The House We Live in; 12; Loren Eiseley

Man, man's God, the world between in this post-atomic age. The Ann McCar, the University of Pennsylvania, probes these areas with his guest today, physical anthropologist Lauren Isley, provost of the University of Pennsylvania, author of the immense journey. Lauren Isley, this is the house we live in, and inquiry into man and environment and environment and man. In a previous series, we asked a group of distinguished theologians to speak to us of God-nature man and I hope there was to banish anthropocentrism, the concept of man, the center of the universe, to cast some doubt upon anthropomorphism, the sense that man exclusively is made in the image of God. We turned to a group of distinguished natural scientists and had them speak to us about man and nature,

the nature of nature itself, the nature of man, and finally we asked a Sir Julian Huxley, some synthesis of these views, some view of man, the biological laws within which he exists, the strengths which he must exercise. Now we turned to another examination, to look more specifically to man's relation to the environment, to see what examples can be found in the historic past, what analogies these have for present 20th century man, and it's appropriate that we turn first to you because you have shown an extraordinary sense of personal identity with man's whole evolutionary past. I know of no one who's writings show better this linkage to the whole history of evolutionary and living processes. It's also great delight that I await your discourse. Well, thank you, Mr. McCarg, I would just put it this way that I guess I am interested in the novelty that exists in the universe.

The strange aspects of it which seem to be always emerging, which seem in a sense unfinished, and I feel that man in this connection is a very strange and unique animal in his own peculiar way. If one just casts back in time, for example, into the waste of the night that we can see around us, that region of wandering fires and gas and the enormous desert range of the universe as far as we can reach out and see it. We somehow have the feeling that there's something very, very strange, very peculiar about the first emergence of life out of this wilderness, which in many ways seems so indifferent to everything that we believe in.

And in a curious way, the whole succession of life on the planet, it seems to me, is a succession of these episodes. It is almost as though every waste, every wilderness, given time produces some strange emergent. I believe that one of your countrymen, Mr. Stevenson, the Robert Lewis Stevenson, the writer, comment somewhere in one of his essays that natural environment somehow cries out for a story to be associated with something that, in his terms, he saw as demanding a murder or demanding something else, but all was in that atmosphere of stones and trees is something lurking, something hidden. And in a sense, this is true of life, because first there is this strange quality of its emergence about which in spite of all the chemical experiments we have carried on, there is still something that we do not understand about it. And then we find the early seas swarming with life, strange forms, but the continent still denuded of life, empty of green, empty of plants, empty of animals, another waste, in a sense, waiting for something to be born out of it.

And then the grass comes, the trees come by degrees marching out of the water through this long succession of plant life, which, of course, had to provide the base before living organisms in the animal realm could move out of the waters onto the land. And then you get the march onward to the great dinosaurs. If we were to go back really into that period and stand on those shores, we might have said, looking at the great reptals of that time that had dominated the living web that had radiated into all the continents, and in many varieties, they flew in the air, they occupied the forest, the swamps, the seas, and it would have appeared at that time that there was nothing left untouched, nothing in the sense of any new corridor to be penetrated at all by life.

And then suddenly at the end of Cretaceous time, something like 160 million years or so ago, this world changes. For reasons that we know very little about, and we find that a few small rat-like creatures that have been lurking in the underbrush, the first mammals, our own ancestors, come out into this suddenly opened the main out of which the great reptals, of which the great reptals have vanished. And then they in turn expand and extend themselves just as the reptals had into many realms and areas of life, reform the living web in another way. And then several million years later, the great ice age spreads over the planet, the large areas of it, the kind of snowy wilderness that once more is a waste, and which seems to hint at something forming behind the screen of things. And as that ice passes, there are the merges out of this wilderness man.

