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Title: The Future of Life by Edward O. Wilson ISBN: 0-679-76811-4 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 11 March, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.08 (40 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: All the talk about diversity; it's biodiversity that matters
Comment: Forget the nattering about cultural and religious diversity. Edward O Wilson makes a strong and compelling argument that biodiversity should take pride-of-place as the pre-emininent subject of discussion. THE FUTURE OF LIFE should be the topic that the diversity industry concentrates on.
The substantive subject here however is not the scientific underpinnings of adaptation, evolutionary psychology and sociobiology in general, nor does this book go into the moral and political debates surrounding these topics. It's a refreshing break from the 'Science Wars' and the concomitantly fought, but larger, 'Culture Wars.' A refreshing break yes, but this book is by no means breezy or full of cheer. You may very well come away depressed - how else can it be when the subject is man - "the serial killer of the biosphere." In the end though there is some room for cautious optimism.
The litany of woes is well known - destruction of tropical rainforests, overpopulation, pollution, desertification, and massive loss of plant and animal species. Indeed science is generally in agreement on the fact that we are in the midst of a Great Extinction event. They've been others. This is THE SIXTH EXTINCTION (as Richard Leakey put it a few years ago), but it's the first since hominids arrived, and as Wilson says [we have] "accelerated the erasure of entire ecosystems and the extinction of thousands of million-year-old species." Wilson wrote about this previously in THE DIVERSITY OF LIFE but it seems to me, he is following on from CONSILIENCE (where he offered a sythesis of knowledge) by reaffirming that for mankind today, what we know (and equally as important, what we do not know) about the environment is the only knowledge that really matters. He says "perhaps the time has come to stop calling it the 'environmentalist' view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view."
Since we've not yet got that vision, the next best thing is to start using the sort of sythesis thinking that Wilson offers here. Economics is the science of rational man, so in appealing to reason, not emotion, Wilson blends biology with economics and shows the costs associated with a depleted environment. He mentions some "ecosystem services" such as pollination of crops, pollution control, climate control, and water purification, and mentions that a 1997 study by economists put the value of these services at $33 trillion per annum. A partial loss of even some of these naturally occurring, and therefore free facilities would severely disrupt our economic activity, and more importantly, we could never afford the replacement costs. He builds on this emphasis with examples of its practical applicability. "In 1992 a pair of economic botanists demonstrated that single harvests of wild grown medicinals from two tropical forest plots in Belize were worth $726 and $3,327 per hectare respectively, with labor costs thrown in. By comparison, other researchers estimated per hectare yield from tropical forest converted to farmland at $228 in nearby Guatemala and $339 in Brazil."
Although economics as practiced through industrialization and globalization is a large part of the problem, it must also be involved in the solution - "[making] conservation profitable." This book forces us to confront a dismal recent past and a less than rosy immediate future, but Wilson nevertheless ends on a guardedly optimistic note. He offers solutions such as immediate protection of the worlds most sensitive ecosystems or "hotspots", a ban on logging of old-growth forests and mapping of the worlds biodiversity resources.
Wilson does tangentially bring up his pet theory of sociobiology and briefly discusses our genetic wiring as a non-forest dweller as a partial cause for our antipathy towards wilderness. In the end though, the book is a direct appeal to our ability to change based on past environmental experiences, and Wilson demonstrates a philosophical belief in man's spiritual connectedness to nature. It's a sythesis of knowledge and life. It's actually the sort of view that his old scientific rivals - Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin - would probably offer a nod to. It will be interesting to see how they receive this book. Consensus possibly? Maybe biodiversity is indeed all that really matters.
"The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment" (Gaylord Nelson)
Rating: 5
Summary: The Future of Life
Comment: I bought this book for a couple who felt that they were among a tiny minority who loved the beauty of this earth and were enraged at the criminally exploitative treatment of it. When I read the first chapter I could not put it down. This book is a must read for every sane person on the planet, a spectacularly clear and careful study of how things great and small fit together, interdepend on eachother. To disregard any part of it or abuse that living heritage, poses a threat to our very existence on the one hand and on the other, points to our interdependence. I was stunned to learn that most of the species have yet to be identified and catalogued. Wilson knows all the arguments of both extremes on environmental issues, and while he articulately addresses these with balance, reason, and knowledge that only a scientist of his calibre could do, he never looses the sense of joy and wonder over what he has discovered in his journey, nor the urgency to preserve and protect it. In the final chapter he offers realistic and visionary options for insuring a better world. This book is a masterpiece, a Virgilian guide away from the hell we are creating, the limbo we are in, and a view of the paradise we have been wontonly destroying.
Rating: 3
Summary: Well read, not so well produced
Comment: The reader, Ed Begley, Jr., reads this book clearly and with good phrasing. The abridging is not heavy.
Only one complaint: 6 CDs with NO TRACK INDEX! This means that the CDs are useful for listening to straight through only. The user can only guess which chapter will be on which CD, and there is no way (that I know of) to jump to a specific part of the book on the CD, because there is only one track per CD.
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Title: The Diversity of Life by Edward O. Wilson, Edward Osborne Wilson ISBN: 0393319407 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: May, 1999 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Consilience : The Unity of Knowledge by Edward O. Wilson, Edward Osborne Wilson ISBN: 067976867X Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 30 March, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: On Human Nature by Edward Osborne Wilson ISBN: 067463442X Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: October, 1988 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Biophilia by Edward Osborne Wilson ISBN: 0674074424 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: March, 1986 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Naturalist by Edward O. Wilson ISBN: 0446671991 Publisher: Warner Books Pub. Date: 01 December, 1995 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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