space, you want biodegradability which adds carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

Waste Management is Big

In order to use the environment in a humane fashion, we have to realize that waste management and pollution abatement are of the same order of magnitude as our basic industries. Nothing less. Waste management is not something the Boy Scouts do on Saturday morning. I do not want to denigrate the Boy Scouts, but the disposal of newsprint, for instance, requires plants and equipment equivalent to that which produced the original newsprint. Anything less will not solve the problem. A plant to process used newspapers into newsprint costs $300 million, the same as a plant to process logs into paper. We have not admitted that we have built only half of our technological ecosystem, the productive half. We now have yet to build the re-productive half. Every waste product from one process has to be the raw product of a different process. We have to reclaim metals from our wastes before we mine more. This has been done with steel production for decades where scrap is a regular part of the recipe for making steel. We must extend the concept to all other aspects of our industrial and manufacturing world.

Errors Type 1 and Type 2

Consider global warming as our example in learning about these errors. The best way to examine the global warming problem is to consider it in the light of type 1-type 2 errors. A type 1 error is one where you assume the proposition is false when it may, in fact, be true. For global warming it would be to say there is no effect or negligible effect from the greenhouse gases and global warming is not important, when in fact it really is. A type 2 error is one where you assume the proposition is true when in fact it is false. With global warming it would be the same as saying that global warming will have significant effects when in fact this may not be true. The question is: What are the expected behaviors from these two approaches?

In the type one error you do nothing, because you don't believe you have to and you suffer the consequences of global warming—sea level rise, change of climate whatever. In the type two error, if you believe, you will mount a program to avert global warming. This program will take the form of (1) forestation and reforestation (save the tropical rain forest and plant trees everywhere); (2) energy conservation (don't use as much fossil fuel, use more catalytic combustion); (3) development of alternative energy sources, especially solar, but also geothermal, low-head hydroelectric, heat from the ocean, etc.; (4) cessation of ocean dumping; (5) use of more wood and plastic structural materials for permanent structures (houses and other kinds of buildings that will have a life of decades if not centuries); and (6) anything else you can think of. It should be obvious that the measures taken in the type 2 example are things that should be done whether the Earth is heating up or not. The type 2 error choice is manifestly the superior choice. It will in the long run favor the environment, which in turn will be beneficial to humankind. We don't need to know if the Earth is really warming up or not to make this analysis. It is independent of the facts, and is based only on desirable outcomes.

In each instance where pollution has been identified as causing harm to the environment, the argument is raised that if we quit polluting it will (1) raise costs and (2) put people out of work. The people in industry who raise these points have vested interests they are protecting, in many cases mindlessly, since in the end the consumer pays the bill whatever it is. American consumers have repeatedly said that they would pay higher prices for a healthy environment. The same people in industry, when offered an opportunity to increase profits through higher technology, have no compunction in laying people off, closing factories, or in any other way, manipulating the lives of employees.

Let's Imitate Nature

The humane environment is a healthy environment. A humane environment is one which is self-sustaining and self-regulating. Since much of what goes on in nature is the result of basic physics, chemistry, genetics, biology, and ecology, nature does not need instructions from technological humans to do its thing. Humans on the other hand can learn quite a bit about how to run a technological ecosystem from nature. The difference in the technological ecosystem is that man has to consciously run It. But, run it for whose benefit—machinery or people? If we realize that the technological systems differ only in not having innate, inherent genetic instructions, we will begin to see our role more clearly. Ecosystems do not run in straight lines. They have feedback loops and cycles. They are graded in order of magnitude and they fit one into another. There is no waste in natural ecosystems; there are products, raw products, by-products, and end products, but no waste.

• We have to look at our own ecosystems in this same light, and we have to take the time and energy to design them to imitate nature, to be so like nature that it would seem that they operate with genetic instructions.

• Most of all we have to view the management of the resources of the Earth in a much more humble spirit that we have been accustomed to doing. Conquering nature is idiocy. Living with nature is wisdom. Exerting dominion over processes we do not understand is foolhardy and egotistic to an extreme. Being prepared to be surprised by the complexity and wonder of nature is to view genetic information and wisdom with the meekness that will foster understanding.

• We are beginning to understand how to manipulate the genetic material of organisms. We have an opportunity to play God. We also have an opportunity to blunder on a superlatively grand scale. Humans have usually blundered when they had the opportunity, mostly because they did not take the time to understand the workings of the systems with which they were involved.

• It's never too late to get smart.

The ecosystems of Earth have been very forgiving and they will continue to be so until humans set into motion processes that are inimical and detrimental to human survival. When those conditions arrive they will be driven by processes of nature and genetics and the drive will be relentless.

The Bright Side

The bright side of the picture is that we don't have to be stupid. With even a modicum of intelligence the proper choices can be made. One of the sure indicators of success will be the recognition and husbanding of self-generating, self-regulating decision systems in which humans are at home—physically, morally, and spiritually. This is our equity in a humane environment.

...Ted Sudia...

© Copyright 1990
Institute for domestic Tranquility