“Half- Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life”
Author: Edward O. Wilson
Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
Pages: 212
Price: $15.95 (Hardcover)
It is arguable that Edward O. Wilson, a native Alabamian who graduated from UA before his Ph.D. at Harvard, had his career at Harvard, is now Professor Emeritus and has over the years won two Pulitzer Prizes, is the most important biologist alive today.
Attention should be paid.
“Half-Earth,” E. O. Wilson’s 31st book, constitutes the last volume of a trilogy which, like all of his books, is devoted to understanding life on this planet and warning readers that we are dangerously close to destroying the only home we will ever have. We are destroying the rainforests, polluting the oceans and the air, promoting global warming, and killing off species by the dozen, some of which we exterminate before we have ever discovered they are here.
The first of trilogy was “The Social Conquest of Earth.”
There he explained how rare are advanced social organizations on earth: homo sapiens, who came to rise up from “one species of large-sized African primates,” and Wilson’s specialties, ants, termites, wasps, bees. Wilson lays out here how his conception of “survival of the fittest” developed from the individual and his immediate genetic kin to “Group Selection,” the social group, not just the family, and that has made all the difference.
In “The Meaning of Human Existence,” mild-mannered Professor Wilson became a little more insistent. We humans, he reminds us, have developed through technology enormous powers of destruction but “our moral reasoning” is “conflicted and shaky.” “Only wisdom based on self-understanding, not piety, will save us.”
In this concluding volume, he shouts: the destruction of the biosphere is near, but can be prevented, perhaps, by leaving half the planet alone; that is, by removing most humans so the natural world can endure and recover. These large saved spaces, in a variety of terrains and climates, though not contiguous, could shelter species, from elephants to microorganisms, we would otherwise destroy.
This “does not mean dividing the planet into hemispheric halves or any other large pieces the size of continents or nation-states.” Wilson suggests what many of the spaces would be in North America, for instance, the redwood forests of California and the longleaf pine savannas of the South. In South America, several areas, especially the Amazon river basin.
Even in Europe, there are still undestroyed forests that could be preserved and which contain a large fraction of all European mammals.
Many large mammals, for a variety of reasons, are being driven to extinction. Once, Wilson writes “millions of rhinos thundered across the African plains or slipped silently through the Asian rain forests.” Now there are 27,000 left in the world.
We have killed them for sport, for the hafts of ceremonial daggers, and, since Mao Zedong dictated a turn from Western medicine to traditional Chinese medicine, for pharmaceutical purposes, as a cure for cancer and sexual disorders. Wealthy Chinese demand rhino horn; the price has risen to a par with gold. Wilson assures the reader rhino horn has “no more medicinal value than a human fingernail.”
Saving half the earth, and the biodiversity of the planet, would not be an act of generosity towards nature but a way of preserving ourselves. We are one of the potentially endangered species.
Wilson explains that we got in this perilous situation through the delusion that we were “rulers of the biosphere …and entitled to do anything to the rest of life we wish.” He reminds us that we are not masters, but simply another species and a fragile one at that. Humans can live “three minutes without air, three days without water and three weeks without food.” We are not really tough guys at all.
And, smart as we think we are, the world around us is still a mystery. Scientists believe we have only identified about 20% of the two million earth species. “At least two-thirds of the species on Earth remain unknown and unnamed.”
Wilson calls for an increase in the number of naturalists; those who study and categorize the physical world around us. Too many young scientists, he believes, are opting for molecular biology, cellular biology, and so forth, when the physical world around us has not yet been mapped.
Some scientists, believers in the Anthropocene theory, think it is too late to save biodiversity; we should just arrange to save ourselves and a few other species we know we need.
Other scientists, the de-extinctionists, tell us not to worry: in the future they can resurrect lost species from stored DNA. This would suggest a world-wide Jurassic Park. Still others believe we might relocate to another planet. All are unlikely.
Organizations such as The Nature Conservancy have done good work, but it will not suffice, says Wilson. Half the earth is required.
This is not impossible. Whole populations are moving to the cities. Much technology is cleaner than ever. Teleconferencing and on-line shopping reduce pollution; e-books save trees.
As societies advance, reproduction is being brought under control. Developing nations generally reproduce at a lower rate and we will be OK if we can hang on until the year 2100.
Our ecological footprint can be reduced.
We would, however, need to evolve towards global thinking. Wilson reminds us that at the Olympics, presumably the meeting place for the world’s best athletes, sadly, it is still the national anthem that is played for the winners.
This is a challenge but we “would be wise to wake up, and find our way out of the fever swamp of dogmatic religious belief and inept philosophical thought through which we still wander” and drop the notions of the past, “obsequious to imagined higher beings, contemptuous toward lower forms of life.”
It is not quite, Wilson tells us, too late.
Don Noble is host of the Alabama Public Television literary interview show “Bookmark with Don Noble.” A shorter form of this review was originally broadcast on Alabama Public Radio.
