![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bending_sickleEdward O Wilson (2006)
Part 1: The Creation
A call for help and an invitation to visit the embattled natural world in the company of a biologist.
1. Letter to a Southern Baptist Pastor: Salutation
“Although I no longer belong to that faith, I am confident that if we met and spoke privately of our deepest beliefs, it would be in a spirit of mutual respect and good will.”
“I am a secular humanist. I think existence is what we make of it as individuals. There is no guarantee of life after death, and heaven and hell are what we create for ourselves, on this planet. There is no other home.”
“For you, the glory of an unseen divinity; for me, the glory of the universe revealed at last. For you, the belief in God made flesh to save mankind; for me, the belief in Promethean fire seized to set man free. You have found your final truth; I am still searching. I may be wrong, you may be wrong. We may both be partly right.”
“You and I and every other human being strive for the same imperatives of security, freedom of choice, personal dignity, and a cause to believe in that is larger than ourselves.”
“The defense of living Nature is a universal value. It doesn’t rise from, nor does it promote, any religious or ideological dogma. Rather, it serves without discrimination the interests of all humanity.”
“Scientists estimate that if habitat conversion and other destructive human activities continue at their present rates, half the species of plants and animals on Earth could be either gone or at least fated for early extinction by the end of the century. A full quarter will drop to this level during the next half century as a result of climate change alone. The ongoing extinction rate is calculated in the most conservative estimates to be about a hundred times above that prevailing before humans appeared on Earth, and it is expected to rise to at least a thousand times greater or more in the next few decades.”
“Surely we can agree that each species, however inconspicuous and humble it may seem to us at this moment, is a masterpiece of biology, and well worth saving.”
“Because religion and science are the two most powerful forces in the world today, including especially the United States. If religion and science could be united on the common ground of biological conservation, the problem would soon be solved.”
“I am puzzled that so many religious leaders, who spiritually represent a large majority of people around the world, have hesitated to make protection of the Creation an important part of their magisterium. Do they believe that human-centered ethics and preparation for the afterlife are the only things that matter?”
“For those who believe this form of Christianity [book of Revelation’s End of Time prophecies], the fate of ten million other life forms indeed does not matter. This and other similar doctrines are not gospels of hope and compassion. They are gospels of cruelty and despair.”
“The great challenge of the twenty-first century is to raise people everywhere to a decent standard of living while preserving as much as the rest of life as possible.”
“Knowledge of it [the biosphere] is a magic well: the more you draw from it, the more there is to draw.”
“…to protect the beauty of Earth and of its prodigious variety of life forms should be a common goal, regardless of differences in our metaphysical beliefs.”
“Today it is but a rivulet. Tomorrow it will be a flood.”
2. Ascending to Nature
“At the very least, Pastor, I expect we agree that somehow and somewhere back in history humanity lost its way.”
“Would you be willing to suppose that part of Eden was the rest off life as it was before humanity? The book of Genesis affirms that much, whether read literally or metaphorically.”
“Nor were we driven from this Eden. Instead, we destroyed most of it in order to improve our lives and generate more people.”
“According to archaeological evidence, we strayed from nature with the beginning of civilization roughly ten thousand years ago. That quantum leap beguiled us with an illusion of freedom from the world that had given us birth.”
“A wiser intelligence might now truthfully say of us at this point: here is a chimera, a new and very odd species come shambling into our universe, a mix of Stone Age emotion, medieval self-image, and godlike technology. The combination makes the species unresponsive to the forces that count most for its own long-term survival.”
“They choose to remain innocent of the historical principle that civilizations collapse when their environments are ruined.”
“We can begin with the key discovery of green history: Civilization was purchased by the betrayal of Nature.”
“But the revolution encouraged the false assumption that a tiny selection of domesticated plants and animals can support human expansion indefinitely.”
“…in the name of progress and in the name of the gods too, lest we forget.”
“History now teaches a different lesson, but only to those who will listen. Even if the rest of life is counted of no value beyond the satisfaction of human bodily needs, the obliteration of Nature is a dangerous strategy. For one thing, we have become a species specialized to eat the seeds of four kinds of grass – wheat, rice, corn and millet. If these fail, from disease or climate change, we too shall fail. Some fifty thousand wild plant species (many of which face extinction) offer alternative food sources. If one insists on being thoroughly practical about the matter, allowing these and the rest of wild species to exist should be considered part of a portfolio of long-term investment.”
