Bill Moyers Journal; 711; Rene Dubos: The Despairing Optimist at 80

Funding for this program is provided by this station and other public television stations and by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I think one of the distinctions of being human and use again that word is a kind of faith that being human is something very special. It's a condition whereby you know that you are an animal creature called homo sapiens, but you are capable of transcending it by doing something above and beyond the biological necessity.

Tonight a conversation with René Dubose at 80. I'm Bill Moyers. An 80th birthday testimonial to René Dubose, one of the world's renowned scientists, a microbiologist, ecologist and author who's devoted his years to the care of human life, to the life of the mind and to the well-being of Earth itself. René Dubose is Professor Emeritus at the Rockefeller University in New York City, where he has studied in work since 1927. He was only 38 when he won worldwide acclaim for the discovery of Grandma Seedon, the first commercially produced antibiotic.

One of his most personal and significant scientific journeys began when his first wife died of tuberculosis in 1942. He turned his energies toward explaining and treating what was then a terrifying and incurable disease, and his work led to the perfection of the TB vaccine commonly used today. He began to explore the relation between the environment and disease, and over the years, the search for understanding the effect on human life of environmental forces has become his grand obsession. One of his two dozen books, So Human and Animal, won the Pulitzer Prize, and he continues writing today about environmental quality and the future of technological societies. Recently, Dr. Dubose returned to his native France, where he was born on February 20th, 1901. He visited the small village where he lived, and reflected on the role that this part of the world played in his life. Well, when I returned to Enelville after 50 years of absence, my greater surprise was that so little had changed in the visual appearance of the village itself, of the houses, of the

church, of the schoolhouse, I felt quite at home immediately. Living in a small town, in a small village, I should say, made me acquainted with all sorts of different kinds of people doing all sorts of different kinds of things. By the age of 7 or 8, I had sinned with my own eyes, people engaged in a very great diversity of occupation, and moreover, I had learned to experience directly with all of my senses. Most of the things that happened in the world, so this little village was a microcosm of the world. At a stop by his old schoolhouse, he reminisced with a friend about the influence of some books he read as a boy. Some of the books that were most widely read, were those stories of Jules Verne, who led

them all. I don't know whether that was important in teaching us about science, but it certainly made a few of us eager to learn more about science. As I look at those books now, at the end of a long life devoted to science, I have come to realize that their importance was to make us aware that all of science comes out of dreams. When first asked to dream about the desire to go into space, before one invents ways of going into space. So I think of those transfiction books as the source of inspiration for all the great advances that have been made in our times. Today, Renée Dubose lives in New York with his wife Jean, a former laboratory assistant.

They are developing the Renée Dubose Center for Human Environments, created to communicate Dubose's ideas to other communities around the world. The center is located at Wave Hill on the Hudson River, where President Theodore Roosevelt conceived his policies of national conservation. We began by discussing an idea heard often in the last five years, inventing the future. I call it anticipating the future. Because by anticipation, I mean that we have enough knowledge to anticipate the likely consequences of whatever we do today, we can anticipate the likely consequences of changing the physical environment, of changing the social environment. And because we can anticipate them, we really are responsible for the future. Perhaps this is an occasion where I can speak about the one problem which is causing me

the greatest anguish at the present time, namely an employment of young people, and not only of young people, but especially of young people. But I believe that no human being can live without being part of a fairly well structured social system. I believe that we all become social organisms by functioning, not throughout physical characteristics as homo sapiens, but through the socialization which makes us utilize our biological characteristics to live in a certain kind of way.

To participate. To participate. To participate. That's why there are so many different societies, so many different kinds of civilization, because we participate in so many different societies. And work as a crucial work in it and have a significant role in it. Whatever that role be, have a significant role in it. Well now, when I see a society like ours, it's worse in the United States, but it's beginning to spread over Europe, except that young people, a very large percentage of them, be not given a chance to function in that society, and accept as a solution that to give them money so that they can be fed, that they can be entertained, and then let them out of society. I think that it's inescapable that those young people will create a parallel society which are unquestionably in a not-to-decent future, and even now we become a threat to society.

Well we see that every day in New York City where there are half a million to 800,000 young men between the ages of 15 and 25 who have no job, who have no social role, and they have created this parallel culture which is now spilling over and infiltrating, penetrating, assaulting the other culture. And this is the insult to human kind that I see in all this, is that we believe that by a welfare policy, which consists in giving money so that they can eat, that they can be entertained, they can do what they want, that this is solving the problem. Are you saying that we can invent a future, anticipate a future, and bring in to reality a future which gives work and social participation to people like that? Obviously, I would not know how to do it because I have no experience in social, economic organization.

