"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

48
The Roman, like the Englishman who follows in his footsteps, brought to every
new shore on which he set his foot (on our shore he never set it) only his cloacal
obsession. He gazed about him in his toga and he said: It is meet to be here. Let us
construct a water closet.
This human “cloacal obsession” to pollute the environment and our habitat is a symptom
of our ecological destructiveness and is one of Livingstone’s main preoccupations. The
introduction to his dissertation alludes to the role scientific research can play in
redressing the human cloacal penchant to use the sea as a sewer or dumping ground for
waste. The opening paragraphs hammer home the point that humankind is not only
polluting the Earth but is also fouling its own nest and thus destroying its own
environment and life-support system:
In an ideal world where perfect paradigms prevailed there would be no waste, and
therefore no pollution. In the absence of such a paradise, on a planet whose main
pollutant is, arguably, humanity itself, it is surely the responsibility of every
civilized society to confront the problems inherent in the disposal of the waste it
generates with all the affordable care, practical concern and available skills it can
muster to preserve its environment, not only for its own well-being and survival,
but for those of future generations.
One fact is paramount: this is a provenly tough and resilient planet, the only one
in the known universe upon which diverse and abundant life exists. The earth’s
environmental circumstances have changed in the past due to sketchily perceived
events probably involving climate, vulcanism, polar shifts, cosmological
catastrophes, etc. to the detriment of its then prevailing life-forms. Today, the
planet’s presently dominant life-form is in the strange position of possibly
effecting unwanted changes in the biosphere from its own waste-products –
fouling its own nest, as it were – to its own injury. Fearful of propagating its own
destruction, an awareness – occasionally compounded by ignorance and hysteria
fed by, at times, an alarmist media – has surfaced in humanity’s consciousness of
the price invariably attached to modern comforts, the enjoyment of technological
facilities and uncontrolled population growth. This comparatively recent
disseminative perception of responsibility towards matters ecological and
environmental can only be welcomed. Yet a perspective has to be maintained:
something practical has to be done about the waste. (1, my italics)
The views expressed here (Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis that the Earth is a self-regulating
superorganism which sustains the various life-forms on the planet, the effect of changing
environments on organisms, that humans are just another life-form, and humankind’s
destructiveness and blind indifference to sustainable living) are adumbrated in much of
Livingstone’s poetry. In short, his science informs his poetry. In an interview with
Michael Chapman, Livingstone said he did not see science and poetry as being in