Through uncounted ages Mother Nature has set up a knife-edge balance
among the multitude of aspects and differentiated forms that have
existed and still exist on the planet. Humanity has increasingly upset
this balance of nature, ignorantly and often stupidly, without pausing
to determine the resultant changes. Nowhere is this upset more in
evidence than the changes in climate and animal life and their
possibilities of survival brought about by the erosion of topsoil. Paul
Sears, in his _Deserts on the March_, has told the story. It can be
summed up in four words: deforestation, overgrazing, erosion, drifting
sands.

Another aspect of man's aggressions against nature is the wanton
destruction of wildlife--like the American bison and the wood pigeon.

Still another example is the extraction from the earth's crust of
minerals and metals accumulated through ages and used to turn out
frivolous gadgets or, more disastrously, the materials and machines of
civilized warfare. Instead of conserving natural wealth, rationing it
and thus extending its use to succeeding generations, western man has
burnt it up in the firestorms deliberately kindled during the seven
disaster years from 1939 to 1945.

In the course of its existence western civilization has replaced food
gatherers, cultivators and artisans by hucksters and professional
destroyers of mankind and ravagers of the living space afforded by the
earth's land mass.

Western civilization has done its most far-reaching disservice to
mankind by separating and estranging man from nature. For ages man lived