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Background
| Biography | Edward O. Wilson sprang onto the national scene after writing Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. The work charged that genetics shapes the behavior of all animals including humans, a controversially conservative thesis. During one scientific meeting, a demonstrator dumped a pitcher of water on his head, saying, "Wilson, you're all wet!" Margaret Mead declared during another meeting, "We are talking about book burning." Meanwhile, Steven Jay Gould began an assault in the New York Review of Books. Wilson later wrote in his memoir, "When I had ideas that seemed provocative, I paraded them like a subaltern riding the regimental colors along the enemy line." His response to critics was On Human Nature, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979. He won another Pulitzer for The Ants in 1990, along the way picking up a National Medal of Science award, numerous honorary degrees, and the Crafoord Prize, an award from the Royal Swedish Academy of Science for disciplines not covered by the Nobel Prize. In his last book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, he unified under a small number of natural laws many disparate fields of learning. His latest book is The Future of Life. Throughout this grand adventure, Wilson remains that most strangest of birds, an academic whose childlike curiosity puts him equally at ease in both science and the humanities. |
You've written around two dozen books. Why did you decide to focus on the environment this time?
This has been my main concern all along. In some ways, Consilience was written to try to change the intellectual landscape, to try to move biology and the need for preserving the biosphere close to center stage for intellectual concerns in the academy as well as public policy. So this book is designed as an extended essay - easily read - to present a global picture on biodiversity: how much there is, how we're exploring it, how fast it's disappearing, why it's disappearing, what will be the multiple costs to humanity, and what we can do to save it.
You once wrote the world is "drowning in information, while starving for wisdom." Won't this book just reiterate what we already know about how bad the environment is?
I bring various subjects up to date, a 230-page dispatch from the frontline of biodiversity research and conservation. This matter is vital to the human condition. Among the themes are the estimates of our planets biodiversity. Probably only 10 percent of species is now known. And the discovery of new species is occurring at an accelerated pace, such as new species discovered in deep ocean vents. This was the discovery of a whole layer of bacteria and fungus that are self-sufficient at depths of two miles or more.
Also, one of the unusual features of this book is the final chapter called "The Solution," where I review what is happening around the world in global and national conservation organizations that may be capable of turning the tide.
So what is the solution?
Economic policy and science will be important. Religion will also play a major role as increasing numbers of religious leaders and thinkers begin turning to the environment and especially the preservation of the biosphere as a central issue of their ministry. And so this is what The Future of Life is all about.
How fast is the extinction rate?
The estimates coming from two different ways, and a third which is consistent with these, show that we are seeing doomed to early extinction about 1 percent of species a year. That's based on the best studied groups, vertebrates and flowering plants. We don't even know what the rate is for other groups, like insects for instance.
Why have we only discovered 10 percent of known species?
Using the old-fashioned methods of exploring, collecting then identifying and describing - the Linnaen classification - is very laborious and slow. For example, I just finished and am publishing next year a monogram that gives a detailed classification and all the biological knowledge we have for some 625 species of ants, making up 20 percent of the ant species in the western hemisphere. Off and on, this took up twelve years of my time.
You're considered the world expert on ants, yet it's taken over a decade publish this information on new species. Did you discover all these yourself?
The majority of these are new to science and some of them I discovered myself. There have been few experts on a whole group of organisms since the time of Linnaeus, some 250 years ago. In the second half of the twentieth century, when the whole process of exploration and discovery could have been speeded up, we had the molecular revolution, and exploration in biodiversity was slowed proportionately. It's been marginalized in academic biology and given very little support. That's beginning to change now, and this is part of the whole issue of biodiversity.
Thanks to the revolution in genomics and in bioinformatics - computer based access of genetic information including digitized images of specimens - I figure we can speed up the exploration, description, and analysis of the world's biodiversity by as much as 100-fold.
We're doing this interview over a phone, and people are going to read it on a computer. I sometimes wonder whether all this technology so divorces us from nature that we no longer value it. . . .
I see your point. Let me read you a passage from my book where I'm speaking apostrophically with Thoreau about exactly this idea.
In order to pass through the bottleneck, a global land ethic is needed. Not just any land ethic, that might happen to enjoy agreeable sentiment, but one based on the best understanding of ourselves and the world around us that science and technology can provide.
Surely the rest of life matters. Surely our stewardship is the only hope. It would be wise to listen carefully to the heart and act with all rational intention and all the tools we can bring to bear. Henry, my friend, thank you for putting the first element of that ethic into place. Now it's up to us to summon a more encompassing wisdom.
The living world is dying and the natural economy is crumbling beneath our living feet. We have been too self absorbed to forsee the long-term consequences of our actions and we will suffer a terrible loss unless we shake off our delusions and move quickly to a solution. Science and technology led us into this bottleneck. Now science and technology must help us find a way through.
Can we now be the wiser, beyond where you were, Henry? For you here at Walden Pond, the lamentation of the morning dove and the green frogs calling across the predawn water were the true reasons for saving this place. For us, it is an exact knowledge of what that truth is, all that it implies and how to employ it for the best effect.
There are a number of conservationists who would have problems with these ideas.
