media presentations, would excite so vivacious a response. For it deals with what children know to be true, that if one kills vile snakes, he also destroys lovely trees, because the vile snakes eat the bugs that prevent the destruction of the trees. It is not a great intellectual achievement to know this; in a sense it is the primitive knowledge that a child already senses that things belong together.

I think the bill, inasmuch as it is directed toward a presentation of "how man lives in this bound-together world," if administered with intelligence, and, as my colleague suggested, with a calling upon the ecological, pedagogical research know-how that is already available, would be a significant contribution directed to the tenderest spot in the public response.

Thank you very much.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Thank you very much, Dr. Sittler.

Without objection, your prepared statement will be included in the

record as if read.

(The statement follows:)

STATEMENT OF DR. JOSEPH SITTLER, THEOLOGIAN, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Because the national need to which this Bill addressed itself is a complex and a delicate one, our reflection about it requires a level of thought far deeper than is commonly required for a judgment.

What man does with the world-as-nature is a result of what he thinks about nature; it is shaped in the profoundest care of what he feels about the natural world, what evaluation he has of the world of things and plants and animals.

If the world of the not-self is felt as a mere resource to be used it will surely be abused; if the world is regarded as a gift, a wonder, as a reality having an integrity of its own--it will be rightly used.

That proposition is swiftly and powerfully true: and our present ecological crisis is a result of the denial of its truth. For nature, though often silent, is not without power to condemn as well as power to bless man. And when man so uses nature as to deny her integrity, defile her cleanliness, disrupt her order, or ignore her needs-the reprisals of insulted nature take an often slow but terribly certain form. Nature's protest against defilement is ecological reprisal.

Man cannot be man against nature; he can only be man with nature. For man belongs, too, to the world-as-nature. If out of ignorance, or apathy, or aggressiveness he tears the fabric of which his own life is a part, he destroys himself as well as the mighty structure from whose womb he was born, in whose web he has had his unfolding history, and whose support and companionship-in-life is the primal place and ground of his existence.

Managerial-man forgets this. Nature is patient. She permits him to make steel out of ore, and limestone, and coal and sophisticated chemical operations. But if, in that creative and legitimate work he befouls the air, pollutes the water, and deals rapaciously with the unretrievable and irreplaceable stuff of nature, patient nature begins her quiet but implacable counterattack.

How, then, shall the mind and spirit of a nation be addressed by this ecological fact that man and nature are bound together in the bundle of life?

Education is not the only way; but it is an important way. And, speaking as an educator, I can think of few areas of life that could be so naturally fitted into a course of study. For the things ecology points to and deals with are the immediate actualities of our lives: air and water, plants and animals, forests and bugs and birds and spiders and snakes. And the high specialization of man's historical life whereby a primal organic wholeness of life is ever more deeply threatened would, in my opinion, guarantee a student response of great vivacity. For what is happening to fragmented man as a human person confronts in the vast ecosystem of nature a model of community, interdependence, and balance which, beheld and honored, bestows upon man a vision of wisdom, and order, and is tutorial to the future of man is history.

For the possible correction of the wrongs we have done in the past there must be regulative, protective, ameliorative action directed to the producing, fabricating, consuming, beer-can flinging adult public. But the action this bill proposes.

because it is addressed to the young, is even more crucial. It is directed toward restoration of a rational way of life-and its truth, because a part of public instruction, is truth poured into the very spring of the future.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Let me refer to the famous lecture that was delivered by Dr. Rene DuBois in October 1969, "A Theology of the Earth," in which Dr. DuBois took issue with the thesis of Prof. Lynn White, Jr., out in California, which thesis on the part of Dr. White was that the Judeo-Christian tradition had been of considerable influence in bringing about the erosion of the environment, certainly in the United States.

Dr. White, you may recall, from that essay, alluded to the first chapter of Genesis, in which it is written that man and woman were given the right to subdue the earth and have dominion over all living things. Dr. DuBois quarrels with Dr. White at this point and suggests that the ancient Greek and Chinese and Moslem civilizations didn't have that good a record in terms of their respect for the earth. What do you think about that as a theologian?

Dr. SITTLER. I checked that out just before I left to come down here; I knew of Dr. White's article and also Dr. DuBois' response. And I spoke yesterday afternoon to the professor of semitic studies at the Oriental Institute. In the semitic language what does the verb "to have dominion" mean? And he said "to have dominion" means exactly the opposite of what it has been thought to mean when one translates from Hebrew into Latin, which was one of the earlier translations of the Bible. The term is understood as "domination," a kind of political word meaning "to exercise control over," but the proper translation would be "to exercise tender care for." And this is almost a 180-degree shift in the meaning.