Man who brings with him something that had never existed in the universe before an invisible something carried in his mind, all of the corridors of life that we can look at now seem to have been entered. The seas, the great continents, the air, there seem nothing more for life to exploit. And yet with the coming of man, this emergent creature out of this final wilderness, there came a new penetration of life into a hitherto unimaginable realm, the realm of mind, the realm in which things could be created, which could not be brought out of the natural universe itself. And yet it was the natural universe after all that has created this thing, and this, it seems to me, we must never forget because this realm of mind offers a certain danger to us in a way. If we grow too remote from this world out of which we came, too remote from green leaves, too remote from waters and ancestral waters in the sense that we still carry in our living bodies, there is a danger that in the mechanical constructions which the mind itself can create, that we may forget that we exist and live by this world out of which we have emerged.

The other day I happened to be writing on a train between two points, and the train passed a huge industrial plant. There were great piles of yellow sulfur, there was a waste of kind of greenish water all full of what appeared to be obnoxious chemicals. There was all of these materials that man had brought out of the earth to put into his constructions. And yet as I looked at this, it struck me in a sense, here is the new waste, this realm of girders and sulfur, and raw chemicals, that were arranged out of their natural positions in the earth. What will come out of this? Will it be some new mechanical contrivance that man himself may create in the shape of his giant machines that may supplant him? What is evident here?

This is the kind of thing, in other words, that seems to me so incredibly novel, so strange that we have entered in our heads, the environment which constantly pulls things out of the future, and which now moves at this tremendous pace of change. You hint then of a promise from man's mind, but you also speak of the present danger. And I think a phrase that can be attributed to you is that man may be conceived of as a planetary disease. I think in a sense this is true, as one might say, that all organisms in a sense that run loose, that escape for the moment out of the living web that controls them have this potential danger within them. If one flies over any extended area of the country, I think in a sense one can almost see this as one might look at fungus spreading on an orange, because one sees these great urban concentrations of people spreading and spreading the forest disappearing,

the concrete highways extending farther and farther, and although in a sense, and momentarily perhaps this represents the spread of civilization, along with it goes this danger of overpopulation, this divorce once again from the nature that we are far more dependent upon than we realize. Somewhere in one of my writings I have referred to the asphalt man, and by that phrase I have meant, and this is true of many born into urban circumstances. The man who has forgotten nature of green grass, the man who has come to the conclusion as one of my students demonstrated not long ago, that they do not understand this living webber. They are parked in it because this lab spoke to me one day and he said, well now you talked about the dangers, the face of civilization.

What isn't it true that we can eliminate other forms of life, make more room for ourselves, live here alone if necessary by means of chemistry and science? Which seems to me the appalling culmination of a kind of thinking which has divorced itself from the world upon which it is in actuality dependent. Because really we are part of a living web which one runs from the smallest microorganisms on up to ourselves, and although this web we may order and may do things too at the same time the web itself is something upon which we depend and which in its turn, either holds us to a certain position in the universe, or if we break through that web it may at the same time well destroy us, because nature has a way of striking back at these emergence that run too far out of our control.

Could I elaborate, ask rather you elaborate this, you have spoken about manners of planetary disease and I think you have used the demonstration of this, the statement that manners evolved only at the expense of climaxes of plants and animals. This is true, here once more the history of man is a history intimately linked for example just to choose one with a grasslands, not alone, the grasslands made possible the existence of man out on the grass after a history of a long history incidentally of living in the arborial world, the tree world, but after this curious anthropoid who became ourselves got down onto the ground.

