[Pollinator] City Pulse: Edward O. Wilson recruits builders for a human ark

[Jennifer Tsang]

http://www.lansingcitypulse.com/index.php?option=com_content
<http://www.lansingcitypulse.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1
383&Itemid=29> &task=view&id=1383&Itemid=29

 


Edward O. Wilson recruits builders for a human ark 

 

 


Written by Lawrence Cosentino    


Wednesday, 17 October 2007 


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. 

The world's foremost natural scientist comes to Michigan State University
Monday to sound the alarm for mass extinction.

Wilson, 78, is a genteel Alabama 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."

"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.

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. 

Image

 

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.

(The first five, including the famous dinosaur die-off 65 million years ago,
were caused by cataclysms such as climate shifts, volcanoes or meteors.)

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

All environmental problems are interconnected, of course, but Wilson 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.

But anyone who has looked into a coffin viscerally understands that
extinction is forever. Wilson says it's time to concentrate resources and
attention on the living world. Wilson spoke at length in a telephone
interview with City PULSE last week.

You couldn't afford her
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
Wilson are watching species splatter the windshield by the thousands - often
before we notice they're in the road.

"Think of what we lose," he laments.  "It's like burning up a library with
most of the books unread."

What's in those books? We don't know yet - and that's the whole point.

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. 

"Every species is a masterpiece of evolution," Wilson says. "It's taken
millions of years to emerge in the form we have today."

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 Wilson'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.

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.

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, Wilson says. If we had to pay for Mother Nature, we
couldn't afford her. 

Image

President Jimmy Carter presents Edward O. Wilson with the National Medal of
Science in 1977. (Courtesy photo)

 

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.

"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," Wilson says.

All they ask, Wilson 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."

If those reasons aren't enough, Wilson 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. 

By "spiritual," Wilson 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."

Ants on the sidewalk
That kind of awe begins, Wilson says, when you're 6 or 7 years old and you
turn over a rock or look into a pond for the first time.

Years before Wilson surveyed the biosphere from Harvard's intellectual
heights, he was a deeply impressionable kid growing up in Alabama and
Florida, fascinated by jellyfish, water snakes and insects.

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 Alabama and northern Florida offered plenty of room to
ramble and foreshadowed Wilson's epic research voyages to the world's rain
forests. Alabama has more than 40 species of snakes, and Wilson collected
them all.

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 Wilson's right eye.

"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 Wilson to a lifetime of bending over and peering at
ants.

It was a fortuitous choice for an ambitious young researcher. Wilson'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, Palafox
Street in Pensacola, Fla., 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."

Wilson still returns to that patch of sidewalk regularly to check on the ant
population.
"It's getting on toward 75 years - my survey through time of one spot on one
sidewalk in one city," he says.

"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."

Wilson barely finished his studies at the University of Alabama 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.

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 Wilson's
appetite for a wider survey of social behavior in animals. 

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, Wilson traced the genetic underpinnings of ant
wars, monkey aggression, kangaroo courtship and scores of animal quirks in
between.

In the last chapter, Wilson 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. 

"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,"
Wilson explained in his autobiography.

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 Wilson's head, chanting "Wilson's all wet."

Wilson 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.")

The "Sociobiology" battles cooled in the 1980s, and a consensus gathered
around Wilson's synthesis of cultural and genetic evolution to explain human
behavior. Wilson 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.

Newts and Newt
In 1979 Wilson read a numbing statistic: British ecologist Norman Myers
calculated that the world's rain forests, a combined area about the size of
the continental United States, was losing a chunk close to the size of
Florida every year.

Shocked by the study, Wilson plunged into activism for the first time,
speaking publicly on the biodiversity crisis.

Like his beloved ants, Wilson is determined to move this mountain, one human
grain at a time.

Wilson'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 Wilson
is on the board of directors) are using clever financial tools, including
debt-for-conservation swaps, to set aside crucial land from Costa Rica to
Zambia to Poland. In some cases, the WWF is outbidding timber and mineral
interests.

Wilson urges action at the national, state and local level, too. "There's
got to be a river bank or forest around Lansing 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!"

Wilson 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.

"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."

Another crucial step, Wilson argues, is to make a complete catalogue of
world species, and he is urging citizen scientists to join. Last year,
Wilson 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.

"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."

Meanwhile, Wilson urges political pressure at every level.

"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."

Wilson 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."

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.

"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."

Wilson 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."

"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."

Edward O. Wilson
MSU World View Lecture Series
Wharton Center Cobb Great Hall
7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 22
$20
1 (800) WHARTON

 

 

Jennifer Tsang
Coevolution Institute <http://coevolution.org> 
423 Washington St. 5th Fl.
San Francisco, CA 94111-2339
T: 415.362.1137

F: 415.362.3070

www.nappc.org

www.pollinator.org

 

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