Ecology and the escalation of human impact.

If we consider man in nature and man as part of nature, he no more upsets than do ants and beavers. This is precisely the point of the present inquiry. According to the author this is our planet since we have forged an ever greater power to control and even to destroy it. In this article, author attempts to pose these questions by drawing a scale of man's impact, by applying to him ecological laws already derived from the study of animals and plants, and by listing processes of man's management of his planet, still hewing as closely as possible to ecological processes displayed by other living beings. Ethnic values are underlined in many of the examples offered by the author, as authentic ecological forces have not only power but direction. It can well be argued that a diversity of exploitive activities is more harmonious if not the most productive. Five major phases recognized in this article are primeval or submission, pastoral or domestication, settlement or cultivation, industrial or substitution, and climatic and cosmic or cosmic outburst. The author implies that what we may have learned of the ecology of man, as governed by largely inescapable environmental opportunities and as channeled through variously narrowing and expanding cultural processes, reveals a growing control over increasingly large units of the total environment.