He got down without any specialized features which would enable him to feed on grass, this is one of the curious accidental things as far as we can see which is controlled is destiny. Because the animals that got on to the grass early, such as the horses for example and some other farms, became highly adapted to feeding on grass. But man's dentition is not suited for this purpose and when he came down he must have lived for a time as a kind of scavenger we might say along the borders of the grasslands and as his material equipment his ability to make tools increased he became the hunter that we know now his first spread over the world in any extensive sense was what we might call a kind of rapid migration like some kind of fire burning over in grass. So, feeding on the great mammals of the grasslands, the last of the ice age world, in other words the mastodins, the giant bison's, all of that great array of creatures which were partly also the product of the ice and which survived into its closing phases and which man used in making these enormous

league long steps across the world. In other words he passed rapidly through a variety of environments largely by stealing the energy, existing in the proteins of these great grass feeding animals and utilizing it for his own. But it wasn't, was he partly do extinguishing them? He probably was because although there were doubtless many forces at work here including climatic change at the close of the ice age, man had become by that time a formidable hunter in a primitive sense. And by the use of fire for example he was altering contributing to altering this environment and at the same time becoming ever more effective in his hunting of these big mammals so that many of them were doubtless in the end hurried out of existence by mankind. He was here, suddenly, somewhere in the, let us say within the last 10,000 years or so, that man shifted his attention from the great mammals that were disappearing to agriculture.

And here again through the use of fire and the discovery that seeds could be planted, cultivated, altered, he found for himself just at a point when he might have found himself in difficult circumstances in terms of the loss of the great hunting world. He found it possible to make up for that lost energy by the use of plants. And of course this was what made possible his concentration into these great cities which have reached their climax in our time because it is only by the use of food stored in grains by the complicated technology and means of transport which accompanies our modern agriculture that man is able to support himself in these great urban concentrations. It is also one of the reasons why he is so vulnerable, so terribly vulnerable if through atomic war or other means of this kind, the transportation systems of the world should be eradicated or eliminated because your cities would then melt away like frost in a morning sun.

Yes, you once said that if there were a cataclysm, the deaths from starvation might well exceed these from radiation. I think you told the class of my once that if they had all had to go out and hunt for the breakfast, they would all be hungry. That's right, but this is something that living the artificial lives that we do now in this sense, we have almost forgotten these basic necessities on which we still depend. We get our food most of us out of cans at the market. In so many ways we have lost touch with the earth from which we sprang and upon which we are still dependent. There are really quite profound analogies in the statement that man has evolved here to far at the expense of climaxes of plants and animals.

How many more climaxes other can man continue to exploit these and continue to survive? I think there is no doubt that chemistry offers certain possibilities. Obviously, we haven't reached the end of development along these lines, but at the same time we are feeding, of course, a large and growing population which takes a tremendous amount out of the ground. I think that the rather easy conception, which once more is a little terrifying, that science is going to take care of us like a good magician throughout all foreseeable coming time without any other efforts on our part is a very dangerous philosophy. Because, among other things, if we had any kind of catastrophic war of the kind that man is now able to wage, and if civilization disappeared, even if, for example, we had the survival of a few people afterwards, people perhaps unusually resistant to radiation by accident, or small human groups at the world's corners, that to manage to survive such a catastrophe, to rebuild the kind of civilization that we now possess, not alone, takes very large numbers of people, active and diverse ways, but also you have here a situation in which we may well have consumed a great many of the resources by which the original civilizations were built up,

so that without falling back once more upon the simpler instruments of the savage, we might well find the task of rebuilding far more difficult than it was even in the beginning. And, of course, the great mammals that man depended on in this early hunting stage of existence, we are very largely destroyed. If our civilization dissolved tomorrow, and if our millions even had survived and were out in the fields and the highways, how, as you say, how long would we be able to exist among the little rabbits, mice, and whatnot that we have left after all, is this great scourge of hunting in which man is in the doves.

Well, of course, this whole program is dedicated to being salutary, to ask that we reappraise our relation to environment. But you have a sense of a positive sight to man's mind, and I think, for you, a bacon, who's for the centennial, who's first centennial, who's best, we are now celebrating. A bacon represents, for you, a positive aspect of man's mind. Well, let me say, in connection with Francis Bacon, that I think his influence has been tremendous, and yet he is a very much misunderstood man in certain ways. Bacon, 400 years or so ago, was one of the first men to realize, actually, that there was this invisible environment in man's mind, in the sense that one could pluck out of the future in a sense and create the world in which we chose to exist. And he urged the development of science at a time when it was little understood, and at a time when the universities that existed were largely devoted to the classical learning and nothing else.

