Edward O. Wilson The Future of Life (2002)

     

Edward O. Wilson The Future of Life (2002) Humankind has become the dominant species on Earth in the only sense it really matters: we have a greater effect on the global ecosystems than any other species, and are almost certainly affecting the climate itself. [We are.] In our not so remote past, we could do at most local damage; and in those places where we had practised agriculture for millennia, we had created new stable ecosystems. But now that has changed; and there is a very real risk that ecosystems will change so much that they cannot sustain human life. We have reached a bottle neck, and although Wilson is hopeful that we will pass through it, the Earth will be changed forever.
      Why bother with efforts to sustain at least samples of old ecosystems? Why bother preserving wilderness? Wilson makes the usual economic arguments, and extends them, For example, we need the biodiversity of wilderness because we don’t know what pharmaceutical treasures are hidden there. We need wilderness because such ecosystems are carbon sinks,  and so help sustain human activities such as agriculture and fossil fuel burning. And so on.
     These arguments are enough to at least catch the attention of the money grubbers, but Wilson extends the argument. He claims a deep spiritual value for the natural world. We need it, he says, because we are adapted to it by thousands of generations of evolution. We even create versions of our putative original home, the sub-tropical savannas, in our gardens and parks, especially in temperate climates, whose natural ecosystem is the forest, not the savanna. Even our agricultural landscapes support Wilson’s thesis: where large scale agri-industry hasn’t converted large tracts of land to mono-cultured fields of wheat, the patchwork of fields and copses, of pastures and woodland, tends to reproduce the look of a savanna. And our enduring fascination with Africa also testifies, since we want to see documentaries about the open plains, not the rain forest. When you think about it, the universal human habit of making pleasure gardens of some sort is rather odd. Unlike agriculture and gardening for food, it has no practical value whatever. So I agree with Wilson that nature in and of itself sustains the human spirit. It would be a crime against our descendants to destroy wilderness and jungle.
      I am less certain that Wilson has good reasons for his hopefulness. He cites mostly government and non-government efforts to set aside and manage wilderness areas, to provide economic alternatives to clear cutting of rain forest, and so on. But although he spends a large chunk of one chapter describing the huge ecological footprint of the Western lifestyle, he doesn’t touch on what in my opinion is essential: developing an ethic that opposes continued economic growth, and one that in the short term (i.e., a couple or three generations) proposes a scaling back both of our consumption levels and our population. We need to think of how we can manage economic shrinkage. If we don’t do this, the only long-term value of the wilderness preserves will be as seeds of future temperate forest and tropical rain forest; for we will surely destroy our civilisation, and the vast majority of humans will die. Perhaps Wilson realises this, and that is why he carefully focuses on preservation rather than economic changes.
     The first part of the book, where Wilson describes the current state of the Earth, is well written, clear, and full of new and not so new information. The last chapter amounts to little more than a catalogue raisonnee of agencies and NGOs in the nature conservation movement. *** (2002, edited 2021)