Bates, Marston Life in both the forest and the sea is distributed in horizontal layers. The Forest and the Sea, 1960.
Marston Bates graduated from the University of Florida and received a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1934. For a number of years he was associated with various laboratories of the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1952 he became a professor of Zoology at the University of Michigan. Man's point of view is curiously different in the forest and in the sea. In the forest he is a bottom animal, in the sea a surface animal. Ibid. With regard to fish, the number of species present tends to increase steadily from the headwaters to the mouth in a river system, and this can be looked at as one phase of the growing independence of the stream. Ibid. In defying nature, in destroying nature, in building an arrogantly selfish, man-centered, artificial world, I do not see how man can gain peace or freedom or joy. Ibid. Science has put man in his place; one among the millions of kinds of living things crawling around on the surface of a minor planet circling a trivial star. Ibid. We remain important, you and I and all mankind. But so is the butterfly - not because it is good for food or good for making medicine or bad because it eats our orange trees. It is important in itself, as a part of the economy of nature. Ibid. We think of death from old age as "natural death" and we thus come across the paradox that natural death is uncommon in nature, unnatural. Ibid. We can taste and smell, but clearly we live in a poor and limited chemical world compared with many animals. Ibid. Wallace (Alfred Russel) hit upon the idea of evolution through natural selection quite independently of Darwin and the idea was first presented to the world in papers written jointly and read before the Linnaean Society on June 30, 1858 - a momentous date in the history of ideas. Ibid. Many primitive religions have various forms of nature worship, of animism and totemism. But in some of the great religions, particularly Buddhism and Hinduism, attitudes toward nature - toward animals in particular&emdash;have an ethical basis. Ibid. When some thinker does come forth to provide us with a rationale for conduct, he will have to consider not only the problems of man's conduct with his fellow men, but also of man's conduct toward nature. Ibid. The questions of the nature of his (man's) relationships with the birds and the beasts, with the trees of the forests and the fish of the seas, become ethical questions: questions of what is good and right not only for man himself, but for the living world as a whole. In the words of Aldo Leopold, we need to develop an ecological conscience. Ibid. Within our own civilization, it looks as though the conscious appreciation of the beauties of nature had its roots in the so-called Romantic Movement of the Eighteenth Century. Ibid. It looks as though man's esthetic appreciation of nature increases as the development of his civilization removes him from constant and immediate contact with nature. Ibid. We . . . need to develop ecological appreciation. The Romantic Movement, despite its two hundred year history, has not yet reached our city councils or our highway engineers. Ibid. A general principle is gradually emerging from ecological study to the effect that the more complex the biological community, the more stable. Ibid. Ethical, esthetic and utilitarian reasons . . . all support the attempt to conserve the diversity of nature. Ibid. In defying nature, in destroying nature, in building an arrogantly selfish, man-centered, artificial world, I do not see how man can gain peace or freedom or joy. Ibid. I have faith in man's future, faith in the possibilities latent in the human experiment: but it is faith in man as a part of nature, working with the forces that govern the forests and the seas: faith in man sharing life, not destroying it. Ibid.