Word: dubose
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The defender was René Dubos, distinguished Rockefeller University microbiologist, elder statesman of science and author (A God Within, So Human an Animal). In a major address entitled "Humanizing the Earth," Dubos, 71, disputed one of the fashionable credos of contemporary environmentalists: that any human interference with nature is in...
Equilibrium. A less dramatic but equally pertinent example of nature's shortcomings is its inability to recycle all the wastes it creates. One instance of such a breakdown of "ecological equilibrium" is the accumulation of tons of guano (bird excrement) along the coast of Peru. Indeed, he noted, it...
Nature should also be modified in other ways, Dubos believes. "Many richnesses of nature are brought to light only in regions that have been humanized"-that is, transformed by human toil into agricultural lands, gardens and parks. But Dubos warned that for every pound of food produced by these areas...
Dubos not only wonders if there was an Old Arcadia, he wonders if there is a New Apocalypse. He suspects that when man became an agricultural animal, the earth was ravaged worse than when he became a technological animal. "All living systems are irreversibly changed by almost any kind of...
Roszak and Dubos are both, in some sense, optimists. But Roszak posits a crisis that only a radical and desperate hope can respond to. More convincingly, Dubos argues that history has been an unending crisis-with a pretty fair record of self-restoration or at the least survival. Man'...