But you take a religious view of it that it can be done. But I take a religious view of it, and there's a moral obligation to do it, that it can be done. And I would go very far, I think all of human history is made of situations where people, if you people, have anticipated the problems of the future, have engaged themselves into the problem and have made something out of it. That leads me into an area that you know a great deal about, and that is science in general. Let's take a very specific case that has been in the news recently. It was reported not long ago that three Swiss scientists had literally manufactured or cloned a mammal for the very first time, three manufactured made by hand mice, in which the nuclei were taken from mouse cells and fertilized into mouse eggs.

And the cloning of those mice led the conservative writer George Will to say, what will science try next? Well, many people have a human, that's what George Will is asking, is it possible that we're going to try to change human nature, or manipulate human nature? Well, we are very far from being able to do that, I have even some questions that it can be done. But the fact is that today, in this country alone, there are six institutes composed of philosophers, theologians, legal people, scientists, physicians who are trying to think what kind of policies, what kind of legal structures, what kind of constraints must be introduced

if we are going to engage into that kind of thing. What is your own opinion about the question of social policy that this raises, and the question is, should science be free to try whatever it can imagine, or aren't the implications of modern science, so-called menace, that science cannot be completely free from social regulation? I'm afraid you were asking the wrong person, I have been a scientific investigator up to the age of 70, and in my opinion, science must be absolutely free of doing it, and however, if you were to try to stop it, you could not stop it. Because human beings, for 35,000 years, have been trying to do that all the time, to change,

to understand nature, to have a picture of it, to modify this way or that way, and if you were to try to stop it by law, so that you could not do it in your laboratory, I would do it in my kitchen. Why? Because I think, if it means anything to be human, if we do believe that we are different as I do from the rest of the animal kingdom, it's because we aspire at a complete understanding of reality, of the cosmos, as we aspire, even without hope of reaching it, and probably there are limits to what we can reach, but certainly it's not worth being human if you

do not try to do it. The problem is that as you aspire, and as scientists make all these discoveries, there are unintended consequences, Napalm, which was a kind of soap that's used to thicken gasoline, was used to burn children as well as soldiers in Vietnam, nuclear energy, which has such wonderful potential for alleviating many of our problems, has been used for destructive purposes. But that was, it began with fire, after all, fire is a very dangerous thing. But the fact is that 500,000 years ago, human beings learned to make fire and to use it, and they did not have bad consequences, but I suspect your eye would not be adherent this room if we did not use fire. So that brings me back to a word that I have used a little while before, namely the word

anticipation. So far, and when I say so far, up to about 25 years ago, we were satisfied with acquiring knowledge, increasing knowledge, with the confidence that eventually it would be helpful, useful. Now we have all those examples of which you have mentioned a few, where disasters have happened, and I'm sure more disasters will happen. But somewhere or another, during the past 20 years, we have begun to cultivate the science and the art of anticipating all the consequences, not all, but many of the consequences of what we do and use. And I think as we cultivate this art, I think, along with it, we cultivate a sense of responsibility

if we are really human beings. All right, let's take the consequences of biological research. Where do you think it will lead us? Well, I happen to believe there is no very good reason, but sufficient, that one can lead to the age of 120, I think the normal lifespan of a human being is about 120 years. I have known a few people over a hundred. So I suspect we eventually will get there, without too much difficulty. However, I don't find that of special interest. What I find of much greater interest is to conviction, my conviction, more than a conviction,

it's a fact, that within our brain, there are potentialities for visualizing, creating, and enjoying much more than we visualize, visualize, create or enjoy. Before they said, it is stated that at any given time, only a very small percentage of our mental equipment is at work. Well, I would see the possibility that in a not too distant future, we learn so much more about our brain, that we will become much more human, because it is our brain that makes us really human. I don't think we are human by being a biological number of the biological species homo sapiens.

