The Future of Life

“You searched for essence at Walden and, whether successful in your own mind of not, you hit upon an ethic with a solid feel to it: nature is ours to explore forever; it is our crucible and refuge; it is our natural home; it is all of these things. Save it, you said: in wilderness is the preservation of the world.” 

In this quote, Wilson is hinting at the personality of Henry Thoreau, who in many ways chose refuge in nature over participation in society. In doing so, he’s alluding to the destructive divide that has come to exist between human society and the natural world, a divide he’ll explore in later chapters. Wilson is also illustrating another dynamic he’ll explore in the book: the deep connection with, and need for, nature that many humans share, and which may ultimately serve as a tool to prevent environmental destruction.

“Each species is bound to its community in the unique manner by which it variously consumes, is consumed, competes, and cooperates with other species. It also indirectly affects the community in the way it alters the soil, water, and air. The ecologist sees the whole as a network of energy and material continuously flowing into the community from the surrounding physical environment, and back out, and then on round to create the perpetual ecosystem cycles on which our own existence depends.” 

In this quote, Wilson is laying out one of the important ways in which life in Earth’s ecosystems is connected; while biodiversity is measured in discrete species, these individual species are inextricably bound to their environment, which explains why phenomena such as habitat loss can threaten both the survival of a species and biodiversity in general. He’s also underscoring one of the dangers inherent in environmental destruction: that removing one species or environment may have unimaginable and reverberating consequences for biodiversity. 

“Ever deeper rounds of zoological exploration, driven by a sense of urgency over vanishing environments, have revealed surprising numbers of new invertebrates, many of which are placed on the endangered list as soon as they are discovered. The global number of amphibian species, including frogs, toads, salamanders, and the less familiar tropical caecilians, grew between 1985 and 2001 by one third, from 4.003 to 5.282. There can be little doubt that in time it will pass 6,000.”

This quote highlights a central theme in the book: that humans are destroying biodiversity faster than we can even realize what we’re losing. The quote also underscores the incredible number of species living on the planet, which some estimate could be as high as 100 million. Finally, by citing the volume of other species, Wilson is hinting at a narrative he’ll develop later in the book, that given that humans are but one species among many, they have an ethical imperative to give that life as much space to flourish as possible.

“You do not have to visit the distant places, or even rise from your seat, to experience the luxuriance of biodiversity. You yourself are a rainforest of a kind. There is a good chance that tiny spiderlike mites build nests at the base of your eyelashes. Fungal spores and hyphae on your toenails await the right conditions to sprout a Lilliputian forest. The vast majority of the cells on your body are not your own; they belong to bacterial and other microorganismic species.” 

Human beings are part of the web of life ,rather than being separate or somehow above it, both as living beings and as habitats for other life forms. This quote is representative of Wilson’s writing, which references not only scientific research but also philosophical and literary texts, with terms such as “Lilliputian,” a nod to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, in which Lilliput is an island of miniature beings.

“As harvesting and processing techniques were improved, the annual catch of whales rose, and the industry flourished. But the whale populations declined in equal measure until they were depleted. Several species, including the blue whale, the largest animal species in the history of Earth, came close to extinction. Whereupon most whaling was called to a halt. Extend that argument to failing groundwater, drying rivers, and shrinking per-capita arable land, and you get the picture.”

In this quote, Wilson is illustrating how economic development drives environmental destruction, a process that accelerated in the 20th century and continues today, despite evidence from the past that such a trade-off is unsustainable. By highlighting how humans affected the environment through past practices—in this case, the large-scale harvesting of whales—Wilson is also underscoring a theme he’ll develop throughout the book; that human beings had a destructive influence on the planet long before the 21st century, and have in fact been driving biodiversity loss for thousands of years. 

“As populations continue to explode and water and arable land grow scarcer, the industrial countries will feel their pressure in the form of many more desperate immigrants and the risk of spreading international terrorism. I have come to understand the advice given me many years ago when I argued the case for the natural environment to the president’s scientific advisor: your patron is foreign policy.”

This quote illustrates how population growth could put strain on the planet in more ways than one; in addition to using more of the planet’s resources, the growth in the number of people, and particularly of the number of young people in developing countries, could drive political conflict. In pointing to the political ramifications of ecological collapse, Wilson is highlighting the connection between the fate of human beings and that of the environment. This quote also underscores the theme of the connectivity of life that Wilson develops elsewhere when talking about ecosystems; in this case, the quote illustrates how all humans, no matter their nationality, will be affected by the overexploitation of the planet’s resources. 

“China can probably feed itself to at least mid-century, but its own data show that it will be skirting the edge of disaster even as it accelerates its life-saving shift to industrialization and mega-hydrological engineering. The extremity of China’s condition makes it vulnerable to the wild cards of history. A war, internal political turmoil, extended droughts, or crop disease can kick the economy into a downspin. Its enormous population makes rescue by other countries impracticable.”