“Meanwhile, the modern technoscientific revolution, including especially the great leap forward of computer-based information technology, has betrayed nature a second time, by fostering the belief that the cocoons of urban and suburban life are sufficient for human fulfillment.”
“Granted, many people seem content to live entirely within the synthetic ecosystems. But so are domestic animals content, even in the grotesquely abnormal habitats in which we rear them. This in my mind is a perversion. It is not the nature of human beings to be cattle in glorified feedlots.”
“Part of the dilemma is that while most people around the world care about the natural environment, they don’t know why they care, or why they should feel responsible for it. By and large they have been unable to articulate what the stewardship of Nature means to them personally.”
“I believe that the solution to all of the three difficulties – ignorance of the environment, inadequate science education, and the bewildering growth of biology – is to refigure them into a single problem.”
“…because we are part of it, the fate of the Creation is the fate of humanity.”
3. What is Nature?
“But what is Nature? The simplest possible answer is also the best: Nature is that part of the original environment and its life forms that remains after the human impact. Nature is all on planet Earth that has no need of us and can stand alone.
Some skeptics have insisted that even when elaborated, such a definition has little use, because the natural world has been so disturbed as to be humanized everywhere and thus has lost its original identity. There is a kernel of truth in that claim.”
“In 1955 I was the first non-Papuan to reach the summit ridge of the central Sarawaget Mountains of north-eastern new Guinea. (Admittedly, few if any others had tried, and I was still young enough to think myself invulnerable.)”
“It is further true that thousands of industrial pollutants drift continuously onto the receding polar snows and into the most distant seas.”
“Very roughly, a full-scale, megafauna-sized wilderness is defined as a relatively large and mostly undisturbed aggregate of contiguous habitats.. As specified by Conservation International in a recent study, it is an expanse of ten thousand square kilometers (one million hectares) or more, at least 70 percent of whose area still bears natural vegetation. Domains of this magnitude include the great tropical forests of the Amazon Basin, the Congolian Basin, and most of the island of New Guinea. They also include the taiga, thee belt of mostly coniferous forests that stretches across North America and on through Siberia to Finnoscandia. Wilderness of a very different kind are Earth’s largest deserts, the polar regions, the high seas, and the abyssal floors of the oceans (in contrast, very few deltas and coastal waters remain unchanged).”
“Smaller wildernesses abound, denoted officially in the U.S. Wilderness Act of 1964 as parts of Earth ‘untrammeled by man and where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.’”
“Luckily, microwildernesses are not a trivial part of wild Nature. Quite the opposite: each cubic meter of soil and humus within it is a world swarming with hundreds of thousands of such creatures, representing hundreds of species.”
“The woodlot may be seriously disturbed on a macroscale, as perceived by humans […]. […] But around the base of each tree is an ancient and relatively intact world of miniature inhabitants.”
“The message is this: first-rate science need not start with white coats and scribbles on a blackboard.”
“How strange, then, it seemed to me upon arrive at the fort [Fort Warren on Geroge’s Island, Boston Harbour Islands] that Black Bill [great-grandfather William C. Wilson, a Confederate blockade runner] and I would cross paths in this improbable place, in two such improbable roles, a felon by happenstance of war followed by the entomologist to whom he had passed on one-eigth of his genetic code, there to study insects.”
“When the scientific exploration is made entertaining and combined with education, a new form of civic institution takes root.”
“Some postmodernist philosophers, convinced that truth is relative and dependent only on a person’s worldview, argue that there is no such objective entity as nature. […] …I have crossed too many sharp boundaries between natural and humanized ecosystems to doubt the objectivity of Nature.”
“There is a rule that all naturalists know and talk about who work in rainforests. The plant or animal species that catches your eye at this moment you may not see again that day, or week, or even year. It may never reveal itself to you again, no matter how long and hard you search.”
“In a few square kilometers at Jari, in the western Brazilian state of Rondônia, entomologists have recorded sixteen hundred kinds of butterflies. In nearby pastures of similar extent converted from rainforest by logging and burning, there may be […] fifty species, plus an indeterminate number that stray across the inhospitable terrain from one forest fragment to another.”