We are human because we belong to a human society. And that's the potentialities of that are obvious for anyone who knows even the sleight of demands of history, look at the immense diversity of civilizations in the past 5,000 years. Well, I'd have no question that we can create much richer civilizations in the future. You talk about, we must be in a human society to be human. And yet, as people are getting older, you talk about possibly living to 120. Was there ever a time when you didn't think you'd make it to 80? Yes, because I have been a very sick man all my life. Whether when makes it at 80 or later, depends as much upon what happens up there, as what

happens in your physical organs. As a painter, you know, at the age of 708, I had very severe rheumatic fever, developed heart lesion, which is still very active, and could have submitted and do what most people do, and take a very slow life, taking care of my heart, so to speak. As I began, I decided consciously to function, and to re-educate myself to take advantage of what I call the phenomenal resiliency of not only of human systems, but of all natural systems, and by the way, that has a lot to do with my views about environmental problems and ecology.

I saw that by the age of 79 last year, I was physically the strongest, and I have ever been. But what did you say to yourself when you were 10 years old, when you had your rheumatic fever and were confined to your bed? What did you say to yourself? At that time, nothing that I know. The only thing that I remember is that I did, I was 7 or 8, so I probably didn't think anything, suffered physically, but I came from a very humble family. My father was a small butcher, whom I hardly ever saw, because he died during the first World War, I ran the butcher shop with my mother, and in the evening, in that little village, I used to help her do the dishes. And my mother, who had left school at the age of 12, that was an immensely perceptive person, would talk to me about what I should do with my life.

And as I recall, there was one significant book in the whole, in that little village, that dictionary, I don't know if you know what that means, what dictionary means, but in French, it's a little dictionary at everybody that many people had in their homes. And at the end of that dictionary, there was a special section for what was called the Grand Zécole, the great schools of France. And my mother looked through all that and helped me dare dreaming about the Grand Zécole, and whether I could eventually get there, and she obviously had decided that I would get to one of them.

And throughout my life, this evening with my mother, pointing out to me that there were those great schools, and that out of them came a kind of life different from the one that we were living. This has been an essential, perhaps the most important fact in my life. I eventually did go to one of them. This was a conscious, deliberate exercise, if you will. Yes. I really, at that time, I suspect with the help of my mother, who somewhere and other from the beginning had great aspirations for me, why I don't know. But I did decide that. Is this what you minute ago when you said that the man has as much to do with health as the biological organism of the body, that you can choose health?

Is it that simply said? Well, you know, it's not that simple, it's very complicated, but I believe it's the most important aspect of medicine. And everybody tells you, right, is so, that the purely mechanistic view of biology and of medicine, in particular, come from the heart. Now, I'm don't want to pretend that I'm a great reader of philosophy, in fact. I don't read philosophy very much. But it happens that among the virtues of fans, and even though I have lived in this country for so long, I still believe that there are special kind of virtues in fans, in fans. There are books being published, which, the very small books, about all the famous people

of the world, most of them being French, and Michel Chauvinism. Well, it's justified kind of Chauvinism, because it's a kind, it means that it's a Chauvinism where you can really understand, because it's somebody who speaks your language. Well, there is one about, it's called, Descartes Parl-V-Mam, Descartes by himself, just as you would have Chopin-Harrer by himself, just selecting fragments of Chopin-Harrer, of Emerson, or in that case, of Descartes. So not so long ago, I was reading the Descartes Parl-V-Mam, and whereas Descartes is depicted rightly so, as the person who separated so clearly in his mind, and in the mind of the modern world, the thinking process from the biological process, there is a letter by

him to a German princess, perhaps he wrote a great deal of letters, he had a great correspondence all over Europe, and in which he tells her about health, in fact, the most important thing about health is to be happy. When I'm happy, I'm never sick, and I become sick only when I'm unhappy, and perhaps you know that he died in Sweden, because he was so unhappy with the way a queen Christina of Sweden handled him, so to speak, and so that even in the case of Descartes, the awareness which is that of practically every human being, that what happens up in our brain is crucial to what happens in our body on vice versa.

Now I think any sensible person knows that, but during the late 19th century, as scientists, we have not known how to deal with that, so we deal with all the physical, chemical aspects of our body, and we do wonderful things with it. But now during the past few years, and as a few years, five or six years, one has recognized the existence in the brain of that new kind of hormones, which are called endorphins or other such names, which, to a large extent, conditioned how we respond to things, whether we experience pain, whether we behave in a way or another. And my prediction, if I can afford to make one at this late stage of my life, is that the great advances in medicine during the next 20, 25 years, will be how the states of

mind determine, to a large extent, how we respond to the limitations of our body. In the 1940s, I was a very successful scientist. I was president of all sorts of things, president of the Harvard Society, president of the American Microbiological Society, president of all the societies. And I devoted myself to these duties with as much energy as I could. And at that time, I developed a massive gastric ulcer, blade myself to death almost. And at that time, while being in the hospital, I read a bit of Chinese philosophy, so that you had to learn to live in a more reasonable way.