Wilson uses China as an example of the consequences of overpopulation—a technique he deploys elsewhere in the book as a means of explaining ideas using real-world examples. In this quote, he’s showing how China’s enormous population, already sustained by feats of innovation, will require further technological leaps to feed itself and even then will be subject to the slightest shift in conditions. In highlighting how China could not realistically be saved from disaster, Wilson is underscoring the position of the rest of the planet: If humans render their home unlivable, there will be no alternative to turn to. 

“The vulnerability of the Hawaiian fauna to the invasive ants conforms to a familiar principle of evolution. Almost everywhere in the world, and for tens of millions of years, ants have been the leading predators of insects and other small animals. They are also among the preeminent scavengers of dead bodies, and as turners of the soil they equal or surpass the earthworms. Prehuman Hawaii, because of its extreme isolation, never had them. In fact, no native ant is known from the central Pacific anywhere east of Tonga. As a consequence Hawaii’s plant and animal communities evolved to conform to an ant-free world. They were unprepared for the shock of occupation by social predators of such high caliber.”

Wilson repeatedly points to particular locations as examples of how humans are changing the world—in this case, how the human presence on Hawaii is fundamentally altering the environment by introducing nonnative species. This quote also hints at the reason extinction rates are so high on Hawaii: As an isolated island, it was a crucible for unique life forms, which are now uniquely vulnerable to destruction from the forces of the outside world, introduced by people. Finally, this quote shows how even when humans are not deliberately targeting a species, human presence can still inflict damage.

“Conservation biologists, focusing on the overall problem of nature’s decline, have begun to work out what appear to be countless ways that variations of the HIPPO forces join to weaken and extinguish biological diversity. Each case is a result of the unique characteristics of the threatened species and the particular corner into which human activity has pushed it. Only by focused study are the researchers able to diagnose the cause of endangerment and devise the best means to nurse the species back to health.” 

This quote demonstrates how the HIPPO framing—which examines the mutually reinforcing ways in which humans drive biodiversity loss—has helped researchers understand the reasons for species decline, even in cases where the cause is not obvious, such as with the Vancouver Island marmot. This quote also illustrates how significantly humans have reshaped the planet, in that so many species are subject to the simultaneous impact of different facets of human activity. Finally, it shows the complexity of addressing species decline, as simply tackling one practice—for instance, overharvesting—may not be enough if that species is also suffering from the destruction or pollution of its habitat.

“Imagine walking with shovel in hand into a typical Amazon terra firme forest, away from and a bit above the floodplain. In a deep shade from the canopy high above, working around tangles of vines, understory palms, and flank buttresses of great trees, you find an open space and dig into its soil. In one cut you are through the litter and humus; the organic material has mostly petered out at an inch or two beneath the surface.”

In this quote, Wilson employs a literacy device he uses at several points throughout the book—using the second person to invite the reader to picture a particular environment. In this case, he’s asking the reader to imagine a tropical forest where the soil is poor despite the lush appearance of the forest itself. This poor soil—evocatively described in this passage—makes destruction of tropical forests particularly dangerous, as they do not easily regenerate. In asking the readers to picture themselves in nature, he’s also drawing on a tendency he’ll explore further in later chapters: biophilia, or the love of life.

“We bequeath to you the synthetic jungles of Hawaii and a scrubland where once thrived the prodigious Amazon forest, along with some remnants of wild environments here and there we chose not to lay waste. Your challenge is to create new kinds of plants and animals by genetic engineering and somehow fit them together into free-living artificial ecosystems. We understand that this feat may prove impossible. We are certain that for many of you even the thought of doing so will be repugnant. We wish you luck.”

This quote is from an imagined testament written by the people of today to those living in 2100. Wilson imagines the planet of the future several times throughout the book but deploys a particularly novelistic style in this passage to evoke not only a planet in which jungles are facsimiles of their former selves and biodiversity hotspots such as the Amazon have disappeared, but also to underscore the moral culpability on display in such a world. Not only does he imply a failure on the part of humans to preserve other life forms; he also suggests a failure by those humans to honor their ethical obligation to future generations—to ensure that they also get to experience the wonder of the world’s biodiversity.

“An endangered species is not like a dying patient whose care is too expensive and futile to prolong. The opposite is true. The great majority of rare and declining species are composed of young, healthy individuals. They just need the room and time to grow and reproduce that human activity has denied them.”

Wilson is addressing the idea that the decline of some species is due to a natural end of their time on Earth, as if the species itself were an organism that had reached the end of its life. Instead, he’s hinting at the fact that many extinctions—dating back thousands of years—have been driven by human beings. He’s also alluding to the reason for many extinctions in the 20th and 21st centuries: Habitat destruction, caused by humans, has engendered the decline of many species that would otherwise flourish. 

