The Regional Balance of Man

The most important contribution of ecology is the idea of the region as an intricate network of interrelations. A change in any one factor of the environment brings about a complete change in the milieu, and man is a part of the processes by which the balance of the region is maintained or shifted. The permanence of civilization depends on man's understanding of, and co-operation with, the totality of the region's forces. The law of diminishing returns is part of a wider law of the exhaustion of the store of nature when man destroys the established cycle of the region's life-processes. Where man has torn the web of life nature seeks to repair it through a reduction of the population to numbers that the ecologic balance may permit. Many countries have adopted a standard of consumption with little reference to the resources. Science must comprehend the web of relations between human life and organic and inorganic nature and reveal the relation between cause and effect between man's activities and the remote phases of transformation in nature's life processes.