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Barriers to Perception:
From a World of Interconnection to Fragmentation

David T. Suzuki
The Suzuki Foundation, 2211 West 4th Ave., Suite 219, Vancouver, BC V6K 4S2, Canada

Making Sense of the Cosmos

The great molecular biologist and Nobel laureate Francois Jacob has stated that the human brain has a built-in need for order. From earliest times, human beings looked out and recognized cycles, repetitive patterns in nature—day following night, the seasons, tides, lunar cycles, plant succession, animal migration—that conferred the ability to predict their recurrence, and thus people acquired a semblance of understanding of and control over the cosmic forces impinging on their lives. Gifted with an enormous brain, our distant ancestors were inquisitive, experimental, and inventive. Over time, they acquired profound insights into their immediate surroundings that had conferred survival value. No doubt they pondered many of the same cosmic questions that we ask today: How did we get here? Where are we going? What is the meaning of life? As the great French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote:

I see no reason why mankind should have waited until recent times to produce minds of the caliber of a Plato or an Einstein. Already over two or three hundred thousand years ago, there were probably men of similar capacity (Lévi-Strauss 1968).

From the dawn of human awareness, people accumulated insights and understanding and superstitions that were woven into their mythologies, into the fabric of their culture and identity. Anthropologists call this a “worldview”; in it, nothing exists in isolation from anything else. The rocks, the wind, the stars, the

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rivers, the forests,and people are all inseparably intertwined. The past, the present, and the future form a seamless flowing continuum. In such a world, human beings often were saddled with enormous responsibility to keep it all going. They had to behave properly, say the right prayers, and follow the proper rituals and ceremonies, or the world could collapse. So the great bounty of the world of which humans partook was laden with responsibility.

From Interconnection to Fragmentation

When Francis Bacon recognized that knowledge (scientia) is power, he began a fundamental shift in how we perceive our surroundings. Science is a radically different way of seeing the world. Instead of trying to understand the whole universe, scientists focus on a part of nature, separate it from its surroundings, control everything impinging on it, measure everything within it, and thereby acquire profound insights into that isolated bit of nature. Ever since Newton described the universe as an immense clockwork mechanism, scientists have been motivated by the notion that by analyzing nature in fragments, we could eventually understand the whole by putting the pieces together as in a giant jigsaw puzzle. Reductionism is at the heart of modern science.

Physicists recognized in this century that reductionism does not work. The universe is not like a giant machine. Quantum mechanics revealed that at the most fundamental level of subatomic particles we could not know their precise location with certainty, only by statistical probability. Furthermore, as Nobel laureate Roger Sperry pointed out, properties emerge from the interactions of parts of nature that cannot be predicted on the basis of the individual properties of the parts (Sperry 1968). However, most of biology and medicine remains predicated on reductionism.

In this century, humankind has undergone massive changes with explosive speed. Harnessing the enormous power of technology, increasing in number exponentially, and accepting a global economy based on endless growth and productivity, we have become a superspecies capable as no other species has ever been of modifying the biophysical features of the planet on a geological scale. In a moment of evolutionary time, great rivers can be diverted or dammed, wetlands drained, ancient forests cleared, and air, water, and soil polluted. As technology and the economy have become the dominant elements of our lives, worldviews have been shattered, and we are no longer able to recognize the exquisite interconnections that mean that every human action has enormous repercussions throughout the biological world. As Thomas Berry says:

It's all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story (Berry 1988).

The challenge we face is to rediscover those connections and recognize that we remain embedded in nature so our every action is laden with consequences

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and ramifications. The difficulty is that we have barriers that blind us to those interconnections. If we are to pass through the barriers, we first have to recognize them.

Barriers to Interconnectedness

The Move to Cities.

If we look at humankind over the vast sweep of evolutionary time, one of the monumental transitions has been the change in this century in how we live. In 1900, only 16 cities had a million or more people. The largest was London, with 6.5 million. Tokyo was seventh, with 1.5 million. More than 95% of humanity lived in rural village communities. We were an agrarian species. Today, over 400 cities have a million or more people. The top 10 all have more than 11 million, and Tokyo is the largest with 26.5 million! Over half of all people now live in large urban settings, and the proportion is increasing all the time (World Almanac 1996).

