The Future of Life

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: Not exactly "dribble".
Review: I wouldn't say Wilson's book is exactly dribble. It's more of the same harped on rhetoric which spews seemingly continuously from the professional environmentalist cave. There is nothing in this book that could be considered useful information for anyone not totally immersed in the politics of it all. It's the environmentalists against the corporations over and over again. More than anything this book is a plea for not millions but billions and trillions of dollars from public and private sources to cordon off nature so the professionals can keep their jobs studying it, and admonishing the rest of us for having abused it. As if they hadn't played a significant part in its present condition.

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Summary: Saving the Earth
Review: In his splendid _The Diversity of Life_, Professor Wilson orchestrated the objective findings of the naturalist with his subjective experiences in the field. In this way he enabled readers to participate in the field work, to understand the motives and the logic, much to the delight of those of us who share his love of nature. That same synthesis of science and humanities prevails in the present volume, but the focus has shifted to the future, and the naturalist becomes a seer or a prophet. It is a troubled prophet who foresees a catastrophic destruction of the habitats and ecosystems that make the good Earth good. By the end of the century, as many as half of extant species may be extinguished if things don't change dramatically. The cause of the calamity? We ourselves. Unleashing his thunder, Wilson lashes us as the 'serial killer of the biosphere' and the 'planetary killer'. This stigma is a heavy moral burden; Wilson himself seems at times to stagger under its weight even though he is pure in heart. And the rest of us? I wonder. For example, he says that there is 'no longer any reasonable doubt of global warming', adding that it would be 'criminally negligent to ignore' the forecasts. He makes no explicit reference to the politics of the Kyoto Accord, but we can't help thinking of it. President Clinton did not send the Accord to the Senate for ratification because he knew that it had no votes. Al Gore, who led the American team at Kyoto, did not make it an election issue, as he might have done. President Bush has opted out of the Accord because conservatives in his party believe that Kyoto is economically and electorally fatal policy based on what they deem to be 'junk science'. There the matter lies for the moment. Will the EU and Japan implement anyhow, as they said they would? Not likely, because the resulting competitive disadvantage would be serious.
Another example of the distance between scientific knowledge and public perception unfolds in Wilson's discussion of the effects of invasive species on the flora and fauna of Hawaii. He writes that 'for most residents and visitors, [Hawaii] seems an unspoilt island paradise. In actuality it is a killing field of biological diversity'. There is the problem: persuading the public to recognize that what seems to the untrained eye a luxuriance of biodiversity is in fact 'a killing field'. And should that succeed, there is a second step: persuading people that the killing isn't just nature doing what comes naturally, but is due to human traffic that mediated entry of so many destructive species. Are we then somehow to hermetically seal every ecosystem from contamination? Will such precautions persuade Joe and Jill Sixpack to relinquish their pleasure in nature by charging through wilderness in their luxury SUV? Somehow it must if Wilson is to reach his stated goal of transforming environmentalism from a special interest into the common interest mainstream. This means, as he explains, reconciling the 'juggernaut' of economic development with stewardship.
Such reconciliation has been the objective of some environmentalists for decades. What has Wilson to add that hasn't been aired thus far? Try as I might, I'm unable to find anything new. What strikes me instead is Wilson's tendency to understate the polarization, to rely on opinion surveys as reliable indicators of public attitude, and to evade discussion of the economic consequences of adopting the robust environmental policy he advocates. For example, he applauds the spearhead role of NGOs as well as 'boycotts [of] insufficiently green restaurant franchises'. In reality the boycotts are directed ESPECIALLY against franchises that cultivate a green image, to bully them into disavowing genetically modified ingredients. More generally, environmental activists have marked genetic engineering as a cursed technology that, like nuclear energy, must be refused. This in turn earns them scorn as Luddites, ferals, and tree-huggers. Why isn't this conflict frankly discussed? His very circumspect endorsement of GE agriculture suggests that he hopes to avoid antagonizing allies. I doubt that it will work out his way. His science advocacy has been vehemently attacked by an eloquent and influential environmentalist, Wendell Berry, and opposition to genetically modified agricultural has the status, among activists, of a holy cause.

Wilson's characterization of the issues dividing economists and environmentalists strikes me as too bland and non-specific to underwrite the programmatic reorientation he espouses. The issue is, he thinks, simply a matter of accepting that the Earth is a finite resource whose living and non-living natural capital, once dissipated, are gone for good. It follows that the economists' vision of endless development is a 'euphoric delusion'. Wilson doesn't discuss--or even allude to--the rejoinder that environmentalists have compiled an appalling record of creating scares by proclaiming apocalyptic scenarios supposedly based on impregnable scientific evidence. The need to address this issue will become more acute as development opportunities foregone (eg, the California energy crisis) and expenditures for environmental protection (EPA fines alone top $270 million per year) down-size middle class lifestyle while celebs continue their display of super-consumption.