“Even in the parking lot extremum, notice the resilient little weed that peeps from a crack in the concrete, the tuft of grass holding on at the curb, the faint colorous span of the cyanobacterial colony plastered next to the ticket kiosk. […] These last-stand wild organisms, the vanguard of Earth’s inevitable return to green and blue, wait patiently for us to change our mind. Their species are still able to give back some of what we remain so remorselessly bent on destroying.”
4. Why Care?
“I expect you’ll concur with that, although your logic to reach the conclusion is different from mine.”
“…the First Principle of Human Ecology: Homo sapiens is a species confined to an extremely small niche. True, our minds soar out to the edge of the universe, and contract inward to subatomic particles, the two extremes encompassing thirty powers of ten in space. In this respect our intellects are godlike. But let’s face it, our bodies stay strapped inside a proportionately microscopic bubble of physical constraints. We have learned how to occupy some of Earth’s most hostile environments – but only when enclosed within airtight containers whose environment is precisely controlled. […] Prolonged residence there, even when physically possible, is psychologically unbearable.”
“The First Principle of Human Ecology can be put another way: Alien planets are not in our genes.”
“It follows that human self-interest is best served by not overly harming the other life forms on Earth that still survive. Environmental damage can be defines as any change that alters our surroundings in a direction contrary to humanity’s inborn physical and emotional needs.”
“The problems of modern civilization rise from the disjunction between our ancient and glacially slow-evolving genetic heritage at one level of evolution and our ultrafast cultural evolution at the other level. There are still thinkers around the world, some in commanding political and religious positions, who wish to base moral law on the sacred scripture of Iron Age desert kingdoms while suing high technology to conduct tribal wars – of course with the presumed blessing of their respective tribal gods. The increasing contrast of such retrograde thinking on the one hand and awesome destructive power on the other should make us more circumspect than ever, and not just about starting wars. It should also make us more careful with the environment, upon which our lives ultimately depend.”
“Yet humanity is already the first species in the history of life to become a geophysical force. We have, all by our bipedal, wobbly-headed selves, altered Earth’s atmosphere and climate away from the norm.”
“What difference will it make if a few or even half of all the species on Earth are exterminated, as projected by scientists for the remainder of this century? Many reasons exist fundamental to the human weal. Unimaginably vast sources of scientific information and biological wealth will be destroyed. Opportunity costs […] will be staggering.”
“Living nature is nothing more than the commonality of organisms in the wild state and the physical and chemical equilibrium their species generate through interaction with one another. But it is also noting less than that commonality and equilibrium. The power of living Nature lies in sustainability through equilibrium.”
“The diversity of insects is the greatest documented among all organisms: the total number of species classified in 2006 is about 900,000. The true number, combing those both known and remaining to be discovered, may exceed 10 million. The biomass of insects is immense: about a million trillion are alive at any given moment. Ants alone, of which there may be 10 thousand trillion, weigh roughly as much as all 6.5 billion human beings. […] Can anyone believe that these little creatures are just there to fill space?”
“People need insects to survive, but insects do not need us. If all humankind were to disappear tomorrow, it is unlikely that a single insect species would go extinct, except three forms of human body and head lice.”
“But if insects were to vanish, the terrestrial environment would soon collapse into chaos. Picture the steps of the cataclysm as it would likely unfold across the first several decades:
A majority of the flowering plants, upon being deprived of their pollinators, cease to reproduce.
Most herbaceous plant species among them spiral down to extinction. Insect-pollinated shrubs and trees hang on for a few more years, in rare cases up to centuries.
The great majority of birds and other land vertebrates, now denied the specialized foliage, fruit, and insect prey on which they fee, follow the plants into oblivion.
The soil remains largely unturned, accelerating plant decline, because insects, not earthworms as generally supposed, as the principal turners and renewers of the soil.
Populations of fungi and bacteria explode and remain at a peak over a few years while metabolizing the dead plant and animal material that piles up.
Wind-pollinated grasses and a handful of fern and conifer species spread over much of the deforested terrain, then decline to some extent as the soil deteriorates.
