Product Description

One of the world’s most important scientists, Edward O. Wilson is also an abundantly talented writer who has twice won the Pulitzer Prize. In this, his most personal and timely book to date, he assesses the precarious state of our environment, examining the mass extinctions occurring in our time and the natural treasures we are about to lose forever. Yet, rather than eschewing doomsday prophesies, he spells out a specific plan to save our world while there is still time. His vision is a hopeful one, as economically sound as it is environmentally necessary. Eloquent, practical and wise, this book should be read and studied by anyone concerned with the fate of the natural world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12486 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03-11
• Released on: 2003-03-11
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Amazon.com
The eminent Harvard naturalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Edward Wilson marshals all the prodigious powers of his intellect and imagination in this impassioned call to ensure the future of life. Opening with an imagined conversation with Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond, he writes that he has come "to explain to you, and in reality to others and not least to myself, what has happened to the world we both have loved." Based on a love affair with the natural world that spans 70 years, Wilson combines lyrical descriptions with dire warnings and remarkable stories of flora and fauna on the edge of extinction with hard economics. How many species are we really losing? Is environmentalism truly contrary to economic development? And how can we save the planet? Wilson has penned an eloquent plea for the need for a global land ethic and offers the strategies necessary to ensure life on earth based on foresight, moral courage, and the best tools that science and technology can provide. -- Lesley Reed

From Publishers Weekly
Legendary Harvard biologist Wilson (On Human Nature; The Ants; etc.) founded sociobiology, the controversial branch of evolutionary biology, and won the Pulitzer Prize twice. This volume, his manifesto to the public at large, is a meditation on the splendor of our biosphere and the dangers we pose to it. In graceful, expressive and vigorous prose, Wilson argues that the challenge of the new century will be "to raise the poor to a decent standard of living worldwide while preserving as much of the rest of life as possible." For as America consumes and the Third World tries to keep up, we lose biological diversity at an alarming rate. But the "trajectory" of species loss depends on human choice. If current levels of consumption continue, half the planet's remaining species will be gone by mid-century. Wilson argues that the "great dilemma of environmental reasoning" stems from the conflict between environmentalism and economics, between long-term and short-term values. Conservation, he writes, is necessary for our long-term health and prosperity. Loss of biodiversity translates into economic losses to agriculture, medicine and the biotech industries. But the "bottleneck" of overpopulation and overconsumption can be safely navigated: adequate resources exist, and in the end, success or failure depends upon an ethical decision. Global conservation will succeed or fail depending on the cooperation between government, science and the private sector, and on the interplay of biology, economics and diplomacy. "A civilization able to envision God and to embark on the colonization of space," Wilson concludes, "will surely find the way to save the integrity of this planet and the magnificent life it harbors."

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
A plea to save our biological heritage and a plan for doing it; from Pulitzer Prize-winning scientist Wilson. With a 13-city tour and a 100,000-copy first printing.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

A Good Look At Where Life Is Headed
This book starts out with an interesting conversation between Wilson and Thoreau at the Walden cabin. While this only takes place in Wilson's imagination, it goes a long way towards showing how the study of life has changed since the mid-1800s and how much further our understanding of the complexity of life has come. We now know about all of the microscopic forms of life that larger forms of life (such as us) are dependent on.

The final chapter of the book gives his recommended solution along with a progress report of how various governments and non-govermental agencies are doing to save the existing natural spaces that contain so much undiscovered life. There is cause for some hope as well as concern.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the vast diversity of life on this planet as well as how its most successfull animal (humans) have done great damage to it. If we and the life around us are to survive the bottleneck that he mentions, we all need to read a book such as this and take action to make as much life passes with us to the other side of the bottleneck or the future of life will be bleak indeed.

Shocking
Shocking. I wonder if this book has made anyone think twice about having (more) children? It seems to me that most of what he is saying comes down to human overpopulation...

But I think Wilson could be more flat-footed early on. He attempts to give both sides of the story, when most of his readers (who've read Consilience before, at least) already know exactly where he stands.

Consilience applied
After a lifetime of basic research and cogent theorizing, entomologist E.O. Wilson has turned his attention to the broadest issues in his recent writing. CONSILIENCE: THE UNITY OF KNOWLEDGE (Knopf, 1998), published in 2000, offered his view that just as physics and chemistry have deepened biologic understanding, so biology is poised to inform the social sciences and the arts, to bring all human knowledge into one coherent world view. One way to characterize the new work would be as applied consilience--how use of what we know might save the planet. Wilson is optimistic. He believes that sane heads will prevail, that the non-government organizations working to save the biosphere will be successful, and that science will pull our rumps out of the Á fire before we are too badly burned. While his arguments are potent, his science knowledge vast, and his reputation sterling, my sense is that his optimism may be colored by overlong immersion in academic broth. Wilson believes that people will choose to act for the common good. While that motive is not entirely absent from the world I inhabit, acting for short term personal gain is more the norm. At the same time, his view of science sometimes seems too gee-whiz and uncritical. His embrace of genetically modified food crops (GMOs) clearly reflects these biases. Wilson believes that GMOs will boost food production enough to exceed not only today's deficiencies, but to provide for the avalanche of humanity which will inundate the world by mid-century. He asserts that GMOs will permit this without utter despoliation of the natural world, and believes that preservation of biological hotspots can ensure significant preservation of biodiversity into the future. Missing from his argum >ent is the fundamental observation of ecology that species tend to expand to meet and slightly exceed their long term food supply. For this reason the billion-fold increase in food since humans invented agriculture has resulted in a steady increase in the number of hungry humans. The fabled green revolution that occured after WWII, and which Wilson says GMOs will permit us to better, only accelerted population growth and, predictably, hunger. At the same time, one of the GMO benefits he extolls--the development of crops which can tolerate defoliants--seems curiously short-sighted. Use of Round-Up and similar products has already resulted in the presence of the defoliant chemical atrazine in all water worldwide (that's right, all water). Recent findings show that atrazine causes deformation of limbs and reproductive failure in amphibians at extremely low concentrations. We are only beginning to understand how such chemicals might affect the rest of the web of life. ?Wilson's cheerful embrace of chemical agriculture seems oblivious of the real world effects already observed, let alone the presumptive outcome of expanded reliance on those compounds. Nothwithstanding Wilson's myopia in some quarters, his knowledge about and explanation of the problems life faces under the dominion of humans is breathtaking. This slim book speaks volumes about the state of the world as we enter the ecologic luge of the 21st century. An excellent read.