Ecology [antikvár]

PrefaceEcology, in the next lo or 20 years, may well become the most popular of sciencesa household word to those masses who today are ignorant of both the word and its meaning. This would not be surprising: in a world where the distances are rapidly shrinking through the increase in the attainable rates of speed, close contacts will be established between individuals, nations and civilizations where none was feasible a comparatively short time before.Modern man becomes every day more conscious of the fact that his way of life is increasingly defined by his surroundings. In the past, these were restricted to the farm, the village, the city, the nation with its own cultural pattern. Today the surroundings of a growing number of people consist of the whole earth. The inhabitant of Western Europe knows that his existence, at least in part, depends on what happens, for example, in Asia; similarly, the American, particularly since World War II, has come to realize that his country cannot exist without its ties with Europe and the rest of the world.It is not only a fact that the nations have become pohtically and culturally interdependent; they also co-determine, at least in part, each other's fates through what they undertake against nature in greed, short-sightedness and mere stupidity. Erosion in North and South America, in Africa, in the Near and Far East is a problem that concerns in equal measure the inhabitants of Iceland and the Solomon Islands. The extinction of beautiful animal species and the destruction of their habitat in distant parts of the world are, in the final reckoning, as much the concern of the Amsterdam bus driver as of the captain of New York's Staten Island ferry.The growing realization of the close connection existing between all that happens on this small planet as a result of men's good will or the lack of it, or of nature's being kind or unkind, will not fail to arouse an interest in a science that occupies itself with the relationship between the living organism and its surroundings. It is much to be hoped, however, that such an aroused interest will not affect pure ecology as a science by diluting it to an amateurish half-science that appeals to the masses.May the ecologists always be in a position to serve their science unhampered and may they be able to open the eyes of mankind, as this book attempts to do, not only to nature's delicate balance but also to the many and irremediable damages we inflict on our own Mother Earth every day and everywhere.BernhardPrince of the NetherlandsPresident of the World Wild-Life Fund