Rating: 
Summary: Well read, not so well produced
Review: Although its quite clearly a thoughtful analysis, I could not see Wilson's recommendations as realistic. Wilson catalogs some of the more successful environmental programs, but it seems like the effort to preserve biodiversity is a desperate struggle. It seems somewhat ironic that the world's most distinguished scholar of insect societies would not have more insight on the nature of human societies. Not for those with a pessimistic bent, because Wilson gives plenty of reasons to despair for the natural environment.
Rating: 
Summary: TFOL 4 life
Review: Dr Wilson makes an excellent point about the future of life: namely that non-governmental organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund are outbidding loggers and developers for the rights to biodiversity hot spots. For instance, Dr Wilson reports that the WWF purchased the rights to 100 million acres in Brazil. It's only estimated to cost $270 million to protect this amount of land into perpetuity. Who knew it was going to be this easy?
Dr. Wilson makes a corollary excellent point: that conservation should be made "profitable." How? By means of eco-tourism and plant prospecting. The few pages he devotes to plant prospecting for medicinal derivatives-which can be subsequently synthesized and mass-produced-are very optimistic. Dr Wilson stops short of advocating that WWF and other NGOs go public, but what a great idea that would be, too. Today's and tomorrow's eco-minded investors would probably love to have some truly long-term assets that earn dividends from the discovery of medicinal plants.
But that's further than Dr. Wilson would rather go. It's enough that he wants to make conservation profitable. Having been condemned over the years as being a right-wing racist by Stephen Jay Gould and other socialist flameouts, Dr. Wilson spends most of this book trying to make himself look politically correct.
Take genetic engineering. On page 114, after praising the genetic engineering of corn, potatoes, and rice, he makes a U-turn onto page 116, saying that there are "several sound reasons for anxiety over genetic engineering." (First of all, how can anxiety be the product of sound reasoning?) Anyway, Dr. Wilson presents five reasons for such anxiety, but his heart's not in it. He knows the dangers of genetic engineering are pretty small. Look at the concluding statements for each reason why genetic engineering might be dangerous:
1. "...How far the process should be allowed to continue is an open ethical question."
2. "...Destructive secondary effects . . . are also at least a remote possibility."
3. "...It is simply too early to tell."
4. "...How severe [the effects] will become . . . remains to be seen."
So far, it doesn't sound overly dangerous, does it? Then we get to reason 5, public opinion:
"In the realm of public opinion, genetic engineering is to agriculture as nuclear engineering is to energy." Is one of the great scientists of our day going to stand by while anxiety produces the opinion?
Apparently so. Why, when it would be so easy for him to dispel fears about nuclear power right here? In the interview with Dr. Wilson in the Guardian in 1998, we see why he holds back: Academic intimidation. The man has been traumatized by attacks on him from left-wing faculty and undergrads alike. How else can one explain his praise, at the end of this book, of eco-protesters. That's sad, isn't it?
Rating:
Summary: The Future of Life Book Review
Review: Great work ! In this book, E.O.Wilson takes us through a whirlwind tour of what/why/how of biodiversity preservation -- "what is biodiversity and how we humans are contributing to it's loss" , "why we should preserve biodiversity" and "how we should do it". For the "why" aspect, the author discusses both the "utility" of biodiversity to humans (ecosystem services and bioprospecting etc) and also the ethical reasons. Finally some very practical solutions are presented and he goes on to describe how they are being implemented by NGO's etc. Iam not a trained biologist/ecologist but still i found the book easily readable. Highly recommended !"In the end, our society will be defined not only by what we create, but by what we refuse to destroy" -- John C. Sawhill
Rating: 
Summary: A top biologist's prognosis of the future of humanity
Review: I have more often than not been disappointed by books which deal with the topic(s) of an economically, biologically, and socially sustainable future. Either I was left to wonder whether the scientific or economic evidence put forth was incomplete or suspect, thereby producing unsubstantiated optimism or pessimism, or I have found the policy prescriptions unclear. This eloquent paperback by one of the world's foremost biologists did not leave me disappointed. On a purely personal note, I found this book to take off where several of my earlier academic and professional experiences had introduced questions. I encountered some of the scientific issues in Wilson's book in my freshman year in college in a course on evolution and, later, in a seminar on recombinant DNA, at the same time when Wilson's pioneering book on sociobiology was published. In my professional life, as a non-scientist, my travels to many of the countries Wilson refers to in this book opened my eyes to some troubling prospects. I have included in various travelogues to friends and family tales of the possibly shortest world record of discovery and extinction of species