The
Future of Life , by Edward O. Wilson. Alfred A. Knopf, 229 pages, $22.
Never one to be overawed by a topic-a recent book of his, Consilience , explained the unity of all
knowledge-Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson has now taken on The Future of Life . Mr. Wilson is better qualified than most for
the task: Unlike run-of-the-mill scientists who view their little corner of
science-say the feeding behavior of rotifers-as the center of the intellectual universe, Mr. Wilson has parlayed
his specialty, ant biology, into a truly
global perspective. With his most famous book, Sociobiology (1975), he offered an explicitly biological
perspective on human behavior and pretty much
invented the field now known as “evolutionary psychology.” He writes
authoritatively and passionately about Sumatran rhinoceroses, the El Niño
southern oscillation, radioactivity-defying bacteria, the Xiaolangdi Dam
project in China and, of course, ants. Better, he writes about all these things
with the eloquence of a twice-over Pulitzer Prize winner.
The Future of Life is a
short book of breathtaking scope. There are projections of human population
size (large, but with fewer Italians-they are already dying off faster than
they are being born). There is the familiar hand-wringing about the natural
environment (“battalions of loggers armed with bulldozers and chainsaws could
wipe these [key] habitats off the face of Earth in a few months-and with them a
large part of the world’s biodiversity”). There is hand-wringing too about the
physical environment, particularly those aspects, like the sea level, likely to
be affected by global warming (“Real-estate investment in New Orleans and the
Florida Keys, not to mention the Bahamas and New York City, will seem an
increasingly poor long-term risk”). There is Mr. Wilson’s thumbs-up
contribution to the debate on genetically modified food (“Where genetically
engineered crop strains prove nutritionally and environmentally safe upon
careful research and regulation … they should be employed”). And there are a
number of quirky ideas, like the suggestion that the demilitarized zone between
North and South Korea be converted into a wildlife sanctuary once the two
Koreas have resolved their differences.
The most surprising aspect of The
Future of Life is that it’s not full of doom and gloom. As America’s pre-eminent environmentalist,
Mr. Wilson has long publicized the fates of the rain forests and coral reefs,
and championed attempts to rein in our
apparently inexhaustible capacity
for trashing the planet. With the human population continuing to spiral
out of control and what’s left of the natural world duly dwindling, Mr.
Wilson-who is over 70-could be forgiven for writing a told-you-so sign-off book: “Like I said, the future will be
horrible, and it’s being made vastly worse by that S.U.V. of yours. Goodbye.”
Instead, he is surprisingly upbeat: The future may be messy, but The Future of Life is nevertheless
optimistic.
There are two reasons for Mr.
Wilson’s optimism. The first is a cultural shift that has brought
environmentalism into the mainstream. Mr. Wilson recalls the early days of the
conservation movement when he and a handful of similarly concerned scientists
were little more than “evangelists and beggars.” Now, however, conservation is
big business. Non-governmental organizations (N.G.O.’s) like the World Wildlife
Fund today boast enormous memberships and correspondingly impressive budgets.
In 2001, Conservation International received a grant of $52.8 million from the
foundation set up by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel. There are more paid-up
memberships of environmental organizations in Denmark than there are Danes
(though only one in 20 Americans is a subscriber). Mr. Wilson concludes that the first part of the environmentalist
program has been successfully accomplished:
People are now convinced that conservation is necessary, that the environment
matters. “Polls show that, in the United States at least, people of all
socioeconomic groups and religious beliefs become conservationists when well
informed.” The P.R. battle has been won, and “the problem is no longer the
reasons for conservation but the best method to achieve it.”
It seems that most people
have been converted to the conservation cause by what Mr. Wilson calls moral or
aesthetic arguments: that we, one species among millions, have no right to
annihilate the planet’s other inhabitants, and, taking a more anthropocentric
perspective, that we should preserve our natural heritage for the sake of
future generations. All those irritating “Extinction Is Forever” and “Save the
Whales” bumper stickers have had an impact. However, “moral” arguments don’t
count for much in the boardrooms of logging multinationals, and if conservation
is to work, it has to make sense in terms of the bottom line. Hence Mr.
Wilson’s second reason for optimism: He is confident that the economic scales
are beginning to tip in favor of conservation. He lists, as he has done
elsewhere, the economic incentives for conservation. “Bioprospecting” assumes
that the natural world harbors
untapped pharmacological reserves-that
a cure for cancer, for AIDS, for the common cold would be found if we just
ground up the right rain-forest plant. Mr.
Wilson tells some of the success stories-like cyclosporin, a powerful immunosuppressant critical in
organ-transplant procedures, which was derived from an obscure fungus growing
in the Norwegian mountains-and points out that the potential is tremendous: One
group of fungi has hitherto yielded 80 percent of the antibiotics in current
use, and yet it is estimated that some 90 percent of species in that group are
still unknown to science. Eco-tourism
has also been much touted as a means of turning biodiversity into cash.
Apparently tourism has eclipsed the banana as Costa Rica’s number one
foreign-currency earner.
Mr. Wilson’s economic
optimism does not, however, rest solely on the potential return on
conservation. The other side of the economic equation is also shifting gradually
in favor of biodiversity because the costs of exploiting the environment are
rising. As accessible forests are used up, so the costs escalate: “The profit
margin of the logging companies is very thin in most tropical countries,
forcing them to make offers [for logging concessions] of only a few dollars per
acre. They can be outbid by determined conservation N.G.O.s.” In South America,
new feedlots close to regional markets have made cattle ranching in remote
regions unprofitable, and suddenly the relatively modest return per acre of
eco-tourism is looking good.
To me, Mr. Wilson’s half-full glass looks half empty. Yes,
attitudes have changed and are changing, but to what extent can
eco-consciousness in the United States and Europe have an impact on the
developing world, which is home to most conservation priorities? How can we
ever effectively counter the complaint of Cameroonian journalist François
Bikoro: “You destroyed your environment and got developed. Now you want us to
stop doing the same! What do we get out of it? You have your televisions and
your cars but no trees?” And yes, the economic situation may indeed have become
more favorable to conservation, but conservationists still require serious
money if they are going to go head to head, dollar to dollar, with the logging
companies. Mr. Wilson is excited about the newfound effectiveness (and
financial clout) of conservation N.G.O.’s, but even Intel-level philanthropy
pales into insignificance against recent estimates of the price tag for
maintaining a representative sample of all of the planet’s ecosystems: $28
billion. Mr. Wilson admits that “eventually governments in both north and south
will have to take over the heavy lifting” but also concedes that U.S.
governments are likely to balk at using taxpayers’ money to buy up tracts of
wilderness in Vietnam or Bolivia for conservation purposes.
The Future of Life
culminates in Mr. Wilson’s 12-point “solution” to the woes of overpopulation
and environmental degradation. These are non-trivial suggestions: Number three
insists that we “Cease all logging of old-growth forests everywhere,” and
number eight demands that we “Make conservation profitable.” Mr. Wilson brings
genuine authority to these weighty pronouncements-coming from almost anyone
else they would ring hollow-and they should at least be given careful
consideration by the likes of President Bush and the chief executives of
Indonesian timber companies. Then, for the sake of the future of life, let’s
hope that E.O. Wilson’s optimistic outlook is not, as he puts it, just “a
wild-eyed utopian vision.”
Andrew
Berry, an evolutionary biologist, is a research associate at Harvard
University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology .
