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<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><a
href="http://www.lansingcitypulse.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1383&Itemid=29">http://www.lansingcitypulse.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1383&Itemid=29</a><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'>Edward O. Wilson recruits builders for a human ark <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal align=right style='text-align:right'><font size=3
face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt;display:none'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal><span class=small><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'>Written by <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Lawrence</st1:place></st1:City>
Cosentino </span></font></span> <o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'>Wednesday, 17 October 2007 <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
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<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>Not
long ago, the world woke up to the hazards of polluting the natural environment.
Then it woke up to the depletion of natural resources and energy. Now bells
are tolling for man-made climate change and impending water shortages. Are we
up to one more global wake-up call? Edward O. Wilson hopes so.</span></font> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>The
world’s foremost natural scientist comes to <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceName
w:st="on">Michigan</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceType w:st="on">State</st1:PlaceType>
<st1:PlaceType w:st="on">University</st1:PlaceType></st1:place> Monday to
sound the alarm for mass extinction.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><st1:City w:st="on"><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Georgia'>Wilson</span></font></st1:City><font size=2
face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>, 78, is a
genteel <st1:State w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Alabama</st1:place></st1:State>
native, unabashedly square Eagle Scout, Harvard professor, two-time Pulitzer
Prize winner and a self-confessed ant fanatic who “never grew out of my
insect phase.” He calls Earth’s beleaguered smaller creatures his
“constituency.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>“Generally,
people don’t pick up on any species disappearing, or care, unless
it’s a bird or a mammal, or maybe a frog,” he says.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>As
the world’s foremost authority on ants, Wilson spends much of his life
inspecting rotten logs in Costa Rica, mangroves in Florida and other
micro-habitats around the world, analyzing the tiny life forms that swarm at
the base of Earth’s various ecosystems. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><font size=2
face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'><img
border=0 width=250 height=297 id="_x0000_i1026"
src="cid:image001.jpg@01C81170.8E174C40" hspace=6 alt=Image title=Image><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>He
doesn’t like what he’s seeing. Loss of habitat, especially in the
species-rich rain forests and coral reefs, is causing the sixth great mass
extinction in the planet’s history, this one entirely man made.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>(The
first five, including the famous dinosaur die-off 65 million years ago, were
caused by cataclysms such as climate shifts, volcanoes or meteors.)</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>The
causes of the current wave of extinctions range from agricultural burning and
development to the poisoning of coral reefs to the latest strip mall or condo
development in a wild field or riverbank near you</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>All
environmental problems are interconnected, of course, but <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place
w:st="on">Wilson</st1:place></st1:City> is calling urgently for a shift in
thinking. Pollution, dwindling resources and even global warming, he
explains, can be helped, at least in theory. For example, the world ban on
chlorofluorocarbons imposed in the late 1980s is slowly healing the
once-catastrophic hole in Earth’s ozone layer.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>But
anyone who has looked into a coffin viscerally understands that extinction is
forever. <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wilson</st1:place></st1:City>
says it’s time to concentrate resources and attention on the living
world. <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wilson</st1:place></st1:City>
spoke at length in a telephone interview with City PULSE last week.<br>
<br>
You couldn’t afford her<br>
Most species live for about a million years, unless they were unlucky enough
to have evolved just before humans took the wheel. Now scientists like <st1:City
w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wilson</st1:place></st1:City> are watching
species splatter the windshield by the thousands — often before we
notice they’re in the road.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>“Think
of what we lose,” he laments. “It’s like burning up a
library with most of the books unread.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>What’s
in those books? We don’t know yet — and that’s the whole
point.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>Every
animal, down to the smallest microbe, is a dense package of problems solved:
how to ward off disease, how to avoid predators, how to survive extreme
conditions, how to make love and war, how to get energy, how to fly, ad
infinitum. </span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>“Every
species is a masterpiece of evolution,” <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place
w:st="on">Wilson</st1:place></st1:City> says. “It’s taken
millions of years to emerge in the form we have today.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>Humans
have long piggy-backed on that hard-won information. About 40 percent of
pharmaceuticals used today, even those that are synthesized in labs, were
first discovered in living creatures. In <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place
w:st="on">Wilson</st1:place></st1:City>’s 2002 book “The Future
of Life,” he points out that a single family of fungi (the ascomycetes)
has yielded 85 percent of antibiotics in current use, but he estimates that
only 10 percent of this family of fungi have even been identified and named.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>And
that’s just one tiny corner of life’s cornucopia. A host of
drugs, from anticancer drugs to blood thinners to contraceptives to
immunological drugs and antidepressants, come to us courtesy of animals,
plants and microbes.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>Perhaps
more significant are the staggering “ecosystem services” other
forms of life serve up free of charge. Such services, from water filtration
and retention to soil enrichment, climate control, regulation of the
atmosphere to pollination and so on, equal the combined gross national
products of all the nations on earth, <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wilson</st1:place></st1:City>
says. If we had to pay for Mother Nature, we couldn’t afford her. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><font size=2
face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'><img
border=0 width=250 height=284 id="_x0000_i1027"
src="cid:image002.jpg@01C81170.8E174C40" hspace=6 alt=Image title=Image><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Georgia'>President Jimmy Carter presents Edward O. Wilson with
the National Medal of Science in 1977. (Courtesy photo)<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>The
recent mass die-offs of honeybees began to bring it home, if only because it
cost the world’s agricultural sector billions of dollars.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>“All
you have to do is go out in an orchard or any old weed patch or anywhere and
you’ll see all these pollinators working like crazy to keep the whole
system going,” <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wilson</st1:place></st1:City>
says.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>All
they ask, <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wilson</st1:place></st1:City>
pleads, is to be left alone. “But we’re not leaving them alone.
