By the ordinary standards of natural science, the evidence for biophilia remains thin, and most of the underlying theory of its genetic origin is highly speculative. Still, the logic leading to the idea is sound, and the subject is too important to neglect. In 1992 a conference of biologists, psychologists, and other scholars meeting at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, reported and evaluated a great deal of ongoing research. Some of it was experimental, consistent with earlier data, and persuasive.*
In my opinion, the most important implication of an innate biophilia is the foundation it lays for an enduring conservation ethic. If a concern for the rest of life is part of human nature, if part of our culture flows from wild nature, then on that basis alone it is fundamentally wrong to extinguish other life forms. Nature is part of us, as we are part of Nature.
Biophilia is the most recent of my syntheses, joining the ideas that have been most consistently attractive to me for most of my life. My truths, three in number, are the following: first, humanity is ultimately the product of biological evolution; second, the diversity of life is the cradle and greatest natural heritage of the human species; and third, philosophy and religion make little sense without taking into account these first two conceptions.
In this memoir I have described, for myself and for you, how I arrived at this naturalistic view of the world. Although the tributary sources extend far back in memory, they still grip my imagination, as I write, in my sixty-sixth year. I am reluctant to throw away these precious images of my childhood and young manhood. I guard them carefully as the wellsprings of my creative life, refining and overlaying their productions constantly. When obedient to the rules of replicable evidence, the knowledge obtained is what I have called science.
The images created a gravitational force that pulled my career round and round through epicycles of research. They still define me as a scientist. In my heart I will be an explorer naturalist until I die. I do not think that conception overly romantic or unrealistic. Perhaps the wildernesses of popular imagination no longer exist. Perhaps very soon every square kilometer of the land will have been traversed by someone on foot. I know that the Amazon headwaters, New Guinea Highlands, and Antarctica have become tourist stops. But there is nonetheless real substance in my fantasy of an endless new world. The great majority of species of organisms—possibly in excess of 90 percent—remain unknown to science. They live out there somewhere, still untouched, lacking even a name, waiting for their Linnaeus, their Darwin, their Pasteur. The greatest numbers are in remote parts of the tropics, but many also exist close to the cities of industrialized countries. Earth, in the dazzling variety of its life, is still a little-known planet.
The key to taking the measure of biodiversity lies in a downward adjustment of scale. The smaller the organism, the broader the frontier and the deeper the unmapped terrain. Conventional wildernesses of the overland trek may indeed be gone. Most of Earth’s largest species—mammals, birds, and trees—have been seen and documented. But microwildernesses exist in a handful of soil or aqueous silt collected almost anywhere in the world. They at least are close to a pristine state and still unvisited. Bacteria, protistans, nematodes, mites, and other minute creatures swarm around us, an animate matrix that binds Earth’s surface. They are objects of potentially endless study and admiration, if we are willing to sweep our vision down from the world lined by the horizon to include the world an arm’s length away. A lifetime can be spent in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree.
If I could do it all over again, and relive my vision in the twenty-first century, I would be a microbial ecologist. Ten billion bacteria live in a gram of ordinary soil, a mere pinch held between thumb and forefinger. They represent thousands of species, almost none of which are known to science. Into that world I would go with the aid of modern microscopy and molecular analysis. I would cut my way through clonal forests sprawled across grains of sand, travel in an imagined submarine through drops of water proportionately the size of lakes, and track predators and prey in order to discover new life ways and alien food webs. All this, and I need venture no farther than ten paces outside my laboratory building. The jaguars, ants, and orchids would still occupy distant forests in all their splendor, but now they would be joined by an even stranger and vastly more complex living world virtually without end. For one more turn around I would keep alive the little boy of Paradise Beach who found wonder in a scyphozoan jellyfish and a barely glimpsed monster of the deep.
*“Resolutions for the 80s,” Harvard Magazine, January-February 1980, pp. 22–26.
*In Issues in Science and Technology 2(1) (Fall 1985)120–29.
*“The Column: Harvard University Press,” New York Times Book Review, January 14, 1979, p. 43·
*The proceedings of the conference were published as The Biophilia Hypothesis, ed. Stephen R. Kellert and E. O. Wilson (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993).
afterword
FOR EACH OF US, INBORN PROPENSITIES OF TEMPERAMENT AND talent screen childhood experience and weave the pattern of the adult mind. Through the twists and turns of my own development, I ended up a naturalist and made the practical decision to earn my living by research and teaching. Since then I have had many adventures, both those faithfully described in Naturalist and others, but none have altered me at the core. While more competent and cautious perhaps, and mercifully less roiled by passions, I remain the boy I was when my love of nature was awakened and the world beguiled me into thinking I could make something of my life.