in the Indian Ocean island Madagascar, and of the probabability, within fifty years or less, of total submersion of island nations in the Pacific like the atolls of Kiribati. Wilson brings to his analysis of these and other issues of species extinction, climate change, depletion of fresh water and arable land, a rare combination of eloquent, accessible, and level-headed statement of scientific evidence on one hand, and clarity of policy prescription on the other. Both as a non-scientist passionately favorable to a much higher level of scientific literacy among the general public and as a professional committed to international economic development, I was delighted at this exposition on the prospects of humanity. Wilson is fundamentally optimistic about the options available to deal with pressing environmental challenges, even while he firmly asserts his belief in the clear and present danger of many past and present patterns of production and consumption. He uses an admittedly caricatured dialogue between an "economist" and an "environmentalist" to illustrate purported tensions between prevailing patterns of economic consumption and production and evidence of resource strains on the biosphere. But, unlike some other presentations on similar issues, Wilson does not cast his arguments in simplistic neo-Malthusian terms or in diatribes against globalization. Instead, he coolly appeals to what he considers as a growing consensus among many professionals, scientists, conservationists, economists, and others - with the exception of QUOTE the most politically conservative of their public interpreters UNQUOTE - that the essential facts point to some inevitable choices in how we continue to exploit resources of the biosphere. While his 12-point policy prescriptions on pages 160-64 may seem broad, and even unsurprising, the strength of his book lies in the fact that he compactly marshals an array of complex scientific and economic evidence while avoiding pretensions of scientific certitude where evidence is lacking. He does not shy from admitting that certain of his positions - shared by many others - for example, on preserving species diversity, cannot be fully supported by scientific evidence or economic argumentation, but he does not shy away from making reasonable and transparent appeals to humanist values. QUOTE The case against humans for the extinction of the megfauna is built solely on circumstantial evidence, but the facts would win at least an indictment in any court of law UNQUOTE I confess I was left unsure how deeply to concerned at his report of the epitaph in a London zoo to the last member of a rare species of snails QUOTE 1.5 MILLION YEARS B.C. TO JANUARY 1996 UNQUOTE I would not disagree that many of his policy prescriptions or analysis are hardly novel. I am nonetheless encouraged that they are articulated by one of the world's most renowned biologist. Outside of its policy prescriptions, many of the purely scientific speculations in this book are presented with great eloquence. While I clearly enjoyed the entire book, I especially found the first chapter on species diversity enlightening, with its exposition of why the emergence of numerous species in very extreme and isolated terrestrial conditions suggest the high probability of finding life elsewhere in similar conditions elsewhere in our galaxy. If nothing else, I am sure many readers will enjoy the superb imagery in Wilson's imaginary letter to Henry Thoreau in the preface in which Wilson describes a gargantuan battle between an army of red and black ants so vividly that you can easily imagine the same graphic prose to describe the triumph of a superior army of human enslavers against their vanquished victims whose offspring submit into voluntary servitude at birth from some innate instinct.
Rating:
Summary: The Future of Life
Review: I really enjoy reading the book ¡§The Future of Life¡¨ by the Biologist Edward O. Wilson. It is a rich and vivid book where the writer uses lots of brilliant and detailed description about the animals and other habitats. The sufficient amount information provides me a great and accurate picture of how the wild lives out there truly live. This book depicts how Agriculture, one of the vital industries, endangers the remaining wild species and the nature environment. The world's food supply is hung by a slender thread of biodiversity. Ninety percent of the food supply is actually provided by slightly more than a hundred plant species out of a quarter-million known to exist. Of these hundred species, twenty species carry most of the load, of which only the main three--Wheat, maize, and rice---stand between humanity and starvation. Furthermore, most of the premier twenty are those that happened to be present in the agricultural region. In a more general sense, these important species are the major potential donors of genes that genetic engineering utilize to improve the crop performance. With the insertion of the right snippets of DNA, new strains can be created that are variously cold-hardy, pest-proofed, perennial, fast growing, highly nutritious, multipurpose, water-conservative, and more easily sowed and harvested. And compared with traditional breeding techniques, genetic engineering is all but instantaneous. In sum, Genetic Engineering have drastically changed our old ways of growing crops and thus, it threatens the future existence of the other species since it have significantly decreased the diversity of the nature wild lives.
