The case for the ecological movement is be­yond dispute. One point, of the many co­gent ones made in the growing literature on the subject, is worth repeating here. Rene Dubos has reminded us that we still know precious little about pollution. Seventy per­cent of all the precipitate contaminants in urban air are still unidentified and twenty to thirty years hence those who are today below the age of three will undoubtedly show vary­ing signs of chronic and permanent malfunc­tion. Man is clever enough to conquer nature — and stupid enough to wreck it and thereby destroy himself.We have a concomitant danger in the theo­logical environment — a fall-out of silliness, if the reports of a theological conference on the subject are to be trusted. Most of the(Protestant) divines at the Claremont sym­posium were “with it,” from the crisp title (“Theology of Survival” — in an age when Portnoy’s Complaint is elevated into a “Theology,” why not?) to the conventional self-flagellation. After all, having written the obituary for the Diety and debunked His best-seller, what is so terrible about theo­logians asserting that religion is responsible for our dirty planet, and that the solution requires another one of those “major modi­fications” of current religious values?The starting point for a serious consideration of the religious view of man’s relations with his natural environment is the divine blessing to man in Genesis 1:28 — “be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every creeping thing that creepeth on the earth.” For years the Bible had been iden­tified as the major impediment to the progress of science. Now that science and technology are ecological villians, the blame for them is placed — on the Bible. “And subdue it” has now been proclaimed by theologians at the Claremont symposium as the source of man’s insensitivity and bru­tality. “Dominion. . .over the fowl of the …