STATEMENT OF WILLIAM COOPER, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ZOOLOGY, MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY

Mr. Chairman, I am Dr. William E. Cooper from the department of zoology at Michigan State University. I am a population ecologist and my remarks concern an ecological overview of the degradation of our environment.

I would like to state from the outset that there is a large credibility gap between people here who claim they are going to manage their environment and the people who are trying to work out strategies for the management of biological systems. There is a very fundamental understanding of nature which was not represented by many of the statements made this morning. I personally feel that you are a long ways from accomplishing the goal of environmental management until you get this type of understanding.

One of the fundamental problems is the lack of understanding as to how dependent human society, the way we know it today, is on the existence of stable biological communities.

(Ecologists approach the study of the environment at essentially three levels.)

We look at one set of interactions, occurrences of various types of events in nature, at the population level. Many of the problems discussed today such as the control of pest insects and the exploitation of fish populations are examples of population problems.

There is another level of hierarchy or structure in nature at the community level. The problems, for instance, of restructuring stable fish populations in the Great Lakes that are productive and predictable through time, represent problems at the community level.

A third level of approach ecologists take is what we call an ecosystem. An ecosystem is the fundamental unit of nature, the unit that has to survive if we are going to maintain a life support system on this earth that will support life at least under conditions as we know it today.

An ecosystem is essentially a biological community through which various chemicals and energy pass. In terms of life support systems or ecosystems as we know it today, you have two basic approaches.

In terms of energy flow, it is an open system. Energy flows to the earth and is caught by green plants. It goes through various food webs and either ends up in man or other organisms. Essentially all the heat trapped by the systems every day is reradiated back into space. So the world is in a thermal balance. This is what we mean by an open system. It is a free-flow system.

In terms of elements (phosphorus, nitrogen, potassium, the various chemical elements it takes to sustain life), it is a closed system. These chemicals have to be recycled. You have all the materials today you are probably ever going to have to work with. It is quite important in an ecological system that these elements be recycled.

The major transport system in the world is water. The major function of water in a biological system is moving chemicals around through the various components.

Now, the biological communities that we see today consist of an array of plants and animals that represents generations of evolutionary

selection. These are a highly integrated collection of organisms. The integration or structure, as ecologists call it, provides the community with the mechanism for internal regulation. It is this internal regulation that is absolutely dependent if one is going to maintain a stable type of life support system.

The types of interactions that are built into natural systems to begin this regulation are, for instance, the host-parasite or predator-prey interactions. Many of these types of interactions we must understand if we are going to manage environmental systems.

It is also important to remember that these communities that we see today have survived thousands of years of exposure to stress of all kinds. If there is one thing we know from our environment, it is that they have all been successful far longer than human society has. I think we can learn a lot by looking at these systems in terms of what elements must be retained if we want to develop an equilibrium between ourselves and our environment.

One of the fundamental aspects of natural communities is the larger number of plants and animals we see. This is true of marine and fresh water, of terrestrial and aquatic communities in the Arctic and in the tropics. This is what ecologists call diversity. It is diversity of communities that essentially allows the regulatory mechanisms to be developed.

Communities that are disrupted, for instance, by agricultural plowing of land do not maintain that structure. They very rapidly, if left alone, evolve into very complex communities once again. Nature herself will not allow communities to remain unstructured unless human society expends large amounts of energy to maintain this unstable.

state.

Communities that are not diverse-that is, communities that essentially have been disrupted by man-have one inherent property which is undesirable. That is instability. They are very unpredictable and are very difficult to manage in any type of economic or exploitation process. (Biological communities are constantly exposed to stress.)

Stress to a biological community can take many forms. It can be thermal pollution, industrial or domestic wastes, pesticides or a biological pollutant like the alewife or sea lampreys in Lake Michigan. I think a mistake was made today by many people in trying to consider only pesticide effects from laboratory studies of the lethal or sublethal effects because none of these have been done in the context of the other stresses to which these organisms are exposed. That is, the tolerance of an organism to pesticides is one thing, but if you couple this with a concurrent stress of thermal pollution or domestic or industrial wastes, the ability for an organism or group of organisms to resist an additive stress of pesticides can be quite different.

When you talk about natural systems, they are not just exposed to one pollutant at a time. The impacts on the biological community are a collection of all pollutants concurrently.

One of the properties of a biological community that is put under stress is that it selects for those organisms that have very selective or restrictive physiological tolerances. In general, these are organisms that are not normally found in balanced, well-structured communities. They are organisms that we associate as pests, as outbreak organisms. The

resulting community with its low diversity is composed usually of a rather unique and restrictive array of organisms. These communities are very unpredictable. As we have seen now in the Great Lakes with the alewife or with many outbreaks of pest insects, they are going to take some form of human regulation. When you remove the diversity of the community, you remove from it its internal capabilities of regulating its own problems. There is no alternative but to substitute for that natural inherent regulatory ability some manmade operation. We probably never will get away from the use of chemicals control. We do not have regulatory mechanisms other than use of chemicals to control these biological systems that are unstructured. With our western form of monospecific agriculture, we have essentially destroyed the diversity necessary for control. The problem, then, is to get chemicals for chemical control which have short activity and even more importantly are very host specific.

No one today mentioned the problem of wide-spectrum pesticides. These are chemicals that have a general toxicity to a great variety of plants and animals. You can take a natural community and remove any one species, and that community will still survive. You can remove the elm tree from Michigan, and our biological life support system will not change appreciably. You could probably take out two species or three or four; we don't know how many. We are quite sure that if you kick the system hard enough by removing enough species within a short period of time that you probably will change the structure of biological communities so that their properties are quite different than we have now. We have no way of predicting what those properties will be. They might be compatible with human society the way we know it; they might not be. I know of no ecologist today that could predict what the form of that biological community would

be.