For six decades, through my college student years and my later professional life, I have dwelled in basic science, and in particular my natural habitat of systematics, biogeography, evolutionary theory, ecology, and sociobiology, which all together I like to think of as scientific natural history. Halfway through this career I added nonfiction writing, because I had a talent for it, because well-wrought English prose had always inspired me, more even than music, and because I remained haunted by the cadences of the King James Bible and evangelical sermons of my childhood. A Southern writer had lived inside the biologist, growing impatient for release.
Would I have been as fulfilled had I taken up creative writing in college and only later turned to science for material? Perhaps, but I doubt it. I am now convinced that it is better to work from science into literature than to try the reverse, although many have done so with distinction. To understand the scientific culture deeply and, even more, to express the emotions that attend scientific exploration require that the writer inhabit science for a substantial part of his life, intent upon making important discoveries and placing them within the canon.
In the early 1970s I was summoned by a third altar call, so to speak. Earth’s biodiversity, the Creation, which even as a secularist I regard with a spiritual reverence, is disappearing. Countless millions of years of evolution are being wiped out by the ignorant excesses of humankind. Biologists who most understand biodiversity and the causes of its peril should of all people, I felt, step forward in order to help save it.
In July 1994, the year Naturalist appeared, I was appointed Pellegrino University Professor, one of only fifteen university-wide professorships at Harvard University, intended to provide maximum latitude in teaching, although in fact I continued very much the same activities as before. I retired three years later, at the age of sixty-eight, in order to end teaching and administrative duties completely. I didn’t have to quit: Harvard’s mandatory age cap had been lifted by federal mandate. My wish was to turn more fully to research and writing, as well as to conservation activism. But, I confess, a deeper, more emotional reason for retiring was to shed a burden I had felt too long, that of juggling research and teaching in an effort to reach at least satisfactory achievement in both. A few years thereafter, at the 2004 spring commencement, I was awarded an honorary doctorate, a rare honor at Harvard, which grants only one such degree to a superannuated member of its own faculty on average every year or two. Because I had struggled much at this university, I
felt deeply gratified by the double shoulder sword-touch.
Upon retirement, I was able to tip the balance toward research without dereliction of other duties and to intensify my efforts in global biodiversity conservation. Having served on the boards of The Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund, and as a chief advisor to the New York Botanical Garden, I now focused my efforts on Conservation International, the youngest and in my view the most innovative member of the global conservation community. I was especially attracted by the two relatively young leaders of this organization: Russell Mittermeier, a distinguished conservation biologist and primate expert of seemingly infinite energy, and Peter Seligmann, a genius at organizing such an enterprise, articulating a compelling vision of conservation thereby, and not least, fund-raising. Conservation International has pioneered in finding new ways to establish and secure reserves in tropical, biodiversity-rich countries while promoting economic development in the surrounding regions.
All of the global conservation organizations seek for their boards of directors leaders in business and the professions, as well as conservation experts and independently wealthy enthusiasts. CI has been notably successful in its recruitment efforts, managing at one time or another to attract, for example, the heads of Ford Motor Company, Gap, Intel, Starbucks, and Wal-Mart. Environmental purists undoubtedly would be dismayed by such a roster, but I have learned that there is no intrinsic antagonism between corporate and environmental leaders. Granted, corporations exist whose policies and leaders are wicked, or at least indifferent, but others are committed to protecting the environment and devote substantial time and money with minimal fanfare. If you want to save a tract of rain forest in Guyana, Liberia, or some other fractious developing country, it is often better to have such a person at your side than a diplomat or a professional environmentalist.
At Conservation International I served as a chairman of the Program Committee and as advisor in the founding of CI’s Center for Applied Biodiversity Science. The latter organization, aided by gifts totaling hundreds of millions of dollars from Gordon Moore, cofounder of Intel and chairman of the CI board, became the premier conservation-oriented research organization in the world.
Elsewhere, as an author and lecturer I tried to articulate the scientific argument for biodiversity conservation. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998), which makes the case for a return to the Enlightenment, closes with the chapter “To What End?”—meaning the ultimate goals of our species as a whole. The answer I suggested, and later spelled out at book length in The Future of Life (2002), is to bring humanity through the current bottleneck of overpopulation and rising per capita consumption in a manner that raises the quality of life for all, while ferrying through as much of the rest of life as science, technology, and an informed ethics make possible. A smaller, highly educated world population could, if supported cost-free by an independent, biologically rich natural world, turn Earth into a near-perfect habitat for humanity.
In 2005, I sent to press a new book tentatively entitled The Creation. Drawing on my own Southern Baptist upbringing for style and authenticity, I make the case that science and religion, the two most powerful social forces in the world, need to form an alliance in order to save Earth’s biodiversity. All of life, I remind my hoped-for religious friends, is the living Creation of Judeo-Christian sacred scripture. I press this appeal as a scientific humanist, with no argument from anything but our scientific knowledge of the state of the living environment and a rationalist argument to save the variety of life. I believe that this worldview can be annealed to that based on religious faith. Let us put aside our metaphysical differences, I say, and focus on a clearly defined issue that deeply concerns us all.