Designed properly, cities could be ecologically far more benign in energy use, pollution, use of cars, and so on. But in cities, we live in a human-created habitat that is severely diminished in biological diversity. Our surroundings are dominated by one species—us—and the few plants and animals that we decide to share space with or cannot quite eliminate. In such an environment, it becomes easy to think that we are special, that our creativity has enabled us to escape the constraints of our biological nature. It is easy to forget that we remain absolutely dependent on air, water, soil, energy, and biodiversity for our survival and good health.

I have been shocked while making television programs by the number of urban children (and adults) who have little idea of the source of their food. Many do not know that vegetables grow in the “dirt” or that wieners, hamburgers, and drumsticks are the muscles of animals. They do not know where electricity, water, plastic, or glass comes from or where sewage and garbage go. Yet they are all services delivered not by the economy, but by Earth itself.

Science and Technology

As a student in the immediate post-Sputnik years, I was taught and believed that science enables us to push back the curtains of ignorance to unlock the deepest secrets of the universe and thereby to acquire the understanding that is vital to control and manage the world around us. Progress in science during this century has been spectacular; in my field of genetics, it takes my breath away to see techniques used in undergraduate laboratories that I never dreamed would be available in my lifetime. And the technological prowess that accompanies our insights is truly phenomenal. But in our understandable exuberance over our discoveries, we forget how science progresses, and we forget the extent of our ignorance.

When I graduated as a fully accredited geneticist in 1961, I thought I was pretty hot. I knew about DNA and operons and cistrons. But now when I tell

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students about our 1961 ideas of chromosome structure, gene function, and regulation, they laugh in disbelief. Seen through the perspective of what we know in 1997, our hotshot ideas of 1961 are naive and far off the mark. But students are stunned when I remind them that when they have been professors for 20 years and tell their students what the hottest ideas of 1997 were, those students will also be highly amused. The very nature of science is that we know that most of our current ideas, models, and hypotheses are wrong, in need of major modification, or irrelevant. As we rush to patent and apply ideas and techniques in molecular biology, we remain ignorant about the makeup and extent of biological diversity on the planet. As E.O. Wilson has argued, the 1.6 million species identified may be less than 20% of all species on Earth (Wilson 1992). And identification of a species merely means that a biologist has classified and named a dead specimen; it does not mean that we know anything about how many individuals there are, the distribution of the species, how it interacts with other species, or anything about its basic biology. We are tearing at the intricate web of living things before we have any understanding of its components or how they interact to maintain the planet's productivity. Our basic descriptive research is imperative. Currently, the strength of scientists is description: because we know so little, we make discoveries wherever we look. But for the same reason, we cannot be prescriptive in recommending meaningful action for environmental problems that we encounter.

Rachel Carson's 1962 seminal book Silent Spring was a warning that technology, however beneficial, invariably has costs, and because our knowledge is still so limited, our capacity to anticipate or predict all consequences and costs is extremely restricted. When the insecticidal properties of some molecules were discovered, the benefits of killing insect pests were obvious. At that time, geneticists knew enough to predict that resistant mutants would quickly render an insecticide ineffective, and ecologists understood that the use of broad-spectrum insecticides made little ecological sense when fewer than one-thousandth of all insect species are pests to human beings. But no one could have anticipated the biomagnification of insecticides, because scientists discovered the phenomenon only when populations of some birds, such as eagles, decreased drastically. If we cannot anticipate the consequences of powerful new technologies and if our knowledge of the basic biological and physical makeup of Earth is minuscule, can we go on embracing new technologies with the hope that the inevitable problems that they create will be correctable by further technological innovation? I don't see how we can.

The Information Explosion

Today, as we prepare to leap into a new millennium, our leaders wax eloquent and ecstatic about the information superhighway that will take us there. But having worked as both a university professor and a host in television and radio since 1962, I can tell you that the challenge we face today is not a need for access to more information but a way of wading through information overload. The average person today is confronted with “info-glut,” and most of what passes as information is junk. On an anecdotal level, I encounter many

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people who regale me with fantastic ideas—Bermuda triangles, extraterrestrial abductions, or scientific breakthroughs—and when I ask the source of their stories, the answer is often “I read it” or “I saw it on TV.” But if people do not make a distinction between information obtained from the National Enquirer and information obtained from Scientific American or the New Scientist, or between Geraldo Rivera and The Nature of Things or Nova, then information is validated simply on the grounds that it exists.