We’re ripping them apart, erasing them, replacing them with systems
that are unstable and less productive.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>If
those reasons aren’t enough, <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wilson</st1:place></st1:City>
also makes an unabashedly spiritual argument.” His latest book,
“Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth,” is written in the
form of a plea to an evangelical preacher. </span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>By
“spiritual,” <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wilson</st1:place></st1:City>
says he means both religious feeling and secular awe: “A deep feeling
about the rest of the living world and what it means to us to live on the
planet, the cradle of humanity.”<br>
<br>
Ants on the sidewalk<br>
That kind of awe begins, <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wilson</st1:place></st1:City>
says, when you’re 6 or 7 years old and you turn over a rock or look
into a pond for the first time.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>Years
before <st1:City w:st="on">Wilson</st1:City> surveyed the biosphere from
Harvard’s intellectual heights, he was a deeply impressionable kid
growing up in <st1:State w:st="on">Alabama</st1:State> and <st1:State w:st="on"><st1:place
w:st="on">Florida</st1:place></st1:State>, fascinated by jellyfish, water
snakes and insects.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>His
father, a traveling accountant, took the family to a new town almost every
year. He made friends, but nature was his only lasting companion. The swamps
of southern <st1:State w:st="on">Alabama</st1:State> and northern <st1:State
w:st="on">Florida</st1:State> offered plenty of room to ramble and
foreshadowed <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wilson</st1:place></st1:City>’s
epic research voyages to the world’s rain forests. <st1:State w:st="on">Alabama</st1:State>
has more than 40 species of snakes, and <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wilson</st1:place></st1:City>
collected them all.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>All
animals fascinated him, but a fishing accident in his youth helped determine
his specialty. When a fish flopped out of the water into his face, a dorsal
spine pierced <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wilson</st1:place></st1:City>’s
right eye.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>“I
lost stereoscopy [depth perception] but can make out fine print and the hairs
on the bodies of small insects,” he later wrote. In other words, the
accident all but doomed <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wilson</st1:place></st1:City>
to a lifetime of bending over and peering at ants.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>It
was a fortuitous choice for an ambitious young researcher. <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place
w:st="on">Wilson</st1:place></st1:City>’s passion for ants, with their
stunning variety, global dominance and amazing social life, shows up early in
his autobiography, “Naturalist.” His deceptively Garrison
Keillor-esque description of a boyhood haunt, <st1:Street w:st="on"><st1:address
w:st="on">Palafox Street</st1:address></st1:Street> in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:City
w:st="on">Pensacola</st1:City>, <st1:State w:st="on">Fla.</st1:State></st1:place>,
begins with Model A Fords and the movie “Captain Blood” playing
at the Saenger Theater, but quickly plunges downward to a sidewalk full of
“lion ants of the genus Dorymyrmex.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on"><font size=2 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>Wilson</span></font></st1:place></st1:City><font
size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'> still
returns to that patch of sidewalk regularly to check on the ant population.<br>
“It’s getting on toward 75 years — my survey through time
of one spot on one sidewalk in one city,” he says.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>“I’m
going to go back as soon as I can, and if that sidewalk is still there,
I’ll be able to tell you what I find. I hope they haven’t torn
the place up and put a condo there.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><st1:City w:st="on"><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Georgia'>Wilson</span></font></st1:City><font size=2
face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'> barely
finished his studies at the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceType w:st="on">University</st1:PlaceType>
of <st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Alabama</st1:PlaceName></st1:place> before
Harvard scooped him up. Before long, he scoured the globe, cataloguing and
analyzing thousands of species of ants, discovering hundreds of new species
along the way.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>Ants
have a stunning range of behavior. They “farm” fungus,
“milk” aphids, go on slave raids, enforce rigid caste systems,
bury their dead and constantly communicate with each other, to name but a
fraction of ant wonders. No wonder myrmecology, or the study of ants, whetted
<st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wilson</st1:place></st1:City>’s
appetite for a wider survey of social behavior in animals. </span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>He
marched ahead with typical Boy Scout zest, only to hit a political tripwire