And I have acquired, to a limited extent, some form of control myself over myself, not too much. And I'm sure that has helped me to live to the age of 80 despite of all my ailments. Now, when I developed my hard, in sufficiency, rheumatic, erotic, heart disease, I decided, and I don't know when I did decide it, that I would start continuing functioning. I walk a great deal, wherever I go, I walk, even to this day. I walk miles, every miles, seven miles every day. And I have somewhere another compensated for my erotic deficiency, so that, as you see me, I function very well. Now, I have thanks for this kind of conviction about the resiliency of human nature, to

the resiliency of external nature. And if you were to take the time to look at my last book, which is called A Wing of Earth, it really is an attempt to illustrate through many examples that wherever great damage has been done to the Earth, if we give the Earth the occasion, if we give to nature, the occasion to function again with its forces of recuperation, then things come back. I have seen it in Greece, where those desert lands have come back into forested land as they were before Plato's time, provided you prevent people from cutting trees, provided

you prevent goats from browsing and destroying new growth. But I have seen it everywhere. I have seen it in France, in Verde, where perhaps you recall, the worst destructive battle of modern times were fought, where the forest was completely destroyed, and where now it has completely come back, what is it, almost eight, seven to eight years later. Verde, completely come back. But I have seen it everywhere. Now if you take this view, then you approach problems of the environment with a much more optimistic attitude, because you know that your role as human being is not to reconstruct things, between to use enough intelligent attitude, so as to have nature come back. And the world is full of such examples of restoration.

And you think this applies as well to the human being, that we have powers within us of self-recovery, if we learn how to nurture. Not only do I believe it applies to human being, I believe it's the most important aspect of human life. How do we learn to do this? Because now it seems like we are self-abusive, it seems like we have created an environment which sucks out of us that self-renewal energy. You know, how do we learn to use it? I'm afraid I'm going to use a word that I shouldn't use in front of you, through faith. And when I use the word faith, I'm not using it as applying to a specific religion, faith in life. The book I'm working now is called Celebrations of Life, where the title of the book is.

I believe that in all its phases, in all its aspects, there is in life something very unique, something very different from the rest of inanimate creation, the power of restoring itself, the different between shoes and the soul of your feet, is that if you work for a long time, the soul of your shoes wear out when you have to discard your shoes. If you work barefooted, the skin of your feet grows back, three news itself. Your feet are living, the shoe is dead. And somewhere another, there is something very profound there, the power of renewal.

I have, this is very deep in me, kind of faith, call it religious faith if you will. It's a paradox coming from a man who has spent so much of his life examining quantifiable and measurable phenomenon to hear him discuss aspects that are indefinable about life. Yes. Well, many people tell me, and I know it is true, that if you read, if you were to read my early writing until about 1965, there is in them not a pessimistic note, but a sense that things are really going wrong, and that for all we know, the world and human life is going to be destroyed, whereas if you begin to, if you read the books that I have written since 1970, increasingly there is an optimistic note.

Yes, yes. How did that happen? Well, I wasn't conscious of it, but I can only answer by one reason of which I know all the facts even though I may be rationalizing. Until 1965, I was a laboratory worker, I spent all my time in the laboratory with system where I could control everything, where everything that happened was determined by the world I had created, the world of experiment, the experiment, experimental setup. Then around 1965, perhaps a little before, I began through chain of accidents to move into

the human world, for example I became involved in trying to save Jamaica Bay in New York City, and what I did discover at that time is that all over this country, and I now know over much of the world there are countless people who are willing to do things. The amount of goodwill in the world is very much greater than anything we expect. It's about the Jamaica Bay, I have not yet written that, but I'll give that specific example. Jamaica Bay was used, as perhaps you know, in place where to dump the garbage of New York City, there were 1600 sewer lines where pouring the sewage of New York City into the bay every day.

There was one man, a very unimportant man, unimportant, officially. In messy, important in history, his name was Herbert Johnson. His job was to supervise the dumping of the garbage into Jamaica Bay, it was brought by hundreds of trucks every day. Now this man, I've learned a great deal about him, happened to have been the son of a gardener. Oddly enough, he was the son of a gardener who worked on Mr. Rockefeller's estate in Procantico Hill, has discovered that very scene, so that he knew a great deal about plants. He began planting furs and trees and grasses over those islands of garbage, because he knew enough how to do that, and because he felt like doing it.

