The Future of Life
Review by Gary Hunt
The Future of Life
by Edward O. Wilson
Vintage Books.
$14.00
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We have the Sun Valley Center for the Arts to thank for bringing us Edward O. Wilson, the greatest living biologist and the natural heir to Charles Darwin, who will be talking on Thursday at the Church of the Big Wood in Ketchum. His most recent book is “The Future of Life”, and if you are inclined to think that scientific writing is nothing more than a cure for insomnia, here’s what Booker prize-winning novelist Ian McEwan has to say about Edward Wilson the writer:
"Frankly, I do not know of another working scientist whose prose is better than his. He can be witty, scathing and inspirational by turns. He is a superb celebrator of science in all its manifestations, as well as being a scourge of bogus, post-modernist, relativist pseudo-science, and so-called New Age thinking."
He’s a proclaimed scientist and prose stylist, but the real genius of Edward Wilson is in his grasp of the Big Picture. “The Future of Life” is about the decline of biodiversity, human culpability in that decline, what the ramifications and consequences of that decline will be, and what we can do to stop this train before it runs off the track.
Homo Sapiens may be the most successful product of the last 100 million years of evolution, but our very success is pushing the rest of Life into extinction. The population of humanity is approaching 8 billion people and we’re elbowing aside all of those millions of bugs and weeds that make it possible for us to live on this planet. All of those organic compounds hidden in the chemistry of exotic tropical flora and fauna that encode the cure for cancer, the fountain of youth, forever gone in one callous clearcut. Who are we to destroy creation?
It’s a bleak picture that is painted, but Edward Wilson’s is a voice of reason rather than hysteria, and the final chapter is The Solution. Great strides are being made in conservation movements, particularly by the efforts of large international organizations like the World Wildlife Fund and the Nature Conservancy. By preserving corridors large enough to sustain certain ecosystems, and by identifying ‘hotspots’, regions that host up to 60% of the world’s species but take up only 1.4% of the Earth’s surface, we can maintain a certain amount of biodiversity for future generations. The question remains as to whether we will be able to collectively develop the political will to accomplish that before it is too late.
Edward Wilson is the great Synthesist, and this book flows seamlessly from biology to religion to philosophy to politics in an impartial call to reason and action. The burden rests on all of us to do something about “The Future of Life”.
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