The human species survives, able to fall back on wind-pollinated grains and marine fishing. But amid widespread starvation during the first several decades, human populations plunge to a small fraction of their former level. The wars for control of the dwindling resources, the suffering, and the tumultuous decline to dark-age barbarism would be unprecedented in human history.”
I’d vote for the eradication of the aforementioned lice […]. Also, I’d not mourn the passing of mosquitoes of the Anopheles gambiae complex of Africa […]. Let us not be conservation absolutists when it comes to creatures specialized to feed human beings.”
“In the real world there is a need to control only the tiny fraction of insect species, perhaps as few as one out of ten thousand, that are consistently harmful to humans. In most cases control means to reduce and if possible to eradicate populations of such species in countries where they are aliens, usually having been transported there by humans as unintended hitchhikers.”
5. Alien Invaders from Planet Earth
“Around 1518, a plague of ants irrupted at the fledgling Spanish colony on Hispaniola. The event was witnessed by Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, exacting chronicler of Columbian America (‘who promises before the divine word that everything said and referred to is the truth’) and defender of the Caribbean Indians. A great saint, in my opinion, never canonized. He described the scene at the monastery as follows in his History of the Indies.”
“Fray Bartolomé believed that the plague was an expression of God’s wrath for the maltreatment of the Taino people. […] ‘They made great processions begging Our Father to free them from such a plague so harmful to their worldly goods. In order to receive divine blessing more quickly, they though to taking a saint as a lawyer, whichever one by change our Lord should declare best suited. […] Fortune fell on Saint Saturnin […].’ And indeed, according to Fray Bartolomé , the pague, as if miraculously, soon began to recede.”
“About the same time, swarms of ants threatened the cassava plantations on what is today Loíza on Puerto Rico, and after casting lots the people named Saint Patrick their protector. When a similar plague afflicted Sancti Spíritus in Cuba, the population moved across the river, and Saint Ann was selected for intercession.”
“What was the plague ant? This was a mystery of identity, rather like a criminal investigation. […] What was Formica omnivore? Why did it explode to plague proportions? And finally, why did it then recede within a few years or at most decades?”
“The plague ant of the sixteenth century, I concluded (as had [William Morton] Wheeler on less evidence), was the tropical fire ant. Known to entomologists by its scientific name Solenopsis geminate, it is evidently native to the extreme southern United States, Central American, and probably tropical South America, but has been spread by human commerce over a large part of the tropical and subtropical parts of the world. […] The tropical fir ant may also be native to the West Indies. […] If not truly native but still at least pre-Columbian in origin, the ant was accidentally transported by the Taino’s Arawak ancestors from island to island up the Lesser Antillean chain of islands.”
“If the fire ants lived in and around the Taino gardens, why did this insect wait for Columbus to arrive to irrupt into a plague?”
“The solution […] lies in the scorched appearance of the drying crop plants. This is not an effect produced by any known ants, which very seldom consume plant material. But it does result from heavy infestations of sap-sucking homopterous insects, including aphids, mealybugs, scale insects – and tree-hoppers. Fire ants are among the kinds of ants that protect these insects, and in exchange the homopterans provide them with liquid excrement rich in sugar and amino acids. It appears that the most likely cause of the plagues was the arrival of one or more homopterans new to Hispaniola. These pests, cassied inadvertently by the Spanish, and at first unopposed by any parasites or predators natural to them, bloomed into dense populations. […] The ants, profiting from the increased food supply, luxuriated in their newfound pastures, and the symbiosis of the two kinds of insects created the plague.”
“The fire ants [Solenopsis invicta] alter the environment by reducing the abundance and diversity of many other insect and other invertebrate species, as well as reptiles, and they are powerful enough even to displace or diminish populations of mice and deer.”
“invicta – the unconquered one”
“…two kinds of ants caused the West Indian plagues: fire ants in the sixteenth century on Hispaniola and then something else a century or more later to the south in the smaller islands of the Lesser Antilles. In the latter case, the prime and virtually only suspects left are species of Pheidole ants. […] two candidtates were possible: Jelski’s Pheidole (scientific name: Pheidole jelskii) and the Big-Headed Ant Pheidole (Pheidole megacephala).