And the nature of the electronic media is that they create a virtual reality that is better than the real thing. After all, you can now experience the kinkiest sex without fear of being caught or catching AIDS; you can lose a gunfight and live to fight again; you can have a horrendous crash in a car race and walk away. When I began my career in television, I had the great conceit to think that through this medium I would create films that would stand out like jewels, entertaining while educating the viewing public. My hope was that with good natural-history films people would grow to love and value the wonderful diversity of other species and complex ecosystems. But I have learned that our programs, too, are a form of virtual reality.

Years ago, I was on a talk show on national television, and the host asked me, “As a scientist, what do you think the world will be like in 100 years?” I responded that if human beings are still around in a century, I would hazard a guess that they would curse us for two things—nuclear power and television. Ignoring the nuclear issue, the host did a double take and stammered, “Why television?” My response was “Bob, you asked me a very tough question. If I had responded ‘Gee, Bob, that's a hard one’ and then proceeded to think for 10 seconds, you would have cut to commercials within 3 seconds. Because television is not serious, it cannot tolerate dead air.” Now in reflecting on that exchange, I have recognized that when we assemble a nature film, we create an artifact: we send a photographer to the Arctic or the Amazon for months to get all kinds of shots-to-end-all-shots. Then in an editing room, we string them all together to produce an illusion that a tropical rain forest or the Arctic is a blur of activity. But the one ingredient that is indispensable to experience the real world is time. As telecommunication technology jams more and more information into less and less space, it delivers more jolts per second to an audience now hooked on and demanding more and more adrenaline-charged jolts. And the overriding message within the medium, even for a public-supported medium like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, is consume, consume, consume.

As Thomas Veltre of the New York Zoological Association has pointed out, the underlying message in television is diametrically opposed to that of environmentalism (Veltre 1990). Those of us concerned with sustainable futures look at the world on a geological time scale; we try to see the whole picture, and we urge conservation. Information conveyed by the electronic media is conveyed as a series of unrelated bullets conveying little sense of the context and history that give us an understanding of why they matter. We are assaulted by instant and fragmented factoids; and throughout, we are exhorted to buy, buy, buy.

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Politics, Politicians, and Bureaucracy

Now that the ideological battle and insane arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States has ended, we revel in the apparent triumph of democracy and the efficiency of the global market. But there are enormous ecological problems that governments on any side of the political spectrum are ill equipped to handle.

To begin with, political action is predicated on the need to obtain tangible results in time for the next election, a timeframe that is too short to deal seriously with many of our most important challenges, such as species extinction and climate change. Thus, for example, in a study initiated by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in 1988, it was found that Canada could readily achieve a 20% reduction in CO2 emission in 15 years for a net savings of $150 billion! That apparent good news has never been formally released, and nothing was ever done to implement it. That is because to achieve the CO2 reduction and save an enormous sum, an initial $74 billion has to be invested. It would be political suicide to announce such an up-front expenditure; besides, the political beneficiary of the savings would be someone else 15 years later.

A further problem that I have found in Canada is that elected politicians come primarily from two professions: business and law. In part, that reflects the fact that few people from labor, farming, homemaking, teaching, and so on can afford to run for office and lose. But this skewed representation distorts perceptions of government priorities. It is not an accident that in my country there is excessive concern with economic and jurisdictional issues. In the last session of Parliament, of more than 600 questions asked during Question Period, a mere seven were on the environment, but many concerned Quebec separation, gun control, and athletics. To compound the limited perspectives of government, when 50 members of Parliament were tested for their comprehension of scientific and technological terms and concepts, lawyers and businesspeople scored at the absolute rock bottom of the heap. Yet they will make decisions about the future of old-growth forests, climate change, ozone depletion, toxic pollution, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and many other issues requiring an understanding of science and technology. Clearly, the challenge is to make science and technology a fundamental part of every citizen's education.

