Conservancy Book Review
Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life by Edward O. Wilson
Can humans overcome their hard-wired propensity for short-term planning and self-regard to take on a daring solution to save the world’s plant and animal species from the brink of extinction?
In Half-Earth author Edwin O. Wilson, posits that humanity should commit to reserve one-half of the planet’s surface to nature to benefit the majority of the earth’s species. By doing so, he believes, we can save the living part of the environment and “achieve stabilization required for our own survival.”
This “Half-Earth” would not consist of one huge swath or chunk of the earth’s surface; it would be made up of large and small land and sea areas all over the world, most of which already exist, and even if under threat, can be saved. Some would be a few acres in size and others would be many thousands of square miles. Each would offer the best place in which a high number of species could be protected. These preserves would be linked by land corridors (with a few interruptions) which would create a single global circuit for travelers, imitating our ancestors who used similar pathways over 60,000 years ago. A few of the many areas he mentions are the redwood forests of California, the Amazon River basin, the Bialowieza Forest of Poland and Belarus, Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, the Congo Basin Forest, the Altai Mountains of Asia, and areas in Australia and Melanesia.
While reading the book, I learned more about what Wilson sees as the reason and need for such a dramatic solution as “Half-Earth,” than I learned about the solution itself. But, in my opinion, that does not diminish his message or my appreciation of the book. He eloquently describes the biosphere of earth, the biodiversity within it and how we
are absolutely dependent on other organisms. Just as with species of plants and animals, humans are not exempt from species interdependency. We are the product, along with other organisms, of 3.8 billion years of evolution and our minds and physiology are adapted for life in this biosphere. Yet, he says, we are recklessly destroying the very biosphere we depend on and causing species around us to vanish.
Wilson gives us a brief earth history lesson that brings home a startling comparison to the present. Going back in time to the period just after the Chicxulub asteroid impact, he refers to what scientists call the fifth extinction in the earth’s history. Seventy percent of earth’s life vanished because of it and it took 10 million years for life to recover. Alarmingly, he goes on to describe how many scientists view our current epoch as the “sixth” extinction, not because of a natural disaster, but a man-made one. Explaining the scientific categories of the earth’s historical periods, he and other scientists replace our current epoch, the Cenozoic (mammals) with Anthropocene (man), in which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment. Wilson believes that humans are destroying the planet by laying waste to our habitats, using invasive plant species, polluting, overhunting, and increasing in population.
Throughout the book, readers are led to all sorts of subjects, from the evolutionary past to the future environmental benefits of a digital economy, from a tally of species in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to research of the deep sea, and from intricate details to world views. Whether or not you agree with his outlook, one recognizes that Wilson writes with complete authority, depth and knowledge. His examples or “asides” are not only relevant to his main message but are also of exquisite interest and beauty in themselves. He describes frogs and salamanders as “beautiful in form and often dazzling in color, timid in demeanor,” and “pitifully vulnerable.” He illustrates fascinating and bizarre relationships among species, such as a virus that infects caterpillars which induces a change in their brain, a blister beetle that uses a series of tricks to steal the resources of a solitary bee, or ants which kidnap the immature offspring of other colonies and then raise them as captive slaves.
Throughout the book, Wilson makes the case that, in order to achieve this ambitious Half-Earth Project, humans need to make a fundamental shift in their moral reasoning concerning the environment. This appears to me to be a chief obstacle of the goal, because, as he explains elsewhere, our brains are wired to value the self and only the biological tribe we are in. In addition, he believes, humans tend to favor short term decisions over long ones. In one sense, Wilson almost sounds naïve in that he trusts “that the public and business and political leaders among them will join us and come to value the living world as an independent moral imperative that also happens to be vital for human welfare.”
Nevertheless, I applaud his vision and do hope that humans, including world political and business leaders, will overcome our human shortsightedness and not only treasure our quality of life, but deeply care about the very survival of Earth’s species, and wholeheartedly commit to an expanded global conservation.
Carey Benham