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Book Review: Mankind at the Turning Point

comparison. Simmons faces up to the problems of lead pollution, originally arising out of the use of lead paints but now dominated, it seems, by the effects of lead alkyls in petrol. He shows the pollution routes for both lead and mercury poisoning. He also tackles radio-active wastes in considerable detail, including their appearance in food chains after atmospheric bomb tests, and the problems of accumulating long-lived nuclides. Both books were obviously well advanced before the MIT study for The Club of Rome, "The Limits to Growth", was published. Simmons, however, manages a final page or so on this study, on The Ecologist's "Blueprint for Survival", and on such eloquent and muted 'doom-mongers' as Dubos and Mumford. His comments are sensible. Both books seek an ultimate equilibrium between man and nature, although neither offers any significant suggestions about how to achieve it. Mumford, only mentioned once in each of these books, has always had a deep feeling for this problem. There are nevertheless significant pointers to the issues involved in both books. First of all, the vast plundering and processing of the earth's assets, the contamination of our environment with toxic and unsightly wastes, and our pre-occupation with industrialization, regardless of its objectives, represent an assault upon our environment of unprecedented and growing violence. Available information, however qualified, suggests increasingly that the bland optimism of those still committed to this immoderate process of expansion has become a kind of affront to human dignity and decency; an appalling expression of arrogance and indifference. There is, however, a more profound conclusion to be drawn from these two books. It concerns the interactions within compound systems. Individual organisms within a complex ecosystem are not particularly efficient, but there are so many interdependences in the total system, based on specialist organisms exploiting all usable wastes, that the overall system efficiency is very high. Human organizations are more innovative and consciously intent upon exploiting new opportunities. They therefore tend to be more wasteful, the interdependences are simpler and less complete, and the total system efficiency is lower. It seems, in fact, that in economic systems the subsystem efficiencies are generally high while the overall efficiency is low. In ecological systems,