In addressing the issues of global conservation, I myself have focused in recent years on one particular major gap in scientific knowledge. The amazing fact is that we have discovered and analyzed only a small fraction of Earth’s biodiversity. We lack a fully solid foundation for conservation science. As many as 90 percent of the species of organisms, mostly small invertebrates, protistans, and bacteria but also including even a few birds and mammals, remain unknown, hence with neither a diagnosis nor a scientific name. We have characterized about 180,000 of the flowering plants identified thus far out of a likely 230,000 species still living, as well as a large majority of land vertebrates (amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals), enough to advance conservation science and practices. But of the “little things that run the world,” whose roles in maintaining healthy ecosystems are also crucial to our existence, we still know shockingly little. While the United States continues to spend billions to explore the rest of the solar system, the annual amount invested by public and private sources in the discovery and classification of biodiversity stays close to $200 million.
This stingy level of support has reduced taxonomy, the foundational discipline of biodiversity, to penury in comparison with the status of other biological disciplines. Many important groups of insects and other invertebrate animals, representing a large majority of known species, are addressed by no more than a dozen specialists, who tend to be aging and underpaid. In presentations and talks, I set out to put the following question before the public with some urgency: Why devote so much funding and attention to mapping the heavens, but so little to the home planet?
Since 2000, I have been pressing the issue to scientists and public analysts in other ways. I became principal advisor to the All Species Foundation, newly created to promote the completion of the world biodiversity survey. In the fall of 2001, I chaired a meeting of leaders in projects of this kind at the continental and global levels, sponsored by Harvard and Conservation International. We unanimously agreed that with funding at the level of the Human Genome Project, biologists could mostly complete the mapping of Earth’s biodiversity within twenty-five years, in other words, a human generation. Both of these efforts have attracted a lot of favorable attention but little funding. At the beginning of the new century, plagued by terrorism and an economic recession, government and foundations have had other priorities.
Those of us arguing for the renaissance and public appreciation of biodiversity mapping have been hampered further by a common misconception, widespread within science itself, that taxonomy is just biological stamp collecting and not a serious part of modern biology. That is dangerously wrong. The foundational knowledge of ecology, the database of studies on biogeography and evolution, the substance of the tree of life over evolutionary time, the source of knowledge needed to save biodiversity in its entirety, all these great endeavors of biology depend upon a full taxonomy of the global fauna and flora.
In my inward struggle to frame concisely the reasons for the taxonomic mapping effort, I realized that the argument needed to be expressed as a concrete goal with a timetable for its completion, and in a manner that would make its significance obvious. The goal, I believe, should take the form of an electronic Encyclopedia of Life in which the species already known, now approaching 2 million in number, and, as they are found, the millions remaining to be discovered, would each have a page. The page would be indefinitely expandable and contain everything known about the species, including links to other databases, offering information ranging from its genome to its ecosystems function and, not least, its importance for humanity. The idea has been appealing enough to be adopted as a program of the U.S. National Museum of Natural History.
As taxonomists have soldiered on through the dark valley of their subject’s neglect, a common complaint heard is that complete global mapping is too big a project to undertake. Not at all, I’ve contended, and to support my argument, I can point to a recent effort of my own: mastering the classification of Pheidole, the world’s largest ant genus. There are so many species in this genus, spread out in warm climates around the world, that no one had ever attempted to sort and classify them. Pheidole species are also among the most abundant of all insects and hence are important ecological agents on the land. In trying to make sense of
them, ecologists had been forced to designate the species with numbers—for example, Pheidole species 1, Pheidole species 2, and so on, up to as many as Pheidole species 50 from single locations. This procedure offers no hope of collating information from different localities without consulting the original voucher specimens placed in museum collections. Pheidole, the Mount Everest of ant taxonomy, had to be conquered.
In 1985 I set out to “climb” Pheidole for the New World, the center of its diversity. I had at my disposal in Harvard’s ant collection (the world’s largest) tens of thousands of specimens, collected by myself and others. I had all the necessary literature on the genus, much of it dating to the nineteenth century, and I managed to borrow and hold at Harvard almost all of the type specimens, on which the Latinized scientific names of previously described species had been based.
I worked on and off at odd times in my home laboratory, slowly threading my way through the museum collection while listening to classical and soft rock music. It was my version of knitting—relaxing and never boring, always edifying, and often exciting as I hit upon a species new to science. By 2001, after making about 6,000 measurements to an accuracy of 0.02 millimeter and more than 5,000 line drawings by my own hand, I came to the end. I had separated and diagnosed 624 species, including 337 new to science, which at that time composed 19 percent of all the known ant species of the Western Hemisphere and 6 percent of all the ant species of the world. My results, including analyses of the evolution of the genus and all that was known of the biology of each species, was published in 2003 in a 794-page book, Pheidole in the New World: A Dominant, Hyperdiverse Ant Genus.
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