Understanding Genesis in its context, man was ordered so as to live with God's other creation, the earth, that he was to regard her as the object of his guardianship. In fact, the word is used in the sense that man is to care for, he is to have dominion in the sense of exercising his intelligence to see that her integrity is not abused.

So I think Lynn White is right when he says that, on the whole, the tradition has been misunderstood to mean that man is given a holy charter to walk through the creation in arrogant haughtiness and do what he pleases with it-which is exactly the opposite of the intention of the statement in Genesis.

Mr. BRADEMAS. I wonder if the new English version takes that into account in translation.

Dr. SITTLER. I just checked that out in the New English Bible, which 10 days ago, with considerable publicity, was announced by the publishers. The passage is translated in such a way as to suggest to the mind that the relation is not one of arrogance or overlordship but is one of care and responsibility.

Mr. BRADEMAS. There is one other question I would put to you, deriving again from that lecture of Dr. DuBois.

You will recall that he was commenting on Lynn White's lecture in which there was the statement, "St. Francis of Assisi ought to be the patron saint of all ecologists." But DuBois said, "No, it ought to be St. Benedict, because he relates creative intervention"-alluding to interventionaries of medieval times and since St. Francis symbolizes passive worship of creation.

Do you have any comment on that particular squabble?

Dr. SITTLER. I should like to relate these two statements by introducing a third one. I think both men are right. Let's introduce the third man and then interpret the others.

St. Augustine made a marvelous statement once, in which he said: "It is of the heart of evil that men use what they ought to enjoy and enjoy what they ought to use."

Now, he meant by that, as the context makes clear, that unless one stands before the world with enjoyment, that is, with appreciation of its wonder, its beauty, its otherness than myself, he will certainly abuse it. If he enjoys the world for itself, then he must be trusted sanely to use it because he regards its own given nature.

Now, I think both Francis and Benedict deserve to fit under that category, because Francis, as it were, was the apostle of the enjoyment of the wonder and beauty and freedom of nature, and Benedict was the saint who affirmed that.

Men are supposed to deal with nature, our sister, in such a way as to managerially unfold here toward her fullest possibilities.

Well, Benedict is probably the father of contour plowing, and the Benedictine Order for many generations or centuries taught medieval Europe how to deal with earth, trees, plants, animals. The monasteries really were for hundreds of years the school in primitive ecology. Mr. SCHEUER. They were your ecological institute.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Thank you very much, Doctor.

Mr. Hansen?

Mr. HANSEN. Let me also express my appreciation for your presence here and your testimony, which has been fascinating.

My only question is whether you see in the legislation before the subcommittee a promising and productive approach to the development of the kind of understanding that you spoke of. Will this be a useful tool in achieving this understanding of nature and of our responsibility?

Dr. SITTLER. I think, sir, it can be a useful tool, if, as the thing passes from vision and enactment into exercise, it is not permitted to fall exclusively into the hands of the educators. For this reason: There must be educationally, pedagogically trained, people involved. But I fear for any effort which falls too absolutely into the hands of those whose only training is procedures of pedagogy. There are dimensions of this problem that are visual, poetic, spiritual, historical, economic; it is a very large bag. And I have been an educator long enough to fear my own crowd and its over-specialization.

We tend, as other segments of society, to imagine we know more than we know and to think of ourselves more highly than we ought to think, as St. Paul says. So the approach must be many dimensional. I suggest, sir, that it would be highly appropriate that in a kind of elementary and secondary school education aimed to awaken man to his existence with the fellow creation, that not just statistics or before-and-after pictures, and so forth, but aspects of American literature in which we encounter a marvelous body of material dealing with problems of this kind, ought also to be introduced.

I am a kind of frustrated poet; and I shall not inflict that on you— but there is a body of contemporary poetry directed exactly to this

question which ought to be in the curriculum just as Alice in Wonderland was in the curriculum of my childhood.

Mr. HANSEN. Are you saying also that in addition to the responsibility that educational institutions may have, that others, such as churches, other noneducational institutions and organizations, should in some way be brought into this process and come within the scope of this legislation?

Dr. SITTLER. Yes, sir; I think that would be true.