Perhaps the greatest challenge is that political priorities are defined by a profound species chauvinism that blinds us to larger ecological principles. Once elected to office, politicians are beholden to financial backers, their party, and the electorate, apparently in descending order of importance. But children do not vote. For that matter, future generations do not vote. Yet they are the ones with the most at stake in the decisions now being made by governments. In addition, our governments' priorities are too restricted along species lines to enable them to assess ecological problems adequately. Thus, we create political boundaries that we then deploy every effort to protect. But human borders make little ecological sense to air, water, plants, and animals. Watersheds, mountaintops, ozone layer, valley bottoms, jet streams, wetlands, flyways, ocean currents—these are the real ecological determinants of meaningful boundaries.

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Nothing illustrates better the ludicrousness of our political attempts to manage nature than Pacific salmon, which currently inflame American and Canadian political rhetoric. Adults of the five species of salmon know very well where they “belong”: in the natal rivers and streams that they left 2–5 years before. But because fishing fleets intercept them at sea, we must establish an International Salmon Commission to set quotas for each nation. As the animals move from Alaska past British Columbia to Washington, Oregon, and California, fishers take them in the open sea as though the fish belong to them. Even when the fish reach their river homes in British Columbia, the federal government decrees that they fall under the Department of Indian Affairs for the aboriginal food fishery and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans for the commercial fishers, while the provincial government claims the highest revenue from sport fishing, which falls under the Department of Tourism. As the salmon move up the rivers, activities administered under the Departments of Urban Affairs, Mining, Agriculture, Forestry, and Science and Technology impinge on their fate. So human categories and priorities transform what is a single biological issue into a multiplicity of bureaucratic turf wars, thereby making it certain that the fish will never be dealt with in a way that will ensure their long-term survival and abundance.

When politicians attempt to bring “all the stakeholders” to the table to hash out a contentious issue—such as clear-cutting old-growth forests, damming a river, or building a new nuclear facility—the most important stakeholders are not present. Where are the children, the unborn generations, the fish, air, trees, water, or topsoil? Our minister of forests does not speak on behalf of the forest, nor the minister of agriculture on behalf of the soil, nor the minister of fisheries on behalf of the fish. Instead, we attempt to shoehorn nature into the demands of human economic, political, and social priorities, often rationalizing our actions by claiming that environmental assessments permit them. In Canada, environmental regulations are often suspended because of the need to stimulate the economy or create jobs.

In our position of dominance, we now assume that the planet is a massive resource that is ours to exploit as we wish. Thus, the 1987 UN Commission on the Environment and Development report Our Common Future suggested a goal of protecting 12% of the land in every country. Canada does not come close to that target either federally or provincially, and there has been vehement opposition to attempting to achieve it. It is assumed that human beings—one of perhaps 10–30 million species—have the right to exploit 88% of the land!

The Global Economy

Finally, we are being sold on a kind of global economics that runs counter to what we have learned from biology in the second part of the century. In the early 1960s, geneticists began to apply the tools of molecular biology to look at the products of single genes within a species. To their amazement, they discovered that there was a tremendous amount of genetic polymorphism. Now we understand that genetic diversity is the key to a species's resilience and adaptability as the environment changes. It also appears that species diversity within ecosystems

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and ecosystem diversity around the world are also critical elements in life's resilience. Humans have added another level of diversity that is important for our species's resilience: culture. Human cultures are profoundly local and have enabled groups of our species to survive and flourish in environments as different as the Arctic, grasslands, mountain ranges, steaming jungles and rain forests, and arid deserts. We even flourish in New York, Tokyo, and London, for Heaven's sake!

We have learned that when we attempt to raise large numbers of organisms of a single species or one genetic strain of animal or plant, that population becomes extremely vulnerable to pests, infection, or environmental change. Monoculture runs counter to the fundamental biological principle of maximal diversity as the key to adaptability, and we have learned that at great cost in agriculture, forestry, and fisheries. In spite of this insight, we continue to ignore the importance of maximizing diversity and thus sacrifice long-term resilience and sustainability for the sake of immediate human needs. And we are drastically reducing diversity, not just in the natural world but in human societies around the world. A single notion of economics and development has been spread throughout the globe as nations ignore the 1933 warning of the father of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, John Maynard Keynes:

I sympathize with those who would minimize rather than maximize economic entanglement between nations. Ideas, knowledge, art, hospitality, travel—these are the things which should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonable and conveniently possible; and above all, let finance be primarily national (Keynes 1933).