Then, trees grew, shrubs grew, grasses grew, birds came back, eventually the city took notice of it. When began to stop pouring sewage into the bay and to make a long story short, at the present time, Jamaica Bay has come back essentially to be one of the most beautiful bays of the New York area to such an extent that it's being used for education in problems of nature, and that it is the richest bird sanctuary on the Atlantic coast. And this experience triggered your optimism? No, this where it began, and then ever since I have been all over the United States, and I'm not overstating practically every state, and everywhere I have found Mr. Robert Johnson

or Mrs. Little Lady, not all of them as good, but all of them doing something, and there are hundreds of worthwhile such people. Well, you make me want to take heart, but over the weekend, I read the Global 2000 report to the president, a document prepared at the end of President Carter's administration by more than a dozen federal agencies, whose purpose was to make projections, not predictions, but projections about what would happen between now and the year 2000, if present trends continue. And I must say, despite your optimism and hopefulness and your faith, as you call it, reading this document makes me almost as despairing as possible. This document really makes me wonder about what the Earth is going to be like in the year 2000. I think it is an essentially false document.

False because it is based on erroneous information, all of it erroneous. And if you were to read the copy that you have in hand, you would see that they themselves, state, Mr. President, we have discovered that there is not a single agency within the United States that can provide useful, reliable information about problems of the world. What the information that is using there is most of it so bad that it justifies the expression garbage in, garbage out, which people who use computers to derive conclusion have invented. They know that you cannot derive any valid conclusion unless you have very good data.

And there is no good data. For example, let me just interrupt you and say, what about the conclusions in here that by the year 2000, a third of the world's population will be malnourished. What about the conclusion that every year in Asia and Africa, an area the size of Maine becomes a barren wasteland? What about the statistic that every year the United States loses a million acres of prime farmland that people all over the globe are becoming ecological refugees, leaving the countryside of Asia, for example, that cannot sustain them any longer and moving into the cities, and in fact coming to the United States. The chief conclusion of this document is that human and economic pressures on renewable resources in some areas of the world are becoming so great that the capacity of the earth for self-renewal, as you call it, self-recovery, as you call it, can no longer be taken for granted.

But you know, it would take me 10 hours to answer your questions, so I'll just pick up a few points. Number one, one of the facts at this state, which is right, is that he's a great deal of deforestation going on the line. But they don't mention that the largest program of reforestation ever undertaken by humankind began about 30 years ago. That all the planes, all the heels of China, have been completely deforested for the past 2,000 years. And anybody that has been on continental China knows that I can give you the figure, but something like 100 million acres of land is being reforested in China. I have read very poetical description of people, very learning people, who've said, as you flow, as you fly over China at the present time,

what you see all those young trees going everywhere. One of the great enterprises of the continent of China is reforestation. They don't mention that in North Africa, the program of reforestation is absolutely extraordinary. They don't mention that in Ethiopia, even in the Sahel desert, reforestation is going on a very great scale. And yet I've been in Africa, Dr. Dubose, and in areas of Africa where firewood is now the chief means of energy, there's so little of it that a single member of the family has to spend 360 days a year gathering firewood. How do you explain these contradictions? Explain these contradictions is fairly easy. It's that the problem has been recognized only during the past few years.

And it's only now that people begin to do something about it. If you look through this excellent, otherwise excellent piece, you will find that everywhere in each paragraph they say, if present trends continue. And you don't think present trends will continue? Present trends never continue. Human beings, and perhaps this is where I expressed my greatest faith. If there is something about human beings, is that they never stand either in front of a situation that threatens them, provided they can't see the consequences of it. They start doing something about it. Yet you yourself once asked, what will become of the glorious sensual experience of living on this planet? If there are five times as many people on it as there are now.

And this report says that by the year 2000, we may have six billion people instead of the present. If we spread the word, I believe. I believe because there is nothing we can do about it. Most of the growth in population, is it not, will come in those poorer areas of the world where it will be very difficult for them to feed, to grow, then house. I believe there will be problems in Southeast Asia, in Central America, but not in the rest of Latin America, which is essentially empty as you certainly know. The population density in Latin America is very much lower than what it is here, and the population on this continent is very, very much lower than what it is in Europe. But I'm afraid there will be disasters in Southeast Asia, some part of Southeast Asia,

