Bill Moyers Journal

by Bill Moyers

  E.O. WILSON

  When E.O. Wilson received the prestigious TED Prize award in 2007 (from notables in technology, entertainment, and design who gather every year to share ideas shaping the future), he made a plea on behalf of his “constituency ... a million trillion insects and other small creatures.” Without them, this world-renowned biologist told the audience, “the rest of life and humanity would mostly disappear ... in just a few months.” Specifically, Wilson called for an Encyclopedia of Life to be created for the Internet, with an everevolving page for every one of the 1.9 million known living species and those being discovered every day. Furthermore, he said, the Encyclopedia should be made available free to any and everyone, from trained biologists in the field or laboratory and curious first-graders in their classrooms. If such an ambitious proposal boggled the stratospheric IQs in the room, they didn’t reveal it. To the contrary, they set about to fulfill the vision of this genius of modern science, one of the world’s most influential theorists—“Darwin’s natural heir,” as he is often called. Within a year, the site was up and running, thanks to early support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. In the first six hours of operation, there were more than eleven million hits, overwhelming the computer servers. Check it out at www.eol.org, as I just did a few minutes before writing this, hopeful that I might find a photograph of the Megaloprepus caerulatus, the giant helicopter damselfly, as preparation for a visit from our youngest granddaughter. Sure enough, there it was, right on my screen.

  The Encyclopedia of Life owes its inspiration to Wilson’s childhood in Alabama. Blinded in one eye by a fishing accident when he was a boy, he focused his attention on ants and other insects, beginning a lifelong exploration into “the little things that run the world.” That boy grew up to be “the father of biodiversity” and win honors and acclaim galore, including two Pulitzer Prizes. He has now published his twenty-fifth book, Anthill: A Novel. Many of the characters are ants inhabiting large colonies and waging war in—where else?—rural Alabama. One more reminder of a child’s curiosity that proved the beginning of wisdom.

  —Bill Moyers

  You’ve wanted this Encyclopedia of Life for a long time.

  It’s always been a dream of mine, Bill, of classifying all the species and finding out what makes up the biosphere. We’re maybe today about one-tenth through the discovery of species.

  That’s all we know today, 10 percent of the existing species?

  Amazing, isn’t it? We live on an unexplored planet.

  I figured we had pretty well made the final census of everything that’s alive on earth.

  We have scarcely begun, but the Encyclopedia of Life allows you to go to your computer anywhere in the world and, on command, pull up ways to identify species if you have a plant or an insect you need to know about and find out everything that is known about it up to that time.

  Sort of a YouTube of bugs, insects, and fungi, right?

  A very distinguished scientist wrote me when I published an article on this several years ago saying that this was what we must do. And he said, literally, “Ed—what have you been smoking?”

  What will it mean for my five grandchildren?

  A lot. Consider how ignorant we are and what a difference it makes. We don’t know the great majority of the kinds of creatures living in most ponds or patches of woods that you would pick even around here. When we’re trying to stabilize the environment, trying to get sustainable development, trying to stop the ecosystem from collapsing in the face of global warming or whatever, we really need to know what’s in each one of those habitats. It’s like undertaking a medical examination but your doctor only knows ten percent of what’s inside you, in all of the organs. We need to move ecology way ahead of where it is today to really change things.

  I don’t know anyone who has added more to our understanding of earth’s ecology than you, Ed. As a thirteen-year-old boy, you discovered the very first fire ant colony in the United States. Right?

  In Mobile, Alabama. We lived five blocks from the dock area, so I caught one of the first colonies when it was multiplying. It belongs to a group of species of ants that are potentially serious pests.

  I think we both would probably still be living in the South if it weren’t for those infernal fire ants.

  That’s right. They come from Uruguay and they just keep spreading. Down South we refer to them as a “far ain’t.” That’s not dialect. It means they come from far away and they ain’t going home. Well, there are thousands and thousands of these species, and some of them really aren’t that funny.

  You’ve discovered hundreds of new species of ants from the Pacific Islands to the Caribbean. That’s a lot of anthills in one lifetime.

  Every kid has a bug period, and I never grew out of mine. I just started as most kids do, you know, catching bugs and frogs in bottles and so on.

  When your family moved north you carried your curiosity about nature with you. You settled in a place perfect for a budding naturalist.

  Washington, D.C. And providentially, we lived within walking distance of Rock Creek Park and the National Zoo. So a child’s interest in insects combined with the federal magnificence displaying the wonders of nature. And reading National Geographic was an inspiration to me. All those great pictures. They called beetles “the jewels of the jungle.” Butterflies were the “magnificent insects of the world,” and so on. I pored over that. And I said, “How can I be anything other than a naturalist?” That’s what I want to do all my life.