Rating:
Summary: The Future of Life
Review: I really enjoy reading the book ¡§The Future of Life¡¨ by the Biologist Edward O. Wilson. It is a rich and vivid book where the writer uses lots of brilliant and detailed description about the animals and other habitats. The sufficient amount information provides me a great and accurate picture of how the wild lives out there truly live. This book depicts how Agriculture, one of the vital industries, endangers the remaining wild species and the nature environment. The world's food supply is hung by a slender thread of biodiversity. Ninety percent of the food supply is actually provided by slightly more than a hundred plant species out of a quarter-million known to exist. Of these hundred species, twenty species carry most of the load, of which only the main three--Wheat, maize, and rice---stand between humanity and starvation. Furthermore, most of the premier twenty are those that happened to be present in the agricultural region. In a more general sense, these important species are the major potential donors of genes that genetic engineering utilize to improve the crop performance. With the insertion of the right snippets of DNA, new strains can be created that are variously cold-hardy, pest-proofed, perennial, fast growing, highly nutritious, multipurpose, water-conservative, and more easily sowed and harvested. And compared with traditional breeding techniques, genetic engineering is all but instantaneous. In sum, Genetic Engineering have drastically changed our old ways of growing crops and thus, it threatens the future existence of the other species since it have significantly decreased the diversity of the nature wild lives.
Rating:
Summary: a prescription to get through the bottleneck
Review: In this book, Harvard professor E.O. Wilson presents useful, practical suggestions that address the current global crisis involving overpopulation, wasteful consumption, and unprecedented loss of biodiversity. For example, Wilson points out that roughly $30 billion (about 1/1000th of the annual combined GNP of the world as of 2000) can preserve for future generations critical habitats containing about 70% of the Earth's plant and animal species. Contrast this with about $110 billion spent annually by governments to subsidize fossil fuels and nuclear energy. Wilson is correct in pointing out that the question of the century is: How best can we shift to a culture of permanence, both for ourselves and for the biosphere that sustains us? This is something new in human history. He points out that for hundreds of millennia those humans who worked for short-term gain within a small circle of relatives and friends lived longer and left more offspring .... the long view that might have saved their distant descendants required a vision and extended altruism instinctively difficult to marshal. The book also contains a wealth of fascinating information about our world. E.g. Only three plant species stand between humanity and starvation: wheat, maize, and rice .... yet at least 10,000 plant species can be adapted as domestic crops. New World amaranths, arracacha of Andes, and winged bean of tropical Asia are immediately available for commercial development... e.g. If a small and otherwise unknown animal encountered in the wild is strikingly beautiful, it is probably poisonous; and if it is not only beautiful but also easy to catch, it is probably deadly.. e.g The vast majority of cells in your body are not your own: they belong to bacterial and other microorganismic species.
Rating:
Summary: A high-calibre primer on environmental conservation
Review: It's refreshing to read an environmental diatribe where the writer has both the authority of a world expert and a willingness to compromise to pursue realistic solutions. Wilson ' a Harvard biology professor, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and a director of the Nature Conservancy ' presents a succinct evaluation of the great ecological issues of our day, focusing on the rapid pace of species extinctions, and on the promise of finding a balance between conservation and human activity that will bring the extinctions to a halt. Future begins with a fascinating overview of life itself, its awesome diversity, its adaptation to the most extreme environments on Earth, and even the possibility of life on Mars, Europa, Callisto, and elsewhere in the Universe. From this perspective of life in the grandest scheme, he turns to the current pace of extinctions due to human activity, depletion of water, crop, and fish resources, and frames a debate with a hypothetical opponent who is more concerned with economic growth than the environment. This hypothetical opponent is a representative of the 'juggernaut of technology-based capitalism' (p. 156), and is portrayed as reading The Economist. However, Wilson recognizes that economic and technological growth cannot be reversed, and instead are the best hope to continue relieving poverty and disease throughout the world. Instead he seeks out a way for 'its direction [to] be changed by mandate of a generally shared long-term environmental ethic' (p. 156) to which everyone's opinion can converge. Wilson points out diplomatically that economists also recognize value in the natural environment, and conservationists enjoy driving to national parks in combustion-engine cars. To further his tone of optimistic compromise, Wilson finds hope in the slowdown and projected stop in human population growth, in environmentally friendly legislation and treaties, and in conservation methods that also produce proven economical value, such as ecotourism and bioprospecting for medical products. Wilson even concedes that genetically modified foods, though requiring further study, may contribute to environmental conservation by making agriculture more productive and allowing greater human nutrition to be produced from less cropland, and