and in Central America and probably in other places. But the rapidity, as one has discovered, with which people change their patterns of family size, can be truly extraordinary. Perhaps you know that for 10 years or more, I wrote a column in the American Scholar under the title Disparing Optimist, and the structure of that column was this. I always began by stating a problem which appeared so tragic, so disastrous that the end of the world was inside. Then I asked myself, is there something that can be done about it? That was the second part of my column. Then the third part was to look around the world and say, yes, there is somebody doing something about it. And I believe that to a large extent,

this is our situation, we are for the first time in history, capable of visualizing the consequences of anticipating the consequences of what is happening, and many people do something about it. But is there time for the word to get around so that human beings can change their behavior and response to their anticipation? Yes, well, I often ask myself that question, and this is really oversimplifying the question, that it takes about 10, 15 years to change patterns of behavior. So your legitimate question, and it is a very legitimate one, can one wait 10, 15 years before disaster happens, and then it takes the kind of faith.

So the optimist is not despairing? No, I think one of the distinctions of being human and use again that word is the kind of faith that being human is something very special. It's a condition whereby you know that you are an animal creature called homo sapiens, but you are capable of transcending it by doing something above and beyond the biological necessity. Last night, I was in the process of completing a book, the time in the process of writing, and I was working on the chapter of priorities, what are the important things in our civilization? And then I asked myself,

well, why am I struggling with all this? Why am I doing it? And then I came to my mind, a phrase in Leonardo da Vinci's notes, Leonardo perque tanto penny. Leonardo, why do you give yourself so much trouble? And I think he and I are giving us so much trouble because being human is being something that goes beyond the physical satisfaction of our body of homo sapiens. All of the sudden, there came to my mind a lecture that I gave some two or three years ago in New York City about environmental problems. And in which I described that one of the Christian saints,

Saint Bernard, who created the Sistertian order of monks, took some twenty of his followers to a valley in the east of France, a valley which was very unpleasant from all points of view, brushes and insects and the malaria and whatever you want. And then eventually it transformed it into something which is one of the most enchanting parts of France, namely Burgundy. Saint Bernard said, it is the role of the monks to complete the act of creation. In fact, Jewish thinkers have been saying that long before and they have a wonderful phrase for it, a phrase that you can find throughout

the rabbinical writings. And the phrase is, man as a co-partner of God, man as a co-partner of God. Now, I don't want to present this as a kind of religious indoctrination as a kind of religious preaching, but rather as a kind of feeling very deep in me, that in some way to be human means that we on earth have to do something to make the earth a better place, a better place, not only for us, but even a better place for all the rest of creation on earth. But against your faith and optimism must be placed the fact that more and more people are moving into urban areas,

crowded, dirty, plagued with complex problems. And that as you talk about the natural order and of nature, the fact of the 20th century is urbanization cities. Yes, well, of course, we could have a whole and many sessions on cities. So instead of answering your question, let me describe the fact. Most of my life in Manhattan was lived between 66th Street and 69th Street on the east side. Now, what I have seen during the past few years is that every year, on 6th, 6th Street and on 69th Street, the streets are close to automobiles traffic.

People organize some kind of celebration, some kind of festivity. Festivities that are not unlike the ones I knew when I live in a small village in France of 450 people. And when I see the amount of goodwill, the amount of joy to live, the amount of extraordinary feeling of intensity of living that can go on even in the cities, then I believe that even the cities eventually will learn that urbanization can be converted into something which is supposed to be in the beginning. Urbanization means creating an environment in which human beings can express

as much of their potential abilities as possible and moreover can enrich their potentialities by reacting with each other. So when you use the term the glorious, sensuous experience of life on this earth, you mean not just in a state of wilderness, but in a state of society as well. Perhaps this is the only profound justification I have for being involved in the activities of the institutions in which we are functioning now, which my friends have been, have had the kindness of calling the René Dubas Centre for human environments, which is that we are not only concerned with pollution, with problems of natural resources,

with problems of making the world richer, but in somewhere or another, with making the environment, the natural environment, more compatible with human beings. And if my dreams come right in creating a kind of symbiosis between the natural environment and human being, and I'm using here the word symbiosis in the very strong sense that it had essentially ago when it was invented by a German scholar symbiosis meaning that things lived together, they transformed each other, and they transformed each other by contributing something, both to both components of the system,

so that I would say the ideal of the René Dubas Centre for human environment is to create something which makes the physical environment better, which makes nature better, and which makes human beings better, and that the two together be so well united that they come to create a unity which would be eventually the unity of life. This has been a conversation with René Dubas. I'm Bill Moyers. For a transcript of this program,

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