  I would have thought that, growing up in Mobile, you might have become a devotee of, what was it? The Lord God bird?

  Yes, if I had only known. The Lord God bird. Interesting name for that. That’s the ivory-billed woodpecker, as you well know.

  And people would say, “Lord God, what kind of bird is that?”

  That’s how it got the name.

  It wasn’t that common. There were some over in Louisiana near east Texas, where I grew up.

  Yes, at the Singer Tract. That’s where the last one was seen in 1944.

  The last one?

  It was a very sad story. The Singer Reserve had been cut over and the ivorybills just went down. And then finally there was just one left. A little boy would go and watch it until one day a storm came over there, and then he couldn’t see it anymore.

  But why should we care if the woodpecker goes? We don’t know how many species we’ve lost in the millennium.

  No, but how many species going extinct or becoming very rare do you think it takes before you see something happening? We now know from experiments and theory that the more species you take out of an ecosystem—like a pond, patch of forest, marine shallow environments—the more you take out, the less stable it becomes. If you have a tsunami or a severe drought or you have a fire, the less likely that ecosystem, that body of species in that particular environment, is going to come back all the way. It becomes less stable with fewer species, and we also know it becomes less productive. In other words, it’s not able to produce as many kilograms of new matter from photosynthesis and passage through the ecosystem. It’s less productive. It sure is less interesting, though, isn’t it? And more than that, we lose the services of these species, like pollination and water purification ...

  That we get from nature free of charge.

  Here’s an easy way to remember it. We get from nature, so long as we don’t screw it up and destroy it, approximately the same amount of services, as far as you can measure them, in dollars as we ourselves produce each year. It’s about $30 trillion a year. These creatures have built in them, in their genes and then in their physiology, an endless array of defenses, many of which we could use and have used, like producing antibiotics we never heard of using, chemicals that we never even dreamed existed. So we have already benefited immensely from wild species in that way. But let me get to the bottom line as far as I’m concerned. Isn’t it morally wrong to destroy the rest of life, you
know, in any way you look at it, considering what it’s going to do to human spirit and aesthetics?

  Are we destroying it?

  Yes, we are. If we do not abate the various changes we’re causing—climate, habitat destruction, the continuing pollution of major river systems and so on—we will, by the end of the century, lose or have right at the brink of extinction about half the species of plants and animals in the world, certainly on the land.

  Hold on: half of what we have now will be gone by the end of the twenty-first century?

  If we don’t do something, yes.

  You use the metaphor of a giant meteorite. You say we human beings are a giant meteorite, the biggest and most damaging the earth has ever known.

  It now is pretty well established that 65 million years ago, the earth was struck by an unusually large meteorite, off the coast of what is now Yucatán. And even though it may have only been about ten kilometers across, when it struck the world its power caused gigantic tsunamis over a large part of the world. It rang the earth’s surface like a bell. Volcanic eruptions occurred, clouds formed over the earth that knocked out the sun and greatly reduced photosynthesis. A majority of species of plants and animals died. And among the groups that died out finally and conclusively at that time were the dinosaurs. If we don’t take care of the living environment, by the end of this century we’re going to be getting pretty close to the impact of that big meteorite 65 million years ago.

  How would that change life on earth?

  Well, we’d just live in an impoverished environment. It’d be a lot tougher. We wouldn’t have as many pollinators, we wouldn’t have as many future crops and genes to feed ourselves. We wouldn’t have the same kind of security given to us free in terms of water management. All sorts of things would happen in the most practical way. It should be a horror to people.

  Are you telling me you actually think we could obliterate nature?

  Yes. And did you know that there are people actually saying that’ll be a good thing?

  Why?

  Because they think that it’s the fate of humanity to go on humanizing the planet, turning this planet literally into Spaceship Earth. In other words—

  Live in a synthetic ecosystem.

  Yes, that’s right. Or people who say, “Well, let’s keep on going the way we’re going. Let’s use up the earth. And by that time, our smart scientists ...” Trust me, I’m a scientist, none of us could be that smart. But they figure that by that time, maybe we can make it to the next planet, terraform it, you know? Turn it into an earthlike place and so forth. Dream on. This is crazy. This is the only planet we’re ever going to have. This planet has taken hundreds of millions of years to create this beautiful natural environment we have that’s taken care of us so well, that is, in fact, our greatest natural heritage. And we’re throwing it away in a matter of a few decades.