Despite these criticisms and others that might be mentioned, I benefited from this book and believe that it is a valuable contribution to the debate.

Hiram Caton
Griffith University

Rating:
Summary: most comprehensive analysis of environment
Review: In my opinion, Wilson's book makes the most compelling and clearly-stated argument for biological conservation ever written. His writing is both eloquent and biting. This book changed my entire thought pocess regarding the human race; we have done no good to planet earth and the rest of life. I loved it.

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: A Good Sermon for the Choir
Review: No question, you won't read this book unless you already are half or three-quarters into Wilson's camp. Much of the material is old stuff to Wilson fans from such books as "Biophilia" or "The Diversity of Life". The theme is, of course, the massive degradation of the biosphere by man, and how to salvage what richness of life remains. While most of us are aware of the perilous state of wilderness and wildlife (as the gloomy coda to any nature show on public television reminds us), we tend not to dwell on it - it is so sad and, we feel, so unavoidable. But sometimes one must come to grips with things.

This book is a good start; it was written in 2001, so is pretty current. Wilson covers the ground quite well, and uses many specific examples to illustrate the general state of nature. He starts with an entertaining summary of global biodiversity, then moves into the problem of a vast, growing, and industrializing human population. He also talks about those relatively few spots that are most productive of species - usually tropical rainforests - and how important these are to the effort to retain something of what we are losing. After this he shows the ways that man, that predator without peer or restraint, is such a relentless force for extinction - and always has been.

After detailing the problems, Wilson launches into solutions, both the Why and the How. The least convincing chapter is "How Much is the Biosphere Worth?" His dollars and cents approach here is probably not a good idea - it is that sort of thinking, with its human focus and equating of value with money, that got us into this mess. (Interestingly, he seems guardedly in favor of transgenic agriculture as the best hope to feed the new hordes coming on line without having to chew up all the remaining wilderness just to grow crops.) But the world's best-known naturalist soon gets back into his comfort zone in admitting that we really wish to save the living world simply for "the love of life".

Wilson is an optimist: in spite of all that has been lost he feels hopeful and he details the ways effective private organizations are targeting important areas in the tropical lands in order to save the maximum of biodiversity. He also, and this is important, takes care to defuse the usual Us and Them stance. "We" are good, low-impact users of the planet, "They" are ruthless, short-term exploiters. Wilson has been on enough panels and committees of the great and good to realize that these are caricatures: what mostly divides us is politics; if we can forget the human for a while, we can usually meet to help the rest of nature.

Of course he is repeating himself in writing this book. But people tend to read the latest on timely topics, and the point of his effort is to get sympathetic readers to pay attention again to the crisis and also to bring new converts on board. E. O. Wilson is a scientist with enough prestige and with such concern for all the life on our planet that he will probably be writing this book every few years for as long as he can.

Rating:
Summary: This century's Silent Spring?
Review: Some books should be read and some should be read by everyone. This is one of the latter. Wilson always writes eloquently and he is at his peak here, detailing and supporting human responsibility for conserving the heritage and future of life on this planet. His editors obviously appreciated this, and greatly enhanced the power of this book by letting the author leave the flow of his prose uncluttered by over-reference to researcher names and footnotes. Credit to his many sources is nevertheless appropriately included in the back of the book. This book gets my vote for this new century's Silent Spring!

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Summary: The Clone Report
Review: The future of life by edward wilson is a very interesting book that raises our awareness of our impact on the environment. In this book, Wislons paints the picture of Earth's diodiversity using various ecxamples of species exclusively endangered or extinct. he notes that with yuman expansion and development the rate of extinction annually has risen overa thousand folds with regards to teh endemic rate. Howerver, he does not limit his pospective to that of the extreme conservatists. > Wislon addresses the ecologicla and economical benfits of preserving existgint ecodysstems and working to reconstruct damaged and destroyed ones. Wilson, while trying to address the issues of conservatism, with regards to the economists, over stereotypes the viewpoints described in his dramatization. Wilson's writing , though influential at times, tends to lean towards a capricious and montonous nature. Also, hs plans to help solve the growing problem of the reductoin of biodiversity look nice on paper but seem inpractical in reality. Overall though, wilson conveys the message of a world heading towardsx self-destructoin with a long winded (at time) yet influential style.

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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.