Prophet of Optimism

The prevailing view among environmentalists is that if the world does not end with a bang, it will expire with a strangled cough. Ecologist Kenneth Watt says that with auto exhausts increasing nitrogen in the air, "it's only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable." A positively dissenting view comes from Rene Dubos, brilliant microbiologist and experimental pathologist, author of 15 books and still-working professor emeritus at Manhattan's Rockefeller University. Last week he explained his outlook to TIME Correspondent Alan Anderson.

"My life philosophy," Dubos says in polished, French-accentuated English, "is based upon a faith in the immense resiliency of nature. When man realizes that technology cannot solve all human problems, nature bounces back from our abuses. The fundamental aberration of scientific technology during the past 100 years is embodied in the motto of the 1933 Chicago World's Fair: Science Finds/ Industry Applies/ Man Conforms. In fact, man still lives with the genes of the Old Stone Age hunter and the New Stone Age farmer. We must make industry conform to man by adapting it to his genetic limitations. For example, we know that the temperature of the human body varies from day to night and from summer to winter. Yet the air-conditioning industry has given us a completely constant environment to live and work in.

"Look at London. For 200 years, it was the most polluted city in the world. [Because of strict antipollution laws], they have not had a pea-soup fog for six years, and last year they had 50% more sunshine than they had ten years ago. Songbirds are returning to the parks, fish are being caught again in the Thames." He recalls a personal hero, Herbert Johnson, supervisor of the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. As a minor park employee 18 years ago, Johnson was appalled at New York City's use of Jamaica Bay as a garbage dump and worked to lessen the visual pollution by planting native shrubs, bushes and trees. Now one of the major bird-watching locations in Eastern North America, the refuge has been proposed as the site of a federal recreation area. Even the pollution of the Hudson River is reversible, he says; it will purify itself naturally if man will only stop using it as a refuse dump.

Man with a Mission. Dubos feels that society ultimately will reach the point where production and consumption must slow down as the world's natural resources are depleted, despite efforts to use them more efficiently. While U.S. population grows at the rate of about 1% a year, energy consumption doubles every ten years. But it is the tangible and the immediate that occupy and preoccupy Dubos; at 70, he proselytizes like a young man with a mission. Thus far this year, he has made 24 out-of-town trips, 50 speeches and television appearances. By the end of the summer, he will have made four international trips. Many of his engagements are with students, whose rejection of old social values he finds "the most hopeful sign for the future."

He carries everywhere a plea for legal safeguards against pollution. Industry, he says, "can and will do much more than people believe" to clean up the nation, a point underscored at a congressional hearing last week (see BUSINESS). But, he adds, "they can do it only if there are federal laws so that everyone has to do the same thing around the country. It's a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. If enough of us say often enough that there have to be national standards, soon there will be a national mood that demands them."

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