in his landmark 1975 study “Sociobiology.” Analyzing behavior as
an evolutionary adaptation, <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wilson</st1:place></st1:City>
traced the genetic underpinnings of ant wars, monkey aggression, kangaroo
courtship and scores of animal quirks in between.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>In
the last chapter, <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wilson</st1:place></st1:City>
extended his theories to humans, creasing turf zealously guarded by
sociologists and psychologists and sparking a firestorm of criticism from
colleagues who insisted all human behavior is learned. </span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>“I
simply expanded the range of subjects that interested me, starting with ants
and proceeding to social insects, then to animals and finally to man,” <st1:City
w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wilson</st1:place></st1:City> explained in his
autobiography.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>But
some academics, such as Harvard heavyweights Stephen Jay Gould and Richard
Lewontin, equated sociobiology with eugenics and racism. In 1975 members of a
protest group called International Committee Against Racism crashed an
academic conference, flashed swastikas and dumped a bucket of water on <st1:City
w:st="on">Wilson</st1:City>’s head, chanting “<st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place
w:st="on">Wilson</st1:place></st1:City>’s all wet.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on"><font size=2 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>Wilson</span></font></st1:place></st1:City><font
size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'> was
taken aback by the furor, but came back swinging four years later with the
Pulitzer Prize-winning book “On Human Nature,” a fuller treatment
of the offending chapter in “Sociobiology.” (In 1990 he
took a second Pulitzer for his magnum opus on myrmecology, “The
Ants.”)</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>The
“Sociobiology” battles cooled in the 1980s, and a consensus
gathered around <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wilson</st1:place></st1:City>’s
synthesis of cultural and genetic evolution to explain human behavior. <st1:City
w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wilson</st1:place></st1:City> went even
further in 1998’s “Consilience,” mapping out the
intersection of evolutionary biology and the humanities, shuffling right
brain into left like two halves of the same deck of cards.<br>
<br>
Newts and Newt<br>
In 1979 <st1:City w:st="on">Wilson</st1:City> read a numbing statistic:
British ecologist Norman Myers calculated that the world’s rain
forests, a combined area about the size of the continental <st1:country-region
w:st="on">United States</st1:country-region>, was losing a chunk close to the
size of <st1:State w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Florida</st1:place></st1:State>
every year.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>Shocked
by the study, <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wilson</st1:place></st1:City>
plunged into activism for the first time, speaking publicly on the
biodiversity crisis.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>Like
his beloved ants, <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wilson</st1:place></st1:City>
is determined to move this mountain, one human grain at a time.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on"><font size=2 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>Wilson</span></font></st1:place></st1:City><font
size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>’s
first priority is to save the most crucial hotspots of biodiversity on land
and sea. Governments are slow to act, but global conservation groups such as
Conservation International and the World Wildlife Fund (where <st1:City
w:st="on">Wilson</st1:City> is on the board of directors) are using clever
financial tools, including debt-for-conservation swaps, to set aside crucial
land from <st1:country-region w:st="on">Costa Rica</st1:country-region> to <st1:country-region
w:st="on">Zambia</st1:country-region> to <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place
w:st="on">Poland</st1:place></st1:country-region>. In some cases, the WWF is
outbidding timber and mineral interests.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on"><font size=2 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>Wilson</span></font></st1:place></st1:City><font
size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'> urges
action at the national, state and local level, too. “There’s got
to be a river bank or forest around <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Lansing</st1:place></st1:City>
that needs restoration,” he says. “There’s got to be a lake
that’s polluted by excessive development. I’m just making it up,
but I’ll bet it’s true!”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on"><font size=2 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>Wilson</span></font></st1:place></st1:City><font
size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'> says
he’d rather be remembered for helping to save a habitat than inventing
a scientific theory. There are many ways to get involved, from local to
national to global groups, each with a different focus.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>“Take
your pick. Take two. Better yet, take three!” he says.