reducing dependence on chemical pesticides. Wilson's conciliatory tone ends with his professed admiration for the WTO protestors of Seattle and Genoa. He marks the low point of the book by echoing the left-wing polemic that global income disparities contributed to 9/11. He also lapses a few times into the poorly reasoned hyperbole that often erodes the conservationists' credibility. For instance, on page 39 we read of ''the United States, whose citizens are working at a furious pace to overpopulate and exhaust their own land and water from sea to shining sea.' Yet, Wilson points out on page 30 that population growth in the United States is now due only to immigration, and that the non-immigrant population of the United States has achieved practically zero growth. In another instance that is more esoteric, but sloppy for an expert on biological history, Wilson suggests humans are the first species to alter the environment on a global scale: ''Homo Sapiens has become a geophysical force, the first species in the history of the planet to achieve that dubious distinction.' This neglects vast influences that have been exerted on the global environment by past life, including the production of all of our oxygen and nitrogen ' together constituting 99% of the Earth's atmosphere ' and the eradication of almost all of the carbon dioxide, which is thought to have formed most of the primitive Earth's atmosphere, just as it still composes over 95% of the atmospheres of Earth's neighbors, Mars and Venus. On the other hand, Wilson's detailed account of different species that have recently gone extinct or are down to just a few individuals shows good reason to be disturbed. The current rate of extinctions is in the range of the greatest mass extinctions on record, including the K-T impact event that eliminated the dinosaurs and many other life forms 65 million years ago. Wilson outlines what he calls the bottleneck of the next century or so ' the efforts, or lack thereof, of our generation will make an indefinitely large difference in the future biological heritage of the Earth. Future is most valuable for presenting a comprehensive road map for environmental remedy. In perhaps the most compelling prescription, Wilson urges an end to perverse subsidies, whereby governments use taxpayer money to finance economically wasteful activity that also destroys the environment, to cater to special interests, or the economically discredited idea of 'strategic industries.' An example of this is the massive subsidies Germany pays to its coal mines, theoretically to protect the miners' jobs, but also supporting an operation that is not only not profitable in the free market, but also the single greatest source of global environmental degradation. Wilson goes on to offer a summary of sources of value in biodiversity, some of it not yet realized, and recommends economically valuable drivers for ecological protection. He also identifies twenty-five 'hotspot' ecosystems that together cover only 1.4 percent of Earth's land surface, but are 'the last remaining homes of' 43.8 percent of all known species of vascular plants and 35.6 percent of the known mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians.' Analyses such as these make it possible for policymakers and other actors to cooperate with conservationists in carrying out conservation efforts according to reasoned priorities, something that cannot be done where conservationists offer nothing more than an undistinguishing, blanket opposition to any development. The Future of Life provides an ideal, scientifically authoritative, well documented, and absorbing primer on the essential issues of environmental conservation, and a concise but vital guide for shaping or understanding environmental policy.
Rating:
Summary: Situation desperate but not completely hopeless
Review: The Future Of Life is a great book and a perfect antidote to: a) unwarranted optimism about the state of the environment, which by almost any measure appears desperate; b) unwarranted pessimism or fatalism regarding man's ability to DO something about this situation; and c) the reams of misinformation, uninformed opinion, and ridiculously wild-eyed optimism on environmental matters that exists out there (i.e., "The Skeptical Environmentalist"). Unlike The Skeptical Environmentalist, which is written by a statistician, The Future Of Life is written by one of the world's greatest living scientists, Edward O. Wilson, author of 20 books (including Sociobiology, and Consilience), winner of two Pulitzer prizes plus dozens of science prizes, and discoverer of hundreds of new species. Dr. Wilson is often called, for good reason, "the father of biodiversity." Wilson is also one of the rare breed of scientists, like Stephen J. Gould, Carl Sagan, and Stephen Hawking, who can actually communicate their thoughts and findings to the general public. This is particularly important when it comes to Wilson's area of expertise, given that the environment is something which affects all of us and which all of us can play a part in protecting (or destroying). Wilson's main theme can be summed up as "situation desperate, but not hopeless." Why desperate? Because humans--all 6 billion of them--are the most destructive force ever unleashed on Earth. According to Wilson, humanity's "bacterial" rate of growth during the 20th century, its short-sightedness, wasteful consumption patterns, general greed and rapaciousness, ignorance, and technological power have resulted in a mass extinction: "species of plants and animals...disappearing a hundred or more times faster than before the coming of humanity," and with "as many as half...gone by the end of the century." Americans in particular are an environmental disaster, consuming so many resources (oil, meat, timber, etc.) per person that, according to Wilson's calculations, "for every person in the world to reach present U.S. levels