“It should come as no surprise that large numbers of species are crossing the thin zone from the critically endangered to the living dead and thence into oblivion. Yet a few authors—none of them biologists—still doubt that extinction is occurring on a large scale. Perhaps they will have been misled by the circumstance that the extinction of a species, like the death of a human being, is seldom directly observed at the instant of its occurrence.”

Wilson is highlighting the difficulty of quantifying extinctions. This difficulty is partly due to a phenomenon Wilson discusses at length in the book: that species are going extinct before they’re even discovered by human beings. It’s also because species pass so easily from endangered to extinct; once a population is small enough, even the slightest pressure can drive that species into extinction. Awareness of the scale of extinctions is important, though, because as Wilson notes elsewhere, by becoming aware of the consequences of their actions, humans may be able to chart a different, and less destructive, course. 

“Humanity, when wiping out biodiversity, eats its way down the food chain. First to go among the animal species are the big, the slow, and the tasty. As a rule around the world, wherever people entered a virgin environment, most of the megafauna soon vanished. Also doomed were a substantial fraction of the most easily captured ground birds and tortoises. Smaller and swifter species were able to hang on in diminished numbers.”

This quote refers to the pattern whereby the arrival of Homo sapiens in a new part of the world, tens of thousands of years ago, was always followed in short measure by the loss of large land animals such as giant flightless birds and giant sloths. We also see an example of how the negative impacts of people on the environment have changed over time; in the early days of human settlement, thousands of years ago, species decline was largely driven by overharvesting, as with the megafauna mentioned here. In the present day, habitat loss is the most destructive factor.

“What we celebrate in the colonization of Polynesia as a grand historical epic for humanity was for the rest of life a rolling wave of destruction. The vast triangle of archipelagoes that embrace the Pacific are a natural laboratory for the study of extinction. Only during the past twenty years has research revealed the full extent of the human impact on its living environment.”

As colonists from the East Indies moved through the Pacific, they left a trail of destruction in their wake. With this quote, Wilson is alluding to how following this trail can help us understand the relationship between the arrival of humans and extinction events: The longer the history of human occupation on an island in the South Pacific, the fewer species are now endangered, because in those areas the species most vulnerable to extinction have long since disappeared. This quote also points to the tension Wilson explores elsewhere in the book between technological innovation and increase in the living standards of human beings, and the corresponding decline in the state of the natural world. 

“Already fisheries of the western North Atlantic, the Black Sea, and portions of the Caribbean have collapsed. Aquaculture, or the farming of fish, crustaceans, and mollusks, takes up part of the slack, but at a rising environment cost. This ‘fin-and-shell revolution’ necessitates the conversion of valuable wetland habitats, which are nurseries for marine life. To feed the captive populations, fodder must be diverted from crop production. Thus aquaculture competes with other human activity for productive land while reducing natural habitat.”

In this quote, Wilson illustrates how important ecosystems are—in this case, by providing a marine environment that in turn produces food, in the form of fish—and provides an example of why such services cannot be replaced by artificial means, as attempts to do so will be destructive and expensive. This point underscores the irreversible consequences of much human-caused environmental destruction, both for the planet and for people. Wilson is also highlighting how difficult it is to fully understand the loss caused by the destruction of biodiversity, as there may be costs to that loss, both economic and moral, that are currently hard to comprehend.

“Homo sapiens is an ecosystem engineer too, but a bad one. Not having coevolved with the majority of life forms we now encounter around the world, we eliminate far more niches than we create. We drive species and ecosystems into extinction at a far higher rate than existed before and everywhere diminish productivity and stability.”

In biodiverse ecosystems, some species play a particular role in shaping the environment, contributing to that ecosystem in such a way that other species can still thrive, and the ecosystem as a whole can be more productive. In this quote, Wilson is illustrating how human beings, while also playing an important role in shaping ecosystems, do not have a positive impact; due to the relatively recent arrival of humans in most parts of the planet, other species that could keep the human population in check did not have time to evolve.

“The extraction of wealth from an ecosystem can be destructive or benign. Dynamiting coral reefs and clearcutting forests yield fast profits but are unsustainable. Fishing coral reefs lightly and gathering wild fruit and resins in otherwise undistributed forests are sustainable and long-lived. Collecting samples of valuable species from rich ecosystems and cultivating them in bulk elsewhere in biologically less-favored areas is not only profitable but the most sustainable of all.”

Earlier in the book, Wilson notes that economic growth often comes at the expense of the environment. Here, Wilson is offering a glimpse of a model in which economic development could be compatible with the conservation of biodiversity—specifically, in the practice of bioprospecting, or the search in nature for potentially useful resources. This quote also hints at what’s at stake: By engaging in more wasteful practices, such as clearcutting, humans are potentially missing out on the far greater value (both for short-term gain and the long-term viability of life on the planet) that is to be had from selectively harvesting organisms from biodiverse environments.

