• DOI:10.1126/science.155.3767.1203
• Corpus ID: 8076858

The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis

@article{White1967TheHR,
  title={The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis},
  author={Lynn Townsend White},
  journal={Science},
  year={1967},
  volume={155},
  pages={1203 - 1207}
}

• L. White
• Published 10 March 1967
• History
• Science

A conversation with Aldous Huxley not infrequently put one at the receiving end of an unforgettable monologue. About a year before his lamented death he was discoursing on a favorite topic: Man's unnatural treatment of nature and its sad results. To illustrate his point he told how, during the previous summer, he had returned to a little valley in England where he had spent many happy months as a child. Once it had been composed of delightful grassy glades; now it was becoming overgrown with unsightly brush because the rabbits that formerly kept such growth under control had largely succumbed to a disease, myxomatosis, that was deliberately introduced by the local farmers to reduce the rabbits' destruction of crops. Being something of a Philistine, I could be silent no longer, even in the interests of great rhetoric. I interrupted to point out that the rabbit itself had been brought as a domestic animal to England in 1176, presumably to improve the protein diet of the peasantry.