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Review Summary: A Good Look At Where Life Is Headed |
Date: 2008-03-04 |
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Details: 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.
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Review Summary: Shocking |
Date: 2007-11-30 |
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Details: 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. |
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Review Summary: Consilience applied |
Date: 2007-11-27 |
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Details: 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, 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. |
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Review Summary: A worthwhile read. |
Date: 2007-08-23 |
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Details: You can tell that Wilson is a talented sceintist, but if you are somewhat versed in ecology you won't learn much new. It might be just that this 2001 book is (gasp!) already a bit dated. |
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Review Summary: We are drawn to the natural world--but why? |
Date: 2007-06-05 |
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Details: This remarkable volume is one of a series of books in which Wilson sets forth the nature of life on earth, the preciousness of biodiversity and the significance of its loss to the planet. He also tries to suggest value systems and pathways for humanity to surmount its present environmental crises and achieve sustainability.
E. O. Wilson has won many prizes for his scientific accomplishments. He is the creator of entire scientific fields and a discoverer of new species. Wilson discovered 341 new species of ants, thereby more than doubling the number in the genus and increasing the known fauna of ants in the Western Hemisphere 10 percent.
But the subjects Wilson is getting into now are not quite science, not quite ethics, not quite politics, but rather exist in a realm of thought that blends all of them and even touches upon religion.
One of his most interesting ideas is the notion of biophilia--a sense of genetic unity, kinship, and deep history that bonds us to the living environment. Wilson even poses the notion that biophilia is a survival mechanism for ourselves and our species. To conserve biodiversity is an investment in immortality.
Wilson sees habitat selection as a prominent component of biophilia. People prefer to be in natural environments, and especially in savanna or parklike habitats. While there's no direct genetic basis of the human habitat preference, its presence is suggested by a consistency in its manifestation across cultures. In this we are no different from other species--every species that moves under its own power, from protozoans to chimpanzees, instinctively seeks the habitat it must occupy in order to survive and reproduce. If biophilia is truly part of human nature, if it is truly an instinct, we should be able to find evidence of a positive effect of the natural world and other organisms on health.
We have a deeply felt need not just to be in nature, but to preserve it because we need nature, and particularly wilderness. For Wilson, it is the alien world that gave rise to our species, and the home to which we can safely return. It offers choices our spirit was designed to enjoy.
The biophilia hypothesis would certainly explain certain elements of human behavior: our need for the pleasantness of landscapes like Central Park, for example, or the pleasure that we feel around waterfalls and lakes, or the desire to surround ourselves with houseplants, or the giving of floral arrangements as gifts and to mark special occasions. It could even be at the root of the pastoral element in our literature, the love of natural scenery, and the underlying attractiveness of landscape paintings. The implications of biophilia for preventive medicine are substantial. Loss of connectedness to the biosphere might be seen as productive of stress and causative of stress-derived illnesses.
Together with a small group of biologists Wilson is responsible for creating concern about the dramatic biodiversity loss or decline in the number of species that earth is now undergoing -- a loss that equals and may even exceed the biodiversity loss when dinosaurs went extinct due to a cataclysm on the magnitude of an asteroid striking the planet.
In this little book Wilson offers an explanation for why we are drawn to the natural world and why, for some of us at least, every entrance into a wild environment rekindles awakening, awareness and excitement.
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out of 62 Reviews