This is true. There is an ongoing conflict between a very conservative school of conservationist, the primitivists, who think we have to return to the Earth and change our economy and technology radically. Then there are those who agree with the position that I take: that we have to turn the juggernaut. Instead of diminishing our advances in science and technology, we have to use these advances to find a way to save the rest of life.
University science is so money driven today that it's hard to find pure ecologists. I mean, how do you convert the natural history of sand flea into a patent that generates department royalties?
That's true. That happened particularly in the last 50 years as ecology and biodiversity studies were marginalized. On the other hand, they are beginning to come back and conservation biology is the fastest growing science in terms of your people entering the field and positions becoming available. So it's beginning to turn around.
But even research in the tropics isn't about saving the rain forest, it's about finding a new pharmaceutical.
Sure, and there are some people who only see science as a means to make money. But that's only one argument that can be used to support saving species: the utilitarian argument. And I don't hesitate to use it. When I'm talking to a group of conservative thinkers who are business people, I put that up front to get their attention. Then there are two major arguments that should always be coupled to that first one. One is the necessity of having natural ecosystems: the natural economy as opposed to the market economy.
What is a natural economy?
The natural economy is the services provided by the natural ecosystems of the world including purification of water, maintenance of the atmosphere, production of soil. . . . All of this is free. You don't get a bill for it at the end of the month.
How much money is this?
A group of economists and biologists estimated that, for fiscal year 1997, these services came to 33 trillion. All free, and greater than all the national gross products in the world combined.
What is your third argument?
The third can be called - I hope I'm not using too broad a word - spirituality. The moral argument, something that I hope we can all agree upon. I think virtually every thoughtful person, whether a fundamentalist or secular humanist, can agree that there is something morally wrong in destroying what scientists call the "biosphere" and what religious people call the "creation." It's an overwhelming moral argument backed by the precepts of most religions, but also by the conception that this is the world we have evolved in and to which we are well suited.
The new evidence coming in shows that we are innately attracted to the diversity of life and natural environments. Even if you are locked up in a city in front of a computer, you need it.
Even New York City has Central Park.
Exactly. I was once in the penthouse of a very wealthy friend overlooking Central Park and telling him how the ideal human environment has been worked out through surveys from people around the world. Given a choice people will complete their habitation by choosing a precipice overlooking a savannah, next to a body of water. And I took great pleasure in pointing this out to my friend, pointing to the features in Central Park. God knows what he paid for that place, but he had to agree with me.
What is the importance of spirituality in your life? Are you religious at all?
In a purely spiritual sense. I believe there are some precepts that exist which we should consider unbreakable, and there are certain aspects of our environment and relationships with other people that are essentially sacred. Not in a theistic sense, but something that is regarded with a great reverence. And within all these we find an aesthetic and emotional experiences that are deep and very satisfying. So that is what I mean by spirituality.
You once said that you like to think of yourself as a "southern writer who got detoured into science." To most people the idea of scientist and writer sounds contradictory.
Just the opposite. To be a good writer, of nonfiction at least, you have to think clearly, to express yourself clearly. And that's exactly what science is. The best scientists are the ones who think clearly, at least about the subject they are focused on. And they are generally people who can express very clearly what they are working on.
But the writing gets lost in jargon.
Now they may have completely immersed themselves in the necessary technical language because that is where you get precision. Technical language is not meant to obfuscate, not among real scientists; it's meant to gain precision. So you get all these exactly designed terms for clarity of expression. Now if you work broadly, like I do, then you're likely to speak clearly in a language that a large number of people can understand. There's no distinction between [science and writing] at all.
Mentioning the South, how did that environment shape you and how has it changed?
Certainly, I was shaped by the environment of Alabama for a couple of reasons. Growing up an only child and moving about frequently, I had a much larger dose of natural history and boyhood exploration. This really bonded me to nature and made me decide that I wanted to be an entomologist when I was only nine years old.
My forebears in Alabama go way back, pre-Civil War, and Mobile is what I consider my hometown. A great deal of this area is unchanged. Alabama has not undergone the type of population growth and land conversion that many Southern states have, although when I was growing up, it was already an ecologically devastated state. For example, the magnificent long leaf pine that stretched all the way from the Carolinas to Texas had been largely cut. Even back then, they were down to 1 percent left of the original forest. As a college student, I would go into these areas that had been cut at the turn of the century, and they were all second growth. So today there hasn't been a great deal of change in Alabama, although the pressures are growing.
I go back to Alabama frequently. I work with the Nature Conservancy and I've often spoken about the magnificent environment of Alabama and the need to conserve it.
So your book talks about the future of life, but what is the future of Ed Wilson?
I'm 72 and in good health. I'm hoping to work in basic research and spend a large amount of time on the global conservation movement. I'm on the board of three of the major global conservation groups and I lecture and consult a great deal in this field. I find this an exciting time to be alive in this movement. Things are beginning to pick up and we might be able to come up with solutions for many of these places in the world where biodiversity is most at risk.
Paul D. Thacker is a freelance journalist who lives above a pizzeria in Jersey City. He spends most of his time worrying that he is slowly becoming a character in Spike Lee's movie Do The Right Thing.
Image courtesy of Jon Chase/Harvard News Office.
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