The Future of Life

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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.

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Summary: A quality future; the choice is ours and it is now
Review: The is the most beautifully written documentation of the current planetary biological crisis that has ever been written. Wilson brilliantly summarizes the scientific and economic evidence for global deterioration and what it will mean to humanity in the very near future if we do not reverse our current and growing demand's on the world's resources. Those who don't set aside a few hours to read this book will be missing a 21st century classic on the precarious state of the quality of life on planet earth. Most important of all is that Wilson provides a cogent solution to the looming crisis.

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Summary: Awesome and urgent treatise on the future of life.
Review: The question that Edward O. Wilson sets out to address is possibly the most important we have ever faced: "Are we entering a critical period in our biological and ecological history, from which we may never emerge?"

'The Future of Life' is Wilson's most urgent, inspiring and intellectually nourishing books to date. It is a compelling call to arms to avert the global extinction episode that we are currently in the midst of. Our current mode may rival the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 60 million years ago-without the need of any single catastrophic event to help it along.

This volume is destined to go down as one of the most important books of far-seeing cautionary discussion, much as Rachel Carson's 'Silent Spring' did a generation or two ago. Highly recommended.

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Summary: Well read, not so well produced
Review: The reader, Ed Begley, Jr., reads this book clearly and with good phrasing. The abridging is not heavy.

Only one complaint: 6 CDs with NO TRACK INDEX! This means that the CDs are useful for listening to straight through only. The user can only guess which chapter will be on which CD, and there is no way (that I know of) to jump to a specific part of the book on the CD, because there is only one track per CD.

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Summary: Mistaken Title
Review: The title of this book "The Future of Life" is very misleading and mistaken. The book does not, as one would naturally think by the title, look forward to the new life forms that will be possible with genetic engineering and computer technology. Rather, it is very backward looking. For example, Wilson describes in great detail some species that are long since extinct.

Instead of focusing on the wonderment of life and its natural evolution, Wilson prefers to focus on the mundane details of environmental policy. There is so much hand-wringing, whining,a and repetition in this book, that it was a chore to get through.

Seemingly, if it were up to Wilson, there would be no future of life. Rather, the current status quo of species would be jealously protected and frozen forever in time. How unimaginative and uninspired, especially in light of the remarkable breakthroughs that are on the horizon, which will challenge our very understanding of what it means to be alive.

For those who really are interested in the future of life, I would suggest the book "The Shattered Self" by Baldi.

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Summary: The Future of Life Book Review
Review: The title The Future of Life is a good book because it makes predictions of the future based on what is happening now. He describes the Earth as one big organism that has to coperate with all the cordinating ecosystems to survive. Humans have created the "bottleneck theory" where we havecontinually destroyed ecosystems and extinguished species. We as humans are using up all the natural resourses and in the long run, we are hurting ourselves. E.O. wilson uses the book as a "call to action" for humans to change their wars before it is too late and our planet earth is destroyed forever.
Overall, it was a pretty good book. Wilson uses good examples in outlining how we can help improve Earth. He was a tad too pessimistis though. He blamed everything on humans. THere were alot of facts that mad it boring and it got a little redundant towards the end of the novel. The Future of life was an interesting read. There was a lot of interesting information in it.

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Summary: What's happening to our world?
Review: There are many species in the world. There are all different types of species, living in all different types of habitats. But how long will they be around? There is only a fraction of the original number of species that once existed on the Earth's land and in the oceans. Why are so many species coming to extinction so quickly? HIPPO is the answer. HIPPO is the reason created by "conservation biologists." HIPPO gives explanation for the disappearing of species. HIPPO is just one of the many things explained in this book.

In Edward O. Wilson's book, The Future of Life, the future of life on Earth is questioned. Wilson, and other professionals, look at statistics and find the patterns to predict the future. By following the patterns, they are able to predict how long a species is expected to survive in the wild. Also, the size of the population of humanity will change over time. Wilson looks at all of the different scenarios, which results in the many different possible outcomes.

Through looking at many studies it has become evident that the human species is responsible for most of the extinction of species. People come in and ruin habitats, such as the rainforests. They also hunt the animals and introduce alien species, which crowd out or kill out the native species of a land. Although now, many attempts at saving the mass extinction have started, it will take some time to be effective and at the current rates, it is too late. However, Wilson hopes that with reading this book, more attempts will be made. We must increase the conservation and decrease the destruction of species. The flora and fauna of our world need our help. We created the problem and now we must help to fix it.

Read The Future of Life, by Edward O. Wilson, to find out what's going on in your world, to learn about the mass extinction occurring as we speak. Read about Wilson's solution and how you could help. Learn about the species soon to be lost to extinction. The book goes into great detail about many different situations and the trouble that the world is in. An interesting piece of literature, which will hopefully spread the dangerous situation of the Earth as we know it.

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Summary: ¿We, the living¿¿
Review: This book is a definitive introduction to the issues surrounding our living in the ecosystem we call the Earth. It brings into focus, lesser known facts about the other components of this ecosystem, specifically our Flora and Fauna. It shows the various uses that these elements are, to mankind and hence underscores their importance to us as a species. The book is very well written and runs like a story, full of examples and narratives, and is a book that makes a good preliminary to Wilson's book - Biophilia

Having said all the above, this book also has some 'shortcomings', I use the word cautiously... to illustrate that these are not negatives, but rather choices exercised by the author. Wilson himself admits that this book focuses on Micro Fauna largely, and hence the case of conservation he builds up is specific to these; he doesn't really speak much about large animals except perhaps the Whale and Rhino. This book is neither too complex nor very elaborate in its examples nor too in depth in its subjects, if you're already familiar with conservation programs and their arguments, you wouldn't find much new material here... but for a lay person interested in knowing what the entire environment-movement is about, this is an excellent place to start.

Lastly, Wilson uses the method of economics to assign value to our ecosystem, thus aiming to beat the 'utilitarians' at their own game, which is one approach to conservationism. Renowned conservationists such as Richard Leakey though do not compeletely agree with this approach, and take a more moral approach to conversation. A brilliant book by Leakey on this subject needs mentioning - "The sixth extinction", which presents the alternative approach to Conservationism. Taken together, these books make an un-challengable case for us to do our part to make our world a better place for our future.

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Summary: Utterly worthless enviro-dribble
Review: This book is as completely valueless as all other environmentalist "science."

The sole value of this book would be in a histiographic sense, as in say "oh, an example of a totally valueless 'environmentalist' book would be that one by Edward Wilson."

Hundrds of pages of utterly factually incorrect emoting.

Any "environmentalist" with guts, would sit down and read _IT'S GETTING BETTER ALL THE TIME_ by Simon, also happily available from Amazon.

But of course, environmentalists have no mental guts, it's all about...emoting.

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Summary: The monkey without a danish
Review: This book was good. You should read it if you want to get bored and Die!