Environment: Ecology: The New Jeremiahs

THERE has not been a topic for such worried conversation since James Baldwin forecast the fire next time. Suburban matrons predict the melting of the polar icecaps followed by catastrophic floods. Busy executives and bearded hippies discuss the presence of DDT in the flesh of Antarctic penguins. All sorts of Americans utter new words like ecosystem and eutrophication. Pollution may soon replace the Viet Nam war as the nation's major issue of protest.

It is, in short, the year of ecology, a word derived from the Greek oikos, meaning "house." In modern usage, ecology...