Scientists have concentrated their studies on obvious organisms, birds, mammals, man, and fish. They do this for obvious reason. There is economic importance, esthetic values, and recreational problems involved with these organisms. But from the point of ecologists, the great array of small organisms, bacteria, fungi, algae and invertebrates, are the organisms that are fundamentally important to the structure of a viable, stable community.

Management policy based exclusively on human health problems or the dollar costs of the coho salmon industry, would be very seriously in error. The problem is far more fundamental and widespread in terms of just the immediate short-term economic gains.

The data on the other types of organisms that we know are essential to biological communities in order to keep chemical elements flowing and recycling through the systems are very scarce. To date I know of no complete set of data in which you could make predictions as to what the real effect of any chemical has been in our environment. By "effect," I do not mean half-lives in terms of LD-50's. I am talking about long-term viable communities, whose integrity is maintained for several human generations. Until this information is available, the distribution of toxic materials of all kinds should be very restricted to those who are quite host specific, short lived and fixed in terms of spacial distributions.

We do not at the present time know how to manage our environment. People throw around the concept of environmental management very loosely. We cannot even structure the Great Lakes fisheries so they are stable. To an ecologist, the distribution of fish in the Great Lakes is a very unstable environment. It would be very wise to minimize the number of environments that we disrupt in a major sense until we have the ability to restore the capacity of diversity which we know that these communities must have.

The concept of eradication is nonsense. In terms of short-term eradication, one could make an argument that you gain something. In terms of long-term patterns of the population demography of insect populations or of lamprey populations it is very difficult to justify the use of eradication in biological control. To most ecologists, control means maintaining within restrictive parts of the earth's surface tolerable level of pests.

The problems in terms of economics analyses of policies concerned with environmental problems are also very complex. Generally, the statements made concerning the dollar values of particular commodities that we are trying to protect in our environment are usually based on short-term cost-benefit analyses. If one would really compute the cost of a product in terms of the cost of maintaining an environmental quality, that particular process it took to produce that commodity might have been far greater than we realize today. And so ecologists ask for evaluations of procedures. We do not mean for 1- or 2-year gains or ratios of input to output for 1 fiscal year. We are talking about long-term stabilized, steady State inputs and outputs so that the environment can essentially maintain a set of circumstances under which we know that life can exist. It does not mean that life will not exist under other circumstances. It is just that we cannot guarantee it. And unless we can, I think it would be very wise to treat your environment with a great degree of restraint.

Thank you.

Senator HART. I do not need to tell you I am going to have to reread that because it is an area about which I have heard little and read literally nothing. That is a disappointing admission, but it is the truth.

Dr. COOPER. Most ecologists have never communicated with politicians or people working in the applied aspects of science.

I did not write my talk out today. I want to do it afterward. A lot of the things I said resulted from what I heard this morning. I am really disturbed as to how easily people can say that they are going to change environments and how few of these people have ever had experience trying to do that.

My particular area of research is the analysis of model systems to determine what priorities or what aspects of these systems are fundamental for stability. We are a very long ways from having any answers. If someone asked me today-we have got a problem today, how do you handle it-I probably would not be of much value in giving you short-term answers. But I think it is very worthwhile to have this type of communication to caution you that in fact we are probably not solving these problems on a long-term basis at all.

Senator HART. If we are not, it is desirable that we understand it. We

do have a notion that if you can just turn off this faucet or make steady the flow out of another faucet, everything will be fine.

Dr. COOPER. An example I could put out concerns the consumer in this country. The farmer to a great degree was put into a bind. He was forced by the consumer to produce bushels of apples with no blemishes, no worms. The cost of getting that last worm out of an apple is astronomical. If you were willing to essentially tolerate a minimum level of materials and still have the housewife buy this without getting emotionally upset, you would buy yourselves some time to get other answers.

But the answers today, at the scale you are talking about in terms of the acreages and the number of different problems are not going to be provided in the near future by the biological sciences.

Senator HART. May I ask you when you do write that, please let us have a copy. If the record has gone to print, we will not be able to substitute it, but if it comes in in time, I would like to get it in the record.

Is the title "population ecologist" a discipline that has been with us for long?

Dr. COOPER. The area of population ecology has been around since 1938. It has primarily directed itself to the problems of human populations. I think the area that is most germane to the problems discussed today is an area which we call system ecology. Essentially, we are trying to implement the same concepts and tools that systems engineers have used in industry to evaluate various types of policies and processes in terms of long-term and short-term gains in stability. The field of systems ecology is probably 5 years old, maybe 10.

Senator HART. Mr. Meserve.

Mr. MESERVE. No questions, thank you.

Senator HART. Mr. Webber.

Mr. WEBBER. I pass.

Senator HART. Doctor, we thank you very much. You can go back to your classes.

Prof. Joseph Hickey of the University of Wisconsin.

STATEMENT OF JOSEPH HICKEY, PROFESSOR OF WILDLIFE ECOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN

Dr. HICKEY. I would like to talk today on insecticidal residues in Lake Michigan, 1963 to 1968. This paper is really by myself, Daniel W. Anderson and J. Anthony Keith of my department, and James P. Ludwig of the University of Michigan.

This report summarizes University of Wisconsin studies of DDT in a transect of the ecosystems across the lake, tabulates our available data on fluctuating levels of DDE in the Green Bay area since 1963, and discusses the biological significance of these levels with particular reference to birds.

Our research on Lake Michigan has been continuously financed by contracts with the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife, U.S. Department of the Interior. We are much indebted to officials of the Bureau's Patuxent Wildlife Research Center for this support, and