Exploring New Ethics for Survival: The Voyage of the Spaceship Beagle 0140216995, 9780140216998

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Exploring New Ethics for Survival

Also by Garrett Hardin Nature and Man’s Fate Biology: Its Principles and Implications

Birth Control

Edited by Garrett Hardin Population, Evolution, and Birth Control Science, Conflict, and Society 39 Steps to Biology

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Exploring New Ethics for Survival The Voyage of the Spaceship Beagle

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| The Viking Press

Copyright © 1968, 1972 by Garrett Hardin

All rights reserved First published in 1972 by The Viking Press, Inc. 625 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022

Published simultaneously in Canada by The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited sBN

670-30268-6

Library of Congress catalog card number: 78—186737 Printed in U.S.A.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS W. H. Freeman and Company: From Population, Resources, Environment by Paul Ehrlich. Harper & Row, Publishers: From The Meaning of the Twentieth Century by Kenneth Boulding. William L, Langer: From “Europe’s Initial Population Explosion” by William L. Langer. Originally appeared in American Historical Review 69: 1-17, 1963. The Trustees of the late Sir David Low’s Estate: For the “Colonel Blimp” cartoon by Sir David Low.

Second printing June 1975

The University of Chicago Press: For the figure from Ecological Animal Geography by Richard Hesse, translated by W. C. Allee and Karl P. Schmidt.

To Ray Cowles

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waterfleas ———> smallfish ———> tuna

In the chain above, algae (principally diatoms in the sea) are

called “primary producers,” because they capture the energy of sunlight and turn it into chemical energy (food). Protozoa merely convert the organic riches already produced by the algae into other organic compounds. Various small crustaceans of the sort called waterfleas convert protozoa-compounds to waterflea-compounds, and so on. There are five trophic levels (“feeding levels”) indicated in the scheme just given. Only the first trophic level produces food

energy from nonfood energy (sunlight). All the others merely repackage the food energy. . repackage it—with a big loss. About 90 percent, to speak generally. Rule of the Ecological Tithe: The total energy content at each

trophic level is only about one-tenth that of the level below it. One practical implication of this is fairly widely known: a larger population of human beings is supportable on a vegetarian diet than on a carnivorous diet or a mixed one. If our goal is to support the largest

possible population of mankind on earth—though why we should have such a goal is never explained—then our advice is simple: Don't eat the chicken, eat the chickenfeed. Don’t eat the pig, eat the garbage. Don't eat tuna, eat the algae of the ocean: the algae that ultimately feed the tuna have 10,000 times as much food value in them as the tuna. (Gathering the algae and making them palatable

is something else again.) Now let’s see how the food chain causes a magnification of unwanted pollutants as we ascend to higher trophic levels (Figure 1).

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