The economic monoculture that is pursued by every government in the world makes no ecological sense. Most economists externalize the very support systems of life—air, ozone layer, topsoil, water, and biodiversity itself. Small wonder, then, that it is cheaper for a Toronto restaurant-owner to serve lamb imported from New Zealand than mutton purchased from a farm 40 km north.

Even though we live in a finite world, economics is predicated on the notion that it is not only possible but necessary to strive for steady, endless growth. It is suicidal for a single species that is increasing in numbers exponentially and that has already co-opted 40% of the net primary productivity (NPP) of the planet to demand further economic growth that will come from increasing its share of the NPP (Vitousek and others 1986).

The destructive consequences of this mindless fixation on economic growth as society's most important goal are exacerbated by the measurements of economic success. Any transaction of goods and services resulting in an exchange of money registers as an increase in GDP, whether it is the purchase of weapons to counter high crime rates, hospital and funeral costs of homicides and cigarette-smoking, or cleaning up after an oil or chemical spill. In the GDP, whether money is spent to correct social or ecological damage is irrelevant. As shown by the organization Redefining Progress, which uses an economic indicator that subtracts for such costs, the per capita GDP has more than doubled since 1950, but the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) rose slowly to a peak about 1970 and has been declining ever since (Cobb and others 1994).

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The global economy that Keynes warned about is dominated by speculators and transnational corporations (TNCs) that are no longer tied to local populations or ecosystems. The current attempt by the OECD to gain passage of the Multilateral Agreement on Investments will open each country to the depredations of the TNCs while freeing them of responsibility to provide jobs or income for local communities or environmental protection of local ecosystems. Maximizing profit appears to be sufficient rationale for globalization of markets and economies.

Where once currency represented something tangible, increasingly it stands for itself. Today, we can buy money, sell money, and make more money without adding anything of value to society or the planet. The $1.3 trillion in daily currency speculation is bigger than most government treasuries, as we see when governments attempt without success to stop the fall in the franc and peso. This global currency flows electronically across all borders and grows far more quickly than real things. So now, as companies diversify, they can deplete one sector and then move to the remaining areas of income. The great temperate rain forests of British Columbia add “fiber” at the rate of 2–3% per year. Obviously, by cutting only 2% or 3% of the trees each year, forest companies could remove the equivalent of the entire forest in 35 or 23 years, respectively, and still have the entire forest left. But it makes no economic “sense” to take only 2% or 3% per year if a company can make 8% or 9% on its investment by clear-cutting an entire forest and putting the money in the bank. If the money is invested in forests in other countries, it might be possible to make far more; and when the forests are gone, the money can be put into fish; and when they are gone, the money can go into biotechnology or computers. So the economics drive a company to maximize profit without regard to long-term sustainability.

Reconnecting Ourselves by Setting the Bottom Line

Today, governments around the world pursue a “bottom line” that is driven by an economy that is disconnected from the real world and fundamentally destructive of local communities and local ecosystems. Global competitiveness, efficiency, debt, deficit, and profit are buzzwords defining bottom lines. But it is a bottom line that omits the fundamental basic needs of all human societies. To see what our real nonnegotiable needs are, we must first recognize and surmount the barriers to the interconnections between our activities and the rest of the world that nurtures us.

The first level of human need is defined by our biology—as animals, we have fundamental requirements, and failure to meet them adequately results in death or truncated lives. These needs are so important that our bodies have a multitude of safety devices to ensure that they are met. I am speaking, of course, of our need for clean air, clean water, clean soil, and clean energy, all of which are delivered by the planet's collective biodiversity. We need only hold our breath for 1 minute to recognize the life-giving nature of air. Deprived of air for 3 minutes, we are permanently brain-damaged; after 5 minutes, we die. From the moment of our birth to the instant of our death, we need air. We take each breath

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of air deep into the most intimate moist, warm parts of our body, where we literally fuse with the air at the surfactant layer lining the alveoli of the lungs. And when we exhale, our breath rushes out and into the noses of our neighbors! We inhale atoms that once were parts of trees, birds, worms, and snakes. We inhale atoms that were once breathed in by Joan of Arc and Jesus Christ. Air is not empty space; it is a physical substance, a matrix in which we are embedded and linked to all terrestrial life on Earth.