“Suppose, for the sake of argument, that new species can be engineered and stable ecosystems built from them. With the distant potential in mind, should we go ahead, and for short-term gain, allow the original species and ecosystems to slip away? Yes? Erase Earth’s living history? Then also burn the libraries and art galleries, make cordwood of the musical instruments, pulp the musical scores, erase Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Goethe, and the Beatles too, because all these—or at least fairly good substitutes—can be re-created.”

This quote highlights Wilson’s argument for the moral dimension of conservation; the question is not whether we can destroy the earth’s ecosystems and re-engineer species later through technological intervention, but whether we should. To articulate this moral reasoning, Wilson is drawing a parallel between the legacy of artistic creation that is the shared heritage of all human beings and the genetic heritage that is contained in the planet’s biodiversity—a genetic heritage that is part of the human story, too. Finally, he’s making a point about the moral responsibility of present-day societies to preserve a priceless heritage—whether in art, or in nature—for the enjoyment of future generations.

“The creature at your feet dismissed as a bug or a weed is a creation in and of itself. It has a name, a million-year history, and a place in the world. Its genome adapts it to a special niche in an ecosystem. The ethical value substantiated by close examination of its biology is that the life forms around us are too odd, too complex, and potentially too useful to be carelessly discarded.”

While much of the effort in conservation has traditionally been focused on large, charismatic species like whales and elephants, Wilson argues throughout the book that more diminutive lifeforms—such as microbes and invertebrates—are just as compelling, important, and worthy of conservation. By highlighting the complexity and beauty of even those species we see often see as having little value, Wilson is inviting reader to delight in, and care for, all forms of life—an essential foundation for conservation. Finally, by emphasizing the long history of each organism, Wilson is also reinforcing the idea of the genetic connection between humans and all other forms of life.

“Homo sapiens did not evolve to be a forest dweller, like chimpanzees, gorillas and other great apes. Rather, it became a specialist of open spaces. The aesthetically ideal environment of today’s transformed world is the much-treasured pastoral landscape, for better or worse our ersatz savanna.”

This quote is pointing to the roots of biophilia, or the love of nature, which Wilson suggests is likely an innate tendency in humans. He also points to a tension in this relationship: While human beings may love nature, we also seem to be hardwired to want to transform the landscape to suit our needs. The prioritization of certain landscapes—savannah-like open spaces—has motivated people to clear land, wherever possible, for much of human history. However, Wilson goes on to note that this pattern of land use changed over the 19th and 20th centuries, as American thinkers came to appreciate the value of wild lands—suggesting that 21st-century humans can also learn to modify their destructive approach to the environment.

“What’s at stake as they busy themselves are your tax dollars and mine, and ultimately our freedom too. Relax your guard when these people are in power and your property rights go down the tube. Some Bennington College student with a summer job will find an endangered red spider on your property, and before you know what happened the Endangered Species Act will be used to shut you down. Can’t sell to a developer, can’t even harvest your woodlot. Business investors can’t get at the oil and gas on federal lands this country badly needs. Mind you, I’m all for the environment, and I agree that species extinction is a bad thing, but conservation should be kept in perspective.” 

This quote offers an example of a rhetorical device Wilson uses several times throughout the book: the imagining of a dialogue between two interlocutors with different points of view—in this case, one prioritizes human well-being over environmental conservation and voices in some common stereotypes of environmentalists. This strategy serves as an evocative illustration of how ideology complicates conservation efforts, since people who may otherwise share some common ground are driven further apart by their assumptions about what the other side wants. With this passage, Wilson is also showing his own depth of experience with these debates, as he says these stereotypes are derived from arguments he’s heard when participating in conferences and government meetings.

“This small island is the site of the best old-growth lowland West Indian forest in the United States and, as it turned out, almost the entire West Indies as well. Lignumvitae Key was privately owned, and for sale. Its appearance on the market is an example of the distribution of American land-based wealth that has contributed heavily to the Conservancy’s success: of the 34 million Americans who owned any part of the one billion acres of private land in 1978, the top owned 5 percent, or less than 1 percent of the U.S. population as a whole, owned three-fourths. There is no reason to believe that the distribution has changed greatly since then. Hence the potential transfer of large tracts of natural land from wealthier Americans by sale or gift is enormous.”

In Chapter 7, Wilson lays out several of the possible solutions to combat biodiversity loss, which come from government as well as non-governmental organizations. In this case, he’s outlining the conservation possibilities of acquiring land through donation from private owners. In that way, this quote is also demonstrative of one of Wilson’s founding principles in the search for solutions: that capitalism cannot be stopped, and that people must therefore find a way to work with it to protect the planet—such as in leveraging inequities in land ownership for conservation purposes.