I could eliminate Pheidole jelskii quickly. […] Pheidole megacephala, on the other hand, fits the profile almost perfectly.”
“The three worst outbreaks after the 1500s, those on Barbados, Grenada, and Martinique, all commenced during 1760-70, in other words during a ten-year period, and all were concentrated in fields of sugarcane. It is hard to explain this phenomenon except as the relative late arrival of an alien – either Pheidole megacephala itself or, more likely, […] newly introduced homopterous insects with which it formed a symbiosis. The latter explanation is strengthened by the fact that the plague was focused in the cane fields, where homopterans can multiply in great numbers.”
“Of the slightly fewer than twelve thousand ant species known in the world, just thirteen have become invasive by hitchhiking on human commerce, colonizing new areas, then causing significant amounts of ecological or economic damage. Most have moved on up to plague proportions at one time or another. In addition to the fire ants and the Big-Headed Ant, this select group includes the secretive ninja ant (Monomorium destructor) […] the little fire ant (Wasmannia auropunctata) […] the Argentine ant (Linepithema humile) […].”
“Ants are, after all, among the dominant small animals of the planet. In the Amazon forest […] they compose one-third of the insect dry-weight, and together with termites more than a quarter of the dry weight of all animals, vertebrate and invertebrate combined. Those figures are likely equaled or approached elsewhere […].”
“For every harmful species, moreover, there are at least ten aliens established in some part of the word or other […] that are not pests – at least not yet.”
“I have taken pervasive pleasure in stringing together the titles of five recent (and very good) books detailing the impact of the invasive species, in order to tell the story in one sentence: Alien Invaders are a form of Biological Pollution;, as Strangers in Paradise and Life out of Bounds, they have become America’s Least Wanted.”
“Around the world, invasive species are the second-ranking cause of extinction of native species, after the destruction of habitats by human activity. In the long term they are slowly changing the biological quality of our planet. Because we have had only limited success in controlling them, we are let in most cases with no choice except to wait them out […].”
“In the long term the most insidious impact of the rising alien tide is the homogenization of the Earth’s ecosystems.”
6. Two Magnificent Animals
The Wolverine
“…it is one of Earth’s smallest top-tier predators. It can chase cougars and wolf packs away from downed prey, and drag carcasses three times its own weight.”
“a predator’s retractable claws”
“The American naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton wrote of this species in 1908:
Picture a weasel – and most of us can do that, for we have met that little demon of destruction, that small atom of insensitive courage, that symbol of slaughter, sleeplessness, and tireless, incredible activity – picture that scrap of demoniac fury, multiply that mite fifty times, and you have the likeness of a wolverine.”
“Its savage demeanor is not, however, why I want to avoid the wolverine. The reason is that I find Gulogulo the embodiment of wildness, and I know there will still be untrammeled habitats on Earth if wolverines still roam there.”
“The incident illustrates what has been called the Grizzly Bear Effect of environmental ethics. We may never personally glimpse certain rare animals – wolves, ivory-billed woodpeckers, pandas, gorillas, giant squid, great white sharks, and grizzlies come to mind – but we need them as symbols. They proclaim the mystery of the world. They are the jewels in the crown of Creation. Just to know they are out there alive and well is important to the spirit, to the wholeness of our lives.”
The Pitchfork Ant
“…ants belonging to the genus Thaumatomyrmex. […] The genus comprises a dozen species distributed across different parts of the New World tropics. They are the rarest ants in the world, or close to it.”
“Thaumatomyrmex colonies are tiny, comprising at most ten or twenty members that hide in unformed nests within pieces of decaying wood on the tropical forest floors.”
“The fame of Thaumatomyrmex among the ant cognoscenti arises not from their scarcity, however, but from their bizarre anatomy. Their heads are completely unlike those of any other of the known species of ants: short concave in front, and bearing enormous jaws shaped like pitchforks. The teeth, or tines of the pitchfork, are sometimes so elongate that when the mandibles are closed, the largest pair curve all around the opposite side of the head and stick out behind its posterior rim.”
“I then published an appeal in Notes from Underground, the ant biologists’ newsletter. There are, I wrote, sever things I want most to know about ants before going up to that Great Gainforest in the Sky. One of the mysteries I needed to have solved for peace of mind is what Thaumatomyrmex does with its pitchfork mandibles.”
