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A Flash of Green

by John D. MacDonald

First Printing, Simon & Schuster, 1962

Mrs: Doris Rowell: "To start with a general statement, filling in the bay would be a criminal act. It will take away forever something which cannot be replaced or restored. Depth, temperature, tide flow, composition of the bottom, all combine to make this bay unique. We have shallow water species here which are not found anywhere else along the coast."

"It is important to the sum total of human knowledge. We know painfully little about the world we live in. This is a living laboratory. Each new environmental fact is important to mankind, no mater how trivial it might seem to a banker or a newspaper reporter. You are where you are because of science, not in spite of it..."

"In this split second of time in which we are living, things have been too favorable for man. With science he has suppressed too many natural enemies. He is too numerous. He is poisoning the air and water of the earth. He is breeding beyond reason. He is devouring the earth and the other creatures thereon. But it will come to an end, of course. Man has a longer cycle than do the small creatures. Geometric growth is insupportable. During this growth cycle it the the business of thinking people to protect and conserve the other forms of life, so when the cycle is reversed, the ecology will not be too badly distorted. A hundred generations from now, that bay might be supplying food for a mainland village just as it did thirty generations ago."

"My dear Mr. Jimmy Wing, the only victory is existence, and the only defeat is extermination. When a species cannot survive, it is defeated. We must keep mankind from making the planet unsuitable for existence without technology.. In the criminal campaign against fire ants in this country, the poisoners have slanin an estimated five thousand tons of small birds. Tons, Mr Wing. Thirty to forty million in specific areas... This was nonselective elimination, taking the healthy and sick, the predators and sapsuckers, destroying not only that generation but all possible subsequent ones from that conglomerate of basic strains. It is a thoughtless ecological abomination, Mr. Wing. It is like rubbing out one factor in a vastly complex equation. Due to the interrelationship of bird life, insect life and plant fertilization, the known characteristics of that area will change. To what? We do not know. We only know it will be different. I recognize a deity of interrelationships, of checks and balances and dependencies. Acts such as this are like spitting in the face of God. It is a dangerous temerity, Mr. Wing. It is, in its essence, stupidity, nonknowing, the most precarious condition of man. Filling in this bay is part of the same pattern of throwing away everything you do not understand."

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