We can make a similar case for water, which is at least 60% of our body weight. Water inflates us, enters into metabolic reactions, cools us, and delivers atoms and molecules that we need to survive. Through the hydrologic cycle, water cartwheels endlessly around the planet, purified by soil and plants, transpired back into the air by forests. Water is another glue that holds all of life together; we only have to go without a drink for a day to know how important it is.

Every bit of our nutrition that builds and renews our bodies was once alive. As botanist Martha Crouch says, our relationship with food is the most intimate relationship we have with other beings in that we take them into our bodies and incorporate them into our cells and tissues. And all of our food ultimately comes from the soil. It is remarkable then, when our absolute survival and quality of life depend on the quality of air, water, and soil, that we use them freely as dumping grounds for our toxic wastes.

As living beings, we need energy; and all the energy that we use ultimately comes from the sun. The capacity to capture that energy and send it to us in a usable form resides in Earth's great forests and ocean systems. Ultimately, it is the sum total of all of life's forms—Earth's biodiversity—that somehow purifies and renews our real necessities.

We have another level of fundamental needs, for we are social animals. As the young field of ecopsychology emphasizes, we are deeply embedded in the natural world, and it is an illusion to suggest that we are truly independent beings. Whatever we do to our surroundings, we do to ourselves. Numerous studies show that as social animals, we need the early experience of love for the full development of our potential. Studies done in Romania after Ceaucescu's fall indicate that children raised in orphanages and provided with food, clothing, and shelter but never held or cuddled grow up physically and psychically damaged (Johnson and others 1992). The best way to ensure the love that humanizes us is to provide the opportunity for stable family relationships, and that is generally ensured by strong local communities. Employment is a fundamental need, and numerous scientific studies document the medical, physical, and psychological problems that arise from chronic unemployment or unexpected loss of a job (Lin and others 1995). We must be able to ensure justice and security to avoid the problems that can result from their absence. These are the fundamental social needs that must be met for long-term sustainable futures.

Finally, we are spiritual animals that need to be connected to the natural world. E.O. Wilson has called our need to be with other species biophilia, an innate requirement (Wilson 1984). As mortal beings, we are sustained by the knowledge that our kind will live on and that nature itself will continue to thrive after our individual deaths.

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I suggest that by re-examining the fundamental needs on which a truly sustainable future can be built, we will also rediscover the incredible interconnections that once held people together in their surroundings.

References

Berry T. 1988. The dream of the Earth. San Francisco CA: Sierra Club Bk.

Carson R. 1962. Silent spring. Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Cobb C, Halsted T. 1994. The genuine progress indicator: summary of data and methodology. San Francisco CA: Redefining Progress Inst.

Johnson DE, Miller LC, Iverson S, Thomas W, Franchino B, Dole K, Kiernan MT, Georgieff MK, Hostetter MK. 1992. The health of children adopted from Romania. J Amer Med Asso 268:3446–51.

Keynes JM. 1933. National self-sufficiency. In: Moggeridge D (ed). The collected writings of John Maynard Keynes Vol 21. London UK: Cambridge Univ Pr.

Lévi-Strauss C. 1968. The concept of primitiveness in man the hunter. New York NY: Aldine Publ. [Lee RB and de Vore I (eds)].

Lin RL, Shah CP, Svoboda TJ. 1995. The impact of unemployment on health: a review of the evidence. Can Med Asso J 153:529–40.

Sperry R. 1968. Changed concepts of brain and consciousness some value implications, Zygon. J Relig Sci 20.

World Almanac: Funk and Wagnalls Co.

Veltre T. 1990. Speech delivered at the Wildlife Filmmakers' Symposium. Bath UK.

Vitousek PM, Ehrlich AH, Ehrlich PR, Matson PA. 1986. Human appropriation of the products of photosynthesis. Bioscience 36:368–73.

Wilson EO. 1984. Biophilia: the human bond with other species. Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ Pr.

Wilson EO. 1992. The diversity of life. New York NY: WW Norton.