“Thaumatomyrmex is a specialized predator on polyxenid millipedes. Most millipedes […] are covered by hard chitinous armor plates that shield them from attacks by ants and other enemies. Polyxenids have soft skins and are protected instead by a dense coat of long bristles. They are the porcupines of the millipede world. The Thaumatomyrmex foragers are porcupine huntresses. They slip the tines of their pitchfork jaws through the bristles, pierce the bodies of the polyxenids, and carry them home. There they scrape off the bristles with specialized brushes on their forefeet, rather like farmers plucking chickens.”
The Greatest Heritage
“For professional and serious amateur naturalists alike, there are countless wonders like those inherent in wolverines and the Thaumatomyrmex ants. They range in scientific importance from minor to paradigm breaking […].”
7. Wild Nature and Human Nature
“Our relationship to Nature is primal. The emotions it evokes arose during the forgotten prehistory of mankind, and hence are deep and shadowed. Like childhood experiences lost from conscious memory, they are commonly felt but rarely articulated.”
“The gravitational pull of Nature on the human psyche can be expressed in a single, more contemporary expression, biophilia, which I defined in 1984 as the innate tendency to affiliate with life and lifelike processes.”
“Nowadays the word ‘extraterrestrial’ summons in ultimate manner the countless images of still unexplored life, replacing the old and once potent ‘exotic’, which drew earlier travelers to unnamed islands and remote jungles.”
“The affiliation has a moral consequence: the more we come to understand other life forms, the more our learning expands to include their vast diversity, and the greater the value we will place on them and, inevitably, on ourselves.”
“Two new academic disciplines have emerged that address the twin subjects of biophilia and conservation in a systematic manner. Environmental psychology covers all aspects of the relation of human mental development to the environment. Conservation psychology in turn focuses on the many facets of biophilia in order to help design the most effective conservation procedures for natural environments and species.”
“It is in human mental development that the perceptions of living Nature and human nature unite, as well as science and the religious experience.”
“What precisely, then, is human nature? […] It is not the cultural universals, such as incest taboos, rites of passage, and creation myths. Those are the products of human nature. Rather, human nature is the hereditary rules of mental development. […] They are manifested as biases in the way our senses perceive the world. They appear as the properties of language and symbolic coding by which we represent the world.”
“In sharp contrast to their inborn sensitivity to ancient perils, people are far less prone to acquire fear of […] dangerous objects of everyday modern life. The reason for the difference, scientists believe, is insufficient time for the evolving species to hardwire reactions in the brain to these newer threats.”
“Researchers have found that when people of different cultures […] are given freedom to select the setting of their homes and work places, they prefer an environment that combines three features. They wish to live on a height looking down and out, to san a parkland with scattered trees and copses spread before them, closer in appearance to a savanna than to either a grassland or a closed forest, and to be near a body of water […].”
“Subjects in choice tests prefer their habitation to be a retreat, with a wall, cliff, or something else sold to the rear. They want a view of fruitful terrain in front of the retreat. They like large animals scattered thereabout, either wild or domestic. Finally, they favour trees with low horizontal branches and divided leaves. It is probably not a coincidence that some people, I among them, consider the Japanese maple the world’s most beautiful tree.
These quirks of human nature do not prove but are at least consistent with the savanna hypothesis of human evolution.”
“Returning to Homo sapiens, it would be quite extraordinary to find that all the rules of learning bias related to he ancestral world have been erased during the past several thousand years. The human brain is not and never was a blank slate.”
“…a view of natural environments, especially parklands and savannas, generally leads to a decline in moods of fear and anger, and it generates an overall feeling of tranquility. In one study, postsurgical patients […] reported less need for pain and anxiety medication […]. […] prisoners in cells […] lower sick-call rate […] business employees reported fewer feelings of stress and greater job satisfaction […].”
“During fifteen years of records of patient attacks on wall art, all were directed at abstract paintings, none expended on literalist representations of nature.”
* EOWilson, The Creation
Is artificial light at night (LAN) the "new" DDT?
Date: 2009-05-11 11:18 pm (UTC)