Euell Gibbons: Author of Stalking the Wild Asparagus

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PLOWBOY: How did we get ourselves into such a ridiculous position?

GIBBONS: This anti-nature attitude in our culture comes from very respectable sources. One of those sources was Charles Darwin: he said that sometimes the "fittest" creature was the one which cooperated . . . but every example he gave us was an example of competition. Another source was Spencer, who first used the term "struggle for existence". Wallace too. Even Thomas Huxley claimed that each form of life is in continuous battle and competition with every other. There's nothing wrong with that statement except that it's pure bullcrap (laughter).

Nature is typified by cooperation and mutualism. It's everywhere. The production of fruit and the scattering of seed by animals is one example. Flowers and bees are another. is 'ire There are thousands and thousands of examples of mutual aid . . . of one life form absolutely dependent, on another. I find that the "fittest" is very often the life form which has best learned to cooperate with other life forms around it.

PLOWBOY: Has no one else noticed this?

GIBBONS: Of course. Kropotkin, to name one. In 1898 he tried to refute Huxley with his book, MUTUAL AID. . . and not long ago Kropotkin was writing another book to prove that there's even cooperation within a species, let alone between species. Yet—in one of his more recent books, A HISTORIAN'S APPROACH TO RELIGION—we find Arnold Toynbee saying that every form of life tries to establish itself as the center of the universe and in so doing comes into competitive rivalry with every other form of life. That's a ridiculous statement for a truly great man to make. It simply isn't true.

It's much more accurate to say that every life form, in order to survive, must come into non-competitive relationships with dozens of other life forms. Life doesn't exist alone. It exists in interdependent communities . . . and there are no boundaries around communities.

I read an article the other day by an ecologist who was talking about the closed community of life in a cave. Surely he ought to know there can be no such thing because there'd be no source of energy. All energy has to come from the sun and the bats are flying in and out eating the insects which eat the plants which get the sun. The bats traveling in and out are the "truck drivers" . . . all the other life forms in the cave depend on them and their manure and bodies. There's no more a closed community in a cave than anywhere else in the world. The web of life is connected from the fish in the deepest part of the ocean to the rat running along the top of the Continental Divide. It's all a unity and we're not separate from it.

Nevertheless we indiscriminately kill life forms all the time. The people who build superhighways across the country never find out what living things they're destroying. The builders don't even know the life forms' names, natures, or relationship to man . . . they just plow straight through. The people who spray the roadsides have no idea what life is being destroyed or what relationship that life has to their own. For example, if we listened to the people who say, in effect, "Let's kill all wild vegetation in the world because a boy got poisoned," . . . we'd all soon die: most of our oxygen is supplied by wild vegetation.

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