David M. Gates, an ecologist who sounded early warnings that fossil fuels, fertilizers and pesticides posed a potentially fatal threat to the global environment, died on March 4 in Ann Arbor, Mich. He was 94.

The cause was heart failure, his daughter Heather Gates said.

Echoing “Silent Spring,” Rachel Carson’s galvanizing 1962 exhortation against pesticides and weedkillers, and presaging the creation of the federal Environmental Protection Agency by President Richard M. Nixon in 1970, Dr. Gates was in the vanguard of scientists who raised the alarm about an ecological crisis that would culminate in global warming from greenhouse gases.

“We will go down in history known as an elegant technological society which underwent biological disintegration for lack of ecological understanding,” he said in 1968.

As he grew more accustomed to playing Cassandra, Dr. Gates grimly predicted a planet “half-starved, depressed billions gasping in air depleted of oxygen and laden with pollutants, thirsting for thickened, blighted water.”