of consumption with existing technology would require four more planet Earths." Well, we don't have four more planet Earths, and at the present time, we are well on our way to trashing the one we've got. In short, Wilson concludes after chronicling the sorry, depressing, nauseating history of man's mass slaughter and destruction of the environment, our species richly deserves the label: "Homo sapiens, serial killer of the biosphere.'' Given all this, how can I say that Wilson's book is not hopeless? First, because human population growth is slowing (finally!), as women gain education, careers, and power over their reproductive choices. Luckily, when given this choice, women increasingly have opted for "quality over quantity," and average family size has plummeted. In most advanced industrialized nations, in fact, fertility rates have now fallen below replacement level (2.1 children per woman), meaning that populations in those countries will actually start to decline (barring immigration) in coming years. Wilson points that the worldwide average number of children per woman fell from 4.3 in 1960 to 2.6 in 2000. This is still far too high, and still means years more of absolute human population growth, but it's at least a bit of hope amidst the environmental carnage and constant drumbeat of bad news. Second, there is some hope because many humans do love the environment and want to preserve and protect it. Here, Wilson uses the fancy, scientific-sounding term "biophilia" to describe man's "innate tendency to focus upon life and lifelike forms, and in some instances to affiliate with them emotionally.'' In this instance, I believe Wilson may be overly optimistic. When confronted with the choice of a Big Mac or an acre of rainforest, let's say, most people appear to choose the Big Mac. Or when given a choice of driving their gas-guzzling SUVs and living in sprawling suburbia vs. driving smaller cars, living in cities, taking mass transit, and helping to prevent disastrous global warming, most people choose the SUVs and suburbia. Still, much of this is undoubtedly a result of ignorance and skewed economics (i.e., billions of dollars per year in government subsidies doled out to agriculture, fossil fuel production, wasteful water usage, among other things), and these can be corrected--at least in theory. Also, there are undoubtedly millions of humans who strongly care about the environment--whether for aesthetic, religious, ethical, "biophiliac," or other reasons--and are volunteering, donating money, or altering consumption patterns in order to help save it. This brings us to the third reason for not losing all hope: humans have the ability to save the environment, and Wilson lays out a clear, realistic, step-by-step plan for doing so. Ironically, one of the very characteristics of environment which causes it to be so vulnerable --its concentration of biological diversity in a small areas ("hotspots") --means that it is possible to target that land and save it. Wilson estimates that biological "hotspots" cover "less than 2 percent of the Earth's land surface and [serve] as the exclusive home of nearly half its plant and animal species." In Wilson's calculations, those "hotspots" can be saved "by a single investment of roughly $30 billion." Just to put this in perspective, the U.S. gross domestic product is over $10 trillion, or more than thirty times the $30 billion needed to save the "hotspots." The Future Of Life ends on a note of cautious optimism: although right now we find ourselves in a "bottleneck of overpopulation and wasteful consumption," Wilson believes that the race between "technoscientific forces that are destroying the living environment" and "those that can be harnessed to save it" can be won. In order for this to come to pass, however, humanity needs to take action immediately along the lines that Wilson lays out. Ultimately, The Future Of Life is a passionate, brilliant, clarion call to arms by a great scientist, and a great man as well. If we don't hear Wilson's call, we will have only ourselves to blame. And whichever way things turn out, we can't say we weren't warned.
Rating:
Summary: The Future of Life
Review: The Future of Life written by Edward O. Wilson is a book about the call for the ethical and religious bases of the environmental policy and conservation movement. Those wishing to learn something of the new technologies about gene-splicing and new life-forms will be disappointed, as this book is about how to save what is here and now for posterity. Keeping Earth's biological heritage and workng to achieve a long-term economic well-being, while protecting all species... including mankind is the focus of this book. This book has chapters that I've read before as chapter two, (The Bottleneck), was originally published in "Scientific American" and chapter five, (How much is the Biosphere Worth?) was in "Wilson Quarterly." Nevertheless, this does not detract from the books message and drives home the author's point. The section that I found most interesting in this book was chapter seven, (The Solution), as not only has the author brought up the problems facing mankind with his environment, but bring an envisioned solution to what humanity is inflicting on itself and Earth. As Wilson puts it, "We need nature, and particularly its wildernes strongholds. 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." Reading Wilson's prose throughout the book brings a heartfelt clarity of thought to the reader, one realizes that once what we have is gone, who will replace it. This book will make you think, as it is intelligent and brings hope. The author has a powerful and compellingly clear story to tell... the potential to protect, cure and nourish us is all around us in the biological diversity... will mankind be intelligent enough to recognize them. In essence this is a guidebook for the protection of all species on Earth.
|