Mr. BRADEMAS. If my colleague would yield; am I not correct in understanding that the National Council of Churches is now beginning to do something in the field of ecology and that people in your profession are beginning to consider, as a responsibility, thinking through the religious implications of the ecological crisis?

Dr. SITTLER. Yes, belatedly, I think they are. I am writing a book on the subject, and some of my colleagues in other areas of Biblical, theological, historical work are beginning to work on this matter. So there is a rising tide of imaginative and scholarly work.

Mr. HANSEN. Thank you very much, Doctor.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Mr. Scheuer?

Mr. SCHEUER. Well, we all thoroughly enjoyed your testimony, and I know you have given us a number of things to think about, Dr. Sittler.

You may have heard that Dr. Cole testified on the matter of population, and I suggested we ought to have a zero rate of population growth. He answered to the effect it probably ought to be a negative rate. We probably ought to have a declining population for some period of time.

Now, here we are getting right into the domain of the theologian, and I think it would be interesting to us if you would give us the views of an eminent theologian on how we ought to be approaching the business of cutting down on national population, policy, and program, and how do we relate the individual created in the image of the Lord, everybody's Lord, with all of the individual rights and dignities of the uniqueness of mankind? How do we rationalize our long-held religious and political precepts of the uniqueness of the individual and his dignity and integrity with the insistent demands of our environmental ecological theories for a stable if not declining population?

Dr. SITTLER. Mr. Scheuer, I too have been involved in reflections about this matter with my colleagues in the theological community from the various Christian and also the Jewish community, and I know something about that.

Let me say that the definition of the "good and the moral" is more and more being understood not to be a static or a given pattern but is one which seeks in a moving, changing, dynamic, unfolding understanding of history to redesign and restate what is the "good," the "moral," the "fitting" in any situation. And the two positions standing over against each other are really the old traditional Roman Catholic position of natural law, which can be interpreted to mean that interference with reproduction is an offense against natural law. But there are theologians within that community, too, who are saying, "That is one way to read natural law. But if nature changes in regard to man's relationship to it, and if man's relationship to the

world, as nature results in too many people, then the intention of natural law can be understood in another way."

Mr. SCHEUER. Thank you very much.

Mr. BRADEMAS. I have just one other question. Dr. Sittler, before we let you go. And that is a rather fundamental question in this country right now. And that is-and it has been alluded to by Dr. Cole the worship, as it were, of the almighty "GNP." The question is if we are really going to make any significant headway in meeting the whole spectrum of issues that we call "the environmental crisis," must we require a fundamental shift in the values of the American society no longer believe that a constantly rising gross national product must be the fundamental public and private objective of this society?

And in this respect, I note the statement of Dr. Murray Gellmon, the California physicist who won the Nobel Prize this year, in which he said something to this effect: The mark of a really mature and civilized society is its capacity to decide not to do certain things of which it is technologically and scientifically capable.

So I guess the question is: Are we really going to be able to do anything other than saw at the wind in this field unless we move toward some fundamental shift in values in this society?

Dr. SITTLER. This is true. It seems to me the relevance of this bill is that it understands, at the point of priority of value, the crucial point. There must of course be legislation to restrict, ameliorate, to correct and do something about past blunders. But this bill moves at another level it seems to me. It seeks to shake the value-choosing minds of the future rather than do a kind of vacuum cleaner job on the mess. of the past. There has to be some of that done, to be sure.

But the bill is for the next century, not for the next biennium; will men really come to see this?

Well, maybe: There is a beautiful phrase in the Old Testament: "The Lord gave them what they wanted and made them sick of it." This may be the way the human mind changes-by a sheer surfeit of quantum, within which one begins to create the distinction between quantity and quality. This comes, I think, in the mood of the generation now coming to maturity, in which they have so much that falls apart so fast that a longing for sheer craftsmanship, or the less that is better, is not beyond the realm of possibility. We might be in again for an age of hand craftsmanship in certain things.

I am not a pastoral romanticist, and I do not think tractors can be hand crafted to deal with the land. But there are evidences in the culture of a kind of sardonic evaluation of sheer quantity, a line that goes always up on the graph, to which my own kids say, "Very big deal. So what?" But I understand them, because as my car falls apart every fourth year, I say the same thing.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Dr. Sittler, thank you very much indeed for your eloquent testimony.

Dr. SITTLER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Our final witnesses are two distinguished American contemporary artists, Mr. Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler.

Would you like to come forward, please. We look forward to hearing from you.