Media coverage begins for a book that calls for setting aside half the planet
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8167
Invoking the kilometers-wide object that struck Earth some 66 million years ago, Edward O. Wilson calls the extinction rate humans are imposing in the biosphere “the equivalent of a Chicxulub-sized asteroid strike played out over several human generations.” His 32nd book, Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life , comes out this month. The New York Times and other media have begun reporting the solution it advocates: reserving half the planet to let other species survive and flourish.
Claudia Dreifus writes for the Times‘s science section and teaches at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. In an Audubon Magazine piece , she reminded readers about Wilson’s scientific and public stature:
At 86, Edward Osborne Wilson , Harvard University research professor emeritus of comparative zoology, is among the most famous scientists of our time. Only Jane Goodall and Stephen Hawking can draw a larger crowd. Over the decades he’s made his mark on evolutionary biology, entomology, environmentalism, and literature. In all there have been 31 books, two of which, On Human Nature and The Ants , received the Pulitzer Prize.
She added that he’s widely accepted as “one of the greatest researchers, theorists, naturalists, and authors of our time,” is “known as the father of the concepts of sociobiology and biodiversity,” and is “highly celebrated for his lifetime of environmental advocacy.” Concerning the forthcoming book, she explained that it’s “his answer to the disaster at hand: a reimagined world in which humans retreat to areas comprising one half of the planet’s landmass.” She continued: “The rest is to be left to the 10 million species inhabiting Earth in a kind of giant national park. In human-free zones, Wilson believes, many endangered species would recover and their extinction would, most likely, be averted.”
In 2014, Smithsonian Magazine reported about Wilson’s concept, calling it “an audacious vision for saving Earth from a cataclysmic extinction event.” That article noted that Wilson had coined the word biophilia “to suggest that people have an innate affinity for other species” and that “his now widely accepted ‘theory of island biogeography’ explains why national parks and all confined landscapes inevitably lose species.”
Last year, the Conversation ran an article about Wilson’s concept. On 1 March, Dreifus reported in the Times that what the book proposes “means creating something equivalent to the U.N.'s World Heritage sites that could be regarded as the priceless assets of humanity.”
On 29 February, Wilson himself published the 3300-word essay “Half-Earth: Half of the Earth’s surface and seas must be dedicated to the conservation of nature, or humanity will have no future.” It appeared at Aeon, which claims to publish “the most profound and provocative thinking” from “world-leading authorities on science, philosophy and society.” (The online publication doesn’t overlook physics. So far this year, it has published articles on cosmology in January , February , and March .)
Wilson’s piece begins by reporting alarm among researchers “that, within the century, an exponentially rising extinction rate might easily wipe out most of the species still surviving.” He identifies “the amount of suitable habitat left to them” as the “crucial factor” in their life and death. He declares that the “ongoing mass extinction of species, and with it the extinction of genes and ecosystems, ranks with pandemics, world war, and climate change as among the deadliest threats that humanity has imposed on itself.”
Wilson explains that fully half the planet is required because “as reserves are reduced in area, the diversity within them declines to a mathematically predictable degree swiftly–often immediately and, for a large fraction, forever.” He stipulates that he’s not calling for “dividing the planet into hemispheric halves or any other large pieces the size of continents or nation-states.” He also notes that he’s not calling for changes in land ownership, though he doesn’t address how owners can be made to ensure that their lands “exist unharmed.”
He observes that luckily, population growth is decelerating on its own and that technology, looked at overall, is enabling a net reduction in humankind’s ecological footprint. He envisions a system of online virtual visitation of the preserved areas. He sees synthetic biology bringing about “the microbe-based increase of food and energy.” He predicts that advancing technology will favor biodiversity “by moving the economy away from fossil fuels to energy sources that are clean and sustainable, by radically improving agriculture with new crop species and ways to grow them, and by reducing the need or even the desire for distant travel.” He continues:
All are primary goals of the digital revolution. Through them the size of the ecological footprint will also be reduced. The average person can expect to enjoy a longer, healthier life of high quality yet with less energy extraction and raw demand put on the land and sea. If we are lucky (and smart), world population will peak at a little more than 10 billion people by the end of the century followed by the ecological footprint soon thereafter. The reason is that we are thinking organisms trying to understand how the world works. We will come awake.
Furthermore, Wilson writes, “advances made in synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, whole brain emulation, and other similar, mathematically based disciplines can be imported to create an authentic, predictive science of ecology. In it, the interrelations of species will be explored as fervently as we now search through our own bodies for health and longevity.”
His ending requires quoting:
The beautiful world our species inherited took the biosphere 3.8 billion years to build. The intricacy of its species we know only in part, and the way they work together to create a sustainable balance we have only recently begun to grasp. Like it or not, and prepared or not, we are the mind and stewards of the living world. Our own ultimate future depends upon that understanding. We have come a very long way through the barbaric period in which we still live, and now I believe we’ve learned enough to adopt a transcendent moral precept concerning the rest of life.
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
Thumbnail credit: Ragesoss (CC BY-SA 3.0 ), via Wikimedia Commons