He urged experiment, he urged all of those things which in a strange fashion have come into existence in the modern world. There was a wind blowing. He put it from the new continent, and he meant using the phraseology of the Voyagers that day when America had just been discovered. He said that there was a continent of the mind somewhere in the future, which could be brought into existence by human effort. And of course, because we have developed our technology along the lines that Bacon visualized, I think many of us have come to feel that he was remarkably perceptive in this regard, but at the same time that he was in a sense a complete materialist and thought that technology alone would save us. I think this is a misreading of Bacon, a definite misreading.

Because in actuality, scattered here and there in his works, we find also a very definite foreknowledge, a kind of pressing and realisation that more than technology was needed. There is a realisation that this thing we have invented, science, scientific technology tremendously important though it is. It must also be used ethically, and as he puts it in a rather perceptive phrase, he says in the beginning there was only light. By that he meant that in the first dawn of creation as it was then understood that the light of knowledge was the most tremendous thing, not the creation of implements of any sort, not the ability to wage war, not the ability necessarily to create great overcrowded cities. But rather a realisation, a deep realisation that that kind of technical knowledge had to be balanced by a full and complete knowledge of man as an organism existing under circumstances which made it necessary for him to understand every phase of his own personality.

In fact, Bacon makes the remark somewhere I'm going to try and quote it, that man should be the disciple of history and not its servant. In other words that he should learn to understand through his own history and not merely to repeat age after age, the same mistakes, the same errors that his forefathers had committed. But rather that he should learn from that experience and learn well to be always the balanced renaissance man who is the master of his technology and not its servant. There is a very little time left, but it is a time for you to speak about your concept of the environment of contingency.

In this sense, this is a phrase that was used by the Great English Biologist Darcy Thompson back in the 80s, but he didn't develop it. The conception which is really extremely intriguing that with the evolution of life and its radiation into various forms, that the chances of affecting that life are intensified age after age. In other words, more organisms are affecting each other in different ways. This living web is becoming ever more complicated. So that the emergence of a creature like man, for example, has had this tremendous impact upon the natural environment, who has achieved for the moment this kind of breakthrough. That nevertheless, these contingencies at the same time are multiplied and now they are multiplied even more rapidly by what is going on in our heads, the fact that the new continent is here. And the dangers which influence this new continent and its creation are also here.

And it is this which, in a sense, I think was foreseen by Thompson in the use of this phrase, and the rebound of this living web, as it is lunged against in a sense by man, is apt to be more terrific just by the very force of the situations which he himself. He brings in the being. While you make this point, you also represent another view that evolution hasn't stopped. Physical evolution hasn't stopped among the animals. You write about the fish and the trees and the Niger, and you write the changes which are occurring in the tidal lands. There is also a physical evolution, and there are creatures which are adapting themselves to new roles. And man is, of course, at this point only the latest dominant type. This is true, and let us remember now the end of the great reptiles who have disappeared for reasons unknown. And it is perhaps partly the question that the future may ask, or some of the little creatures that are hopping around us now, who may go on and evolve after man, if he takes himself off the scene by violence.

Here there may be things that will survive and ask the question sometime in the far future. What became of man? And what happened to him? Both are isolated. It's a great time to have you here. You and your life and all your writings have represented points of view which are grossly represented in this program. You have represented them with perception and with poetry. I know of no writing which is more superior in this realm than this beautiful, glorious book of view as the immense journey. It has been a great honor to have you here. I'm very grateful to you. Thank you very much. This is very nice. Thank you a lot. I've enjoyed chatting about these things which are always so difficult to analyze within a short space. This is N E T National Educational Television.