While Time Permits
Rogers, Tommy W.
While Time Permits Environment and Man, by Richard H. Wagner. W. W. Norton. 491 pp. $7.50. Reviewed by Tommy W. Rogers The sudden awareness of ecological problems has resulted in efforts...
...Sky and sea have long borne the brunt of man's misuse...
...We have long ignored the subtle cause-and-effect re- lationship between polluted environ- ments and the increasing incidence of asthma, emphysema, and heart de- terioration...
...He suggests that our arrogant and presumptive disregard "for the other organisms on earth is not just a manifestation of myopia...
...Reviewed by Tommy W. Rogers The sudden awareness of ecological problems has resulted in efforts on many campuses to offer courses on man and the environment as part of the science requirements in the curric- ulum...
...Wagner has done an excellent job in illuminating the complexities of the in- terrelationship between man, environ- ment, and technological change...
...Continuing environ- mental degradation will likely make destruction irreversible...
...Beaches, barrier islands, and sand bars, Wagner points out, are ephemeral features of the environment...
...Richard H. Wagner, author of En- vironment and Man, is assistant pro- fessor of botany at Pennsylvania State University wherv., according to the dust jacket, his course on " 'Man and His Environment5 has won wide stu- dent acclaim...
...While Time Permits Environment and Man, by Richard H. Wagner...
...the options are becoming clearly focused...
...Those industrialists who traffic in resource exploitation and either dis- regard questions of environmental pro- tection or pass them on to the public must be resisted...
...There is yet some time, and while the cost of "catching up" is staggering, failure to act now can only impoverish future generations that will have enough problems to bear...
...Continued ordering of priorities on the basis of a ledger kept by economic man is unconscionable for this generation, and suicidal for the next...
...it is based on our abysmal ignorance of the interre- latedness of plants, animals, and their environments...
...The significance of en- vironmental pollution has begun to impress us...
...Let us give future gener- ations at least a glimpse of how planet earth once looked while it was still characterized by some options for the freedom and styles-of-life requisite for man to be fully human...
...Once a salt marsh has been filled with waste, a sand dune leveled for houses, a valley re- duced to a suburb, the options for preservation and renewal are lost, for there are limits to environmental re- construction...
...The premier effort to provide a collegiate level textbook with a com- prehensive analysis of overpopulation, environmental degradation, resource depletion, and the resulting social and spiritual pathologies, Population, Re- sources, Environment, by Paul and Anne Ehrlich, is scarcely a year old, so the field is yet uncrowded...
...Although it is in textbook format, the book is a readable presentation which does not presume an acquaint- ance with scientific jargon...
...We are, Wagner warns, within a few decades of a point in time wherein the sheer mass of people will extinguish man's very humanity in a struggle for mere survival...
...It is a readable argument for the application of reason as opposed to an emotionality that bemoans every ant which becomes victim to a bulldozer...
...If such a prescribed dose of democratic ownership is unpalatable, those main- taining a freedom to build a house wherever they wish, including on top of a sand dune, should not expect public subsidy when their investment is threatened by shifting sand or storm- whipped waves...
...Wagner has organized his book around the theme that man's relationship to his environment has developed through several phases from the time when man's evolution was shaped by his environment up to the modern time when man has the capa- bility to exert an ever increasing influ- ence on the environment...
...Environment and Man is a thor- oughly creditable examination of the issues involved in the man-environ- ment relationship, from wilderness areas, water, air, and pesticides to housing, transportation, and popula- tion...
...Wagner points out that while eco- nomic and material needs will con- tinue to demand wholesale environ- mental modification through construc- tion projects as man deploys his tech- nology, we need to broaden the ap- proach to cost analysis which is based purely on economic and technological values...
...A sug- gested "simple but revolutionary solu- tion" to the problems arising from ef- forts "to stabilize the unstable" would be "to place all such beaches and bar- rier islands under public ownership, and allow only the most temporary and replaceable recreational facilities to be built," thus allowing ephemeral fea- tures to come and go as they please...
Vol. 35 • August 1971 • No. 10
