E.O. Wilson Wants Us to Leave Half of the Earth Alone

E.O. Wilson Wants Us to Leave Half of the Earth AloneHere's WhyThis is a good profile of E.O. Wilson and he talks about his new book due out in March 2016, tentatively titled, Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life.In my opinion, Wilson is one of our greatest living scientists and one of the greatest scientist/communicators of all time.

I like the thesis of his new work. But Wilson's name will always be tainted by association with Sociobiology for me.

Well, "tainted" seems a bit harsh to me considering the amount of work he has done that is unrelated.

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But much of the confusion has come from a simple misunderstanding of the content of sociobiology. Sociobiology is defined as the systematic study of the biological basis of all forms of social behavior, including sexual and parental behavior, in all kinds of organisms including humans. As such, it is a discipline an inevitable discipline, since there must be a systematic study of social behavior. Sociobiology consists mostly of zoology. About 90 percent of its current material concerns animals, even though over 90 percent of the attention given to sociobiology by nonscientists, and especially journalists, is due to its possible applications to the study of human social behavior. There is nothing unusual about deriving principles and methods, and even terminology, from intensive examinations of lower organisms and applying them to the study of human beings. Most of the fundamental principles of genetics and biochemistry applied to human biology are based on colon bacteria, fruit flies, and white rats. To say that the same science can be applied to human beings is not to reduce humanity to the status of these simpler creatures.

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from: What is Sociobiology, by E. O. Wilson, In: Michael S. Gregory, Anita Silvers, and Diane Sutch (eds.) [1978] Sociobiology and Human Nature: An Interdisciplinary Critique and Defense. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, pp. 1-12.

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Half-Earth is his answer to the disaster at hand: a reimagined world in which humans retreat to areas comprising one half of the planet’s landmass. 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.

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O give me a home where the unicorns roam....

Wilson's heart is in the right place, but mankind is not going to stop.The 6th extinction will continue.He has made a magnificent attempt to catalog the life on the planet before it disappears.
He raised more than $5 million to start the Encyclopedia of Life.I have contributed some images to EOL myself.

We can't help it, it's in our genes.

Then the answer is for us to get rid of the humans. Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

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But, small, filthy, unwinged,
You will soon be crouching

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Alone, with maybe some dim racial notion
Of being the last, but none of how much
Your unnoticed going will mean:
How much the timid poem needs

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The mindless explosion of your rage,

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The glutton’s internal fire the elk’s
Heart in the belly, sprouting wings,

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The pact of the blind swallowing
Thing, with himself, to eat
The world, and not to be driven off it
Until it is gone, even if it takes

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Forever. I take you as you are

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And make of you what I will,
Skunk-bear, carcajoy, bloodthirsty

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Non-survivor.

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Lord, let me die but not die

Out.

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James Dickey, from For the Last Wolverine

What would really fuck us over is if we overreacted to a minor ecological scare by wasting all our resources trying to stave off a small amount of global warming, or save a few random species, or preserve some percentage of the Earth's wilderness while leaving billions of Third-World residents forever mired in poverty, famine, disease, and death and perhaps dooming the First World to that same fate.Our goal should be sustainability and stewardshipof our surroundings, but also of ourselves.Edited by Jon, : No reason given.Edited by Jon, : No reason given.Edited by Jon, : No reason given.

Some people think things like the endangered species list and all these ecological and conservation cries are about trying to save, as you say, a few random species. They give short shrift to the fabric that is the ecosystem and have no appreciation for the complex interconnectedness of all of its lifeforms. And this minor ecological scare is known by an overwhelming consensus of knowledgeable scientists in their disciplines as a major environmental shift just like extinctions in the past but happening much more rapidly than this planet has ever before experienced. These concerns and the efforts to abate them are not about some snail darters or southern river otters or a few cherry-throated tanagers. They are about saving homo imbecile sapiens.The attitude you display here has been prevalent for nearly a century now and is only slowly changing as the political and social powers begin to realize what really is at stake here. I applaud your concerns for the third-world residents forever mired in poverty, famine, disease, and death. Just so you know, by not wasting some of our resources trying to stave off the disaster we are already in, these poor lives are about to become dramatically worse along with those of us in the first-world. Worse still, whether we change our policies or not, we may already be too late.The point in the panel in my message is that, in the long run, none of this matters. If we continue to destroy our ecosystem, random species by random species, and continue blowing toxic wastes like CO² into our environment homo imbecile sapiens will become extinct. If we happen to take all mammalia and a couple hundred thousand other species along with us I don’t think Mother Gaia will be the least bit bothered. Two million years from now, just a blink in actual Earth time, no one will even notice, let alone care. Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

You should read Cool It.Lomborg's taken plenty of flack for his views, and while his book is no masterpiece, he has a point with many of the things he says. And the spirit behind his argument, that we should be using our resources to improve people's lives as best we can instead of easing our conscience about the environment, is not off the mark.The Third World (and until recently the rest of it as well) has always been mired in poverty, famine, disease, and death. It was only recently that the trend began changing for the better in certain parts of the world, and that change was only possible through the environmental alteration now being complained about. Other parts of the world have not yet reached our point of development and there is no realistic way for them to even come close to doing so without engaging in similar degrees of environmental alteration.It is the mark of our great wealth that we in the First World can worry about minor changes in the environment and spend millions of dollars saving critters in foreign lands while people in those same lands worry where their next meal will come from or whether this fever will be the fever that finally claims the life of one of their children.The tragedy is our delusion that spending resources averting a little warming or saving a few endangered species will matter as much to our fellow less-fortunate humans as it does to us, especially when all the evidence tells us that folks were as poor, as hungry, as sick, and as dead before it started getting hot, and before critters started dying.I think our resources could be better spent growing more food (which involves cutting down trees, running tractors, applying fertilizers), providing more healthcare (which might involve spraying dangerous chemicals to control disease-carrying insects, or pumping out even more petroleum-derived plastics for hospitals and clinics), generating income in the third world (building industries that may be highly destructive of their environments), and pretty much anything else besides keeping the planet exactly as it is now and trying to make sure it never changes.Edited by Jon, : No reason given.

Bjrn Lomborg? I tried but couldn’t get through his first piece of trash on the subject. His cherry-picked science was biased, his statistical analyses were sloppy at best, his economics was naive and his conclusions were unevidenced and downright illogical. I’ll get my evidence from knowledgeable scientists with credentials in their fields, not some political philosopher with reading problems and no math skills. Since we have quite a lot of these things already but lack the political will to equalize their distribution you are correct. Yes, sir. The best diet for losing weight is more potato chips and coke and more TV.Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

Who needs to lose weight? Half the world is starving to death.I think you need to get a grip on reality.While you sit in your armchair sipping your liquor and pouting about the loss of the rainforests, children in those same rainforests die in incredible numbers from disease, poverty and famine.Ask any man starving in Africa whether he'd prefer seeing the jungles ploughed over and planted with food or the Earth not get a couple degrees warmer.What do you think he'll say?Edited by Jon, : No reason given.

He'll say the analogy went in one ear and out the other without touching anything in between.No, the analogy really wasn't subtle in the least. Just lost.Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

Bjorn Lomborg is the most dishonest pseudo-scientist out there.
RealClimate: Bjrn Lomborg, just a scientist with a different opinion?