XVIII
I am an ecologist. Ecology is the study of living things
in relation to the world around them – everything around them –
air, water, rocks, soil, plants, and animals, including man.
If a tree is cut down, I try to find out what will happen to the birds
in the nests, the squirrels in the branches, the insects in the roots.
I know that the roots of the tree hold the earth, that the earth holds
the rainwater, and that the rainwater keeps the soil moist, so that plants
can grow. I am concerned if too many trees are cut down, for then the
rain will run of the surface of the soil, making rivers rise, overflow
their banks and flood the land. This is the kind of thing an ecologist
thinks about.
Borneo is a huge island in Southeast Asia – the third largest in
the world and bigger than all of Texas. It straddles the equator, which
is why the climate is hot and steamy. Someone has said that there are
two seasons in Borneo – a wet season and a less wet season.
The people are mainly Malays and Dyaks. The Malays, who live near the
coast, are rice farmers and fishermen. Some work on rubber plantations
or in the oil fields, for Borneo is rich in oil. Inland are the high mountain
ranges, where most of the Dyaks live. Until recently, they were headhunters
– the wild men of Borneo – and they still hunt with blowguns
and poisoned darts. The women grow rice, yams, and sugarcane in tiny forest
clearings.
Most of Borneo is part of the Republic of Indonesia. Some of it belongs
to Malaysia, and a tiny part is a British-protected state run by a sultan.
It is an island of dense tropical forests, where vines grow as high as
a thousand feet, where orangutans swing through the trees, and where the
giant long-nosed proboscis monkey can grow as tall as a man. There is
also a great variety of insects, including the anopheles mosquito. This
mosquito carries malaria and is the reason I was sent to Borneo.
Mosquitoes breed in wet places, and there are many swamps and rain holes
in Borneo. In the old days, we used to fight mosquitoes by draining swamps,
when possible, and by spraying a thin film of oil on stagnant waters during
the breeding season. Those who could afford to, put screens on doors,
windows, and openings to keep the mosquitoes out. All this helped to keep
malaria down, but millions of people still got sick.
Then, during World War II, a scientist discovered that a certain chemical
compound, called dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane – DDT for short
– was a marvelous insect killer. The discoverer, Dr. Paul Mueller
of Switzerland, received the Nobel Prize for his discovery.
In Borneo, we sprayed the walls and insides of the huts with DDT. You
know what happened: we killed the mosquitoes – and ended up with
no cats. We had not realized how DDT can accumulate in the fatty tissues
of animals. Even a tiny amount of DDT in food or drinking water, with
repeated meals, builds up and up until a quantity, is large enough to
poison a large animal, such as a cat.
As you know, with the cats dead, the rats took over and brought the threat
of plague. So cats were flown in to stop the rats. Then, just when it
seemed matters were under control – the roofs fell down. This is
but a small example of the complex and subtle connections and balances
which exist among all living things.
Because of the poisonous effect of DDT, it has been banned or restricted
in the United States, the Soviet Union, and other industrial countries.
In December, 1969, at a world conference of the Food and Agricultural
Organization (a body of the United Nations), an attempt was made to ban
the use of DDT all over the world. But the majority of scientists, representing
non-industrial countries, refused to go along with the ban. They knew
that DDT was dangerous to health, but they needed to control malaria and
other diseases, and to protect food crops from insect destruction. The
alternatives to DDT are expensive, and the non-industrial countries, which
contain about eighty per cent of the world’s population, cannot
afford them, for they are very poor.
In El Salvador, for example, the cost of DDT to control malaria is ten
cents a person. Other insecticides would cost at least three times that
much. Where is the money to com from?
The wealthy nations pointed out that the danger of pesticides is everyone’s
responsibility, for when you pollute the atmosphere, and the waters which
flow to the oceans, everyone suffers. Ecologically, the nations of the
earth are one.
The poor nations replied that the wealthy nations are not faced with malaria
epidemics, wholesale destruction of their food supply, and mass starvation.
They can afford to worry about the future of the environment. The poor
nations can think only of day-to-day survival. Seventy-five per cent of
the people in the world go to bed hungry, and the great majority of them
are in poor, non-industrial countries.
Ecologists from underdeveloped countries, faced with starvation and disease,
can only choose the lesser evil – DDT. But the real answer to their
problem is to find new solutions. Work is going forward on drugs for the
prevention of malaria. Unfortunately, these new drugs have some bad side
effects. Others are not effective for all kinds of malaria. And all drugs
are very expensive.
A more fruitful road is for scientists to seek an insecticide that kills
mosquitoes and nothing else. Scientists have discovered that under crowded
conditions, some mosquitoes release a toxic chemical that kills young
mosquitoes. If they can isolate and synthesize that chemical, it would
be a great step forward in malaria control.
Another possibility, which shows considerable promise, is to breed a variety
of mosquito which leaves seventy-five per cent of the female eggs unfertilized.
Released among other mosquitoes, this new strain transmits its infertility
to all the offspring. Thus, each generation would breed fewer and fewer
mosquitoes.
We’ve been talking about DDT and the farmers of Borneo, but ecological
problems are extremely varied and serious, and they cover the whole world.
For example, the fumes of automobile exhausts have greatly increased the
number of people who get ling diseases. Atomic radiation has increased
the incidence of certain types of cancer. the hot water from power plants,
when poured into lakes and rivers, kills the fishes.
There is pollution by lumber mills in Lake Baikal in the Soviet Union.
There is too much sewage in the canals of Amsterdam and Venice. The Danube
is no longer blue. One can no longer swim in the Rhine in Germany, or
in the Seine in Paris, or in our own Hudson River. Whole stretches of
beaches in Italy, South America, England, and the United States have been
polluted with oil slicks from the sea.
This is bad enough, but if the oil spills continue, worse will follow:
a thin film of oil will spread over all the oceans. This will cut down
the sunlight which very tiny plants, called diatoms, need both to reproduce
and to live. These tiny plants, billions and billions of them, are the
source of food for all the fishes of the sea. Further, these tiny plants
use sunlight to combine with water to form carbon dioxide (used as food
by them) and oxygen, which is released into the air. Eighty per cent of
all the oxygen in the world comes from these tiny plants. If sunlight
is cut down and the amount of oxygen is reduced, the whole animal kingdom,
including man, will suffer.
We need to know these things so that we can do something to keep the air
and water clean for all people, as well as for all the animals and plants
in the world. The ecologist should not protect the farmer against malaria
with one hand and bring the roof down on his head with the other. But
the answer is not for the ecologist to do nothing, but to be wiser about
what he does. This is the moral of Borneo.