“Many Americans are doing that, and they’re having the time of
their lives. You meet birders and enthusiasts for rivers, and I’ve
never seen a finer bunch of people.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>Another
crucial step, <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wilson</st1:place></st1:City>
argues, is to make a complete catalogue of world species, and he is urging
citizen scientists to join. Last year, <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wilson</st1:place></st1:City>
got the prestigious TED Prize, awarded to top innovators, for inventing the
online Encyclopedia of Life (eol.org), a map of every single species on the
planet. Just as amateur astronomers help scientists map the skies, amateur
naturalists are helping survey the world’s biological wealth.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>“We
probably know only about 10 percent of the species that exist,” he
says. “When you include insects and bacteria, we don’t know the
majority of the kinds of animals and microorganisms in the world. We’ve
got to explore that, because we’re flying blind here.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>Meanwhile,
<st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wilson</st1:place></st1:City> urges
political pressure at every level.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>“Political
leaders rarely lead,” he says. “If people don’t seem to
care about these things, they won’t either. But if they do,
you’re going to see Wall Street Journal editorials suddenly finding the
gospel.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on"><font size=2 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>Wilson</span></font></st1:place></st1:City><font
size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'> finds
it encouraging that more Americans are going green. “Even Newt
Gingrich,” he says wryly. “Have you seen his book,
‘Contract With the Environment?’ I wrote the foreword. I’ve
known him for a long time, and I’ve long known he was an
environmentally concerned person.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>Will
all these piecemeal efforts aggregate into a real solution? Even if human
population peaks at about 9 billion —an optimistic projection
—there will still be a third or 50 percent more people than we have
now, all of them looking for food and elbow room.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>“This
bottleneck period is going to be real tough on the rest of life,” he
says. “If we can take most of the rest of life with us through the
bottleneck, we will come out, maybe by the end of the century, in good
shape.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on"><font size=2 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>Wilson</span></font></st1:place></st1:City><font
size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'> hopes
future centuries will look back on the 20th and 21st centuries “the way
we look back on the 13th and 14th centuries, times of plague, war and
ignorance.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><font size=2 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia'>“I
think we’ll come through,” he says. “When people finally
get an idea, a goal worthy of their attention, something bigger than
themselves, they respond very well.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p><strong><b><font size=1 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:7.5pt;
font-family:Georgia'>Edward O. Wilson</span></font></b></strong><b><font
size=1 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:7.5pt;font-family:Georgia;
font-weight:bold'><br>
<strong><b><font face=Georgia><span style='font-family:Georgia'>MSU World
View Lecture Series</span></font></b></strong><br>
<strong><b><font face=Georgia><span style='font-family:Georgia'>Wharton
Center Cobb Great Hall</span></font></b></strong><br>
<strong><b><font face=Georgia><span style='font-family:Georgia'>7:30 p.m.
Monday, Oct. 22</span></font></b></strong><br>
<strong><b><font face=Georgia><span style='font-family:Georgia'>$20</span></font></b></strong><br>
<strong><b><font face=Georgia><span style='font-family:Georgia'>1 (800)
WHARTON</span></font></b></strong></span></font></b><o:p></o:p></p>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color="#004000" face=Verdana><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:#004000'>Jennifer Tsang<br>
<a href="http://coevolution.org">Coevolution Institute</a><br>
<st1:Street w:st="on"><st1:address w:st="on">423 Washington St.</st1:address></st1:Street>
5th Fl.<br>
<st1:place w:st="on"><st1:City w:st="on">San Francisco</st1:City>, <st1:State
w:st="on">CA</st1:State> <st1:PostalCode w:st="on">94111-2339</st1:PostalCode></st1:place><br>
T: 415.362.1137</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color="#004000" face=Verdana><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:#004000'>F: 415.362.3070</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color="#004000" face=Verdana><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:#004000'><a
href="http://www.nappc.org">www.nappc.org</a></span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color="#004000" face=Verdana><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:#004000'><a
href="http://www.pollinator.org">www.pollinator.org</a></span></font><font
color="#004000"><span style='color:#004000'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
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