  But what is the serious response to the argument that, “Look, we human beings have always adapted to severe environmental change. Some come, some go. The Mayans are gone. The Sumerians are gone. The Aztecs are gone. Others have survived”?

  Yes, but consider this. The common response is, “Well, evolution always provided new species.” The problem with that is the birth rate of species is going down, because we’re destroying the cradles in which new species are born, the natural environment. What difference does it make? Well, if humanity as a whole decided that it wants to live in a world where we give away this great heritage and all of this mystery and beauty and complexity that we haven’t even begun to explore, I guess if that’s what people want, that’s what they’re going to get. But I have more faith in human beings’ intelligence and taste than that.

  It can be argued that civilization was purchased by the subversion of nature.

  It was, and that’s why we destroyed so much already. When the agricultural revolution began, as you know, about ten thousand years ago, we went from a hunter-gatherer existence where we were more or less in balance—we weren’t wiping out species at any great rate—to one in which we began to turn natural environments, particularly forests and the grasslands, into agricultural fields. That proceeded to an extent that it formed the economic basis for great human population growth and for the evolution of civilization. And who can say that that’s not a good? It’s just that it took a million years for humanity coming through these early stages struggling to survive in nature to finally learn how to displace nature. We did that ten thousand years ago, and we’re continuing to displace it. Now we realize that we’ve got to put on the brakes and bring this to a halt. Otherwise we’re going to be down many of the natural ecosystems in the world, the most beautiful ones. And we’re not stopping. We’re going to be through the whole bit of it in many parts of the world unless we do something. We’re near the end of nature in many parts of the world.

  The end of nature?

  I mean the end of a large part of the rest of life on the planet.

  Can’t life survive without us?

  Oh, it would do wonderfully well without us.

  Nature was doing a pretty good job before we arrived, right?

  Wonderfully well.

  So where did this idea come from that we’re the crown jewel of creation?

  In one sense I sort of think we are. That is to say, we are the brain of the biosphere. We are the ones that finally, after 4.5 billion years of evolution, actually developed enough reasoning power to see what’s happening, to understand the history that created us, and to realize almost too late what we’re doing. We are something new under the sun and on the earth. We’re the ones that can destroy the world. No other single species ever had anything like that power. And we also have the knowledge to avoid doing it. It’s sort of a race to the finish line that we will develop the intelligence and the policies and the decency to bring it to a halt not just for life itself but for future generations before the juggernaut takes us over.

  Give me your capsule analysis of why we are so rapidly escalating the destructive impact of our behavior. What’s going on?

  It’s mainly that we’re just the kind of reckless, ignorant, uncaring species we’ve been up till now that’s doing the damage. We’re still increasing in numbers. We’re at 6.5 billion. However, we’re slowing.

  The prediction is that when we reach nine billion we’ll begin to—

  Yeah, we’ll peak. Nine billion is 40 percent more than what we have now. I think we can handle that. That right now is a serious problem. It’s not the big problem. The big problem is consumption. Rising per capita consumption around the world. So this is why the world has got to have a green revolution.

  And that means—

  I mean, let’s keep on improving our quality of life, but let’s figure out—and we’ve got the brains to do it—how to keep the economy growing and the quality of life improving with fewer and fewer materials and less and less fossil-based or nonrenewable sources of energy. It’s as simple as that.

  You’re putting your hope in new technology?

  I’m putting my hope primarily in human common sense. I like what Abba Eban once said during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. He said when all else fails, men turn to reason. I think we are at the stage now that we are ready to turn to reason, especially if we can only persuade the leadership of the strongest and wealthiest country in the world to gain this understanding, then the technology will become relatively easy. That is, to go green and put less of what we call our ecological footprint onto the world. We’ll ease up on the rest of the world and become sustainable and allow the rest of life to survive and come through. I like to call it the bottleneck. Come through the bottleneck we’re in now. If we use our head, we’ll come out the other end with the kind of improved lives that we all dream of and bring as much of the rest of life with us as possible. That’s why I say what we’re doing now, if we don’t stop it, is the folly for which our descendants will least likely forgive us. Two hundred years from now, they’ll say, “What did they think they were doing?”
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  Why do so many smart people remain passive in the face of the destruction of the conditions for survival?

  I wish you would tell me.

  I’m a journalist. I ask the questions, Ed. You’re a scientist. You find out the answers.

  If I knew, I would figure out better ways of persuasion.

  What would the stewardship of the earth mean to each of us personally? If I said, “I’m going to take my share of the responsibility,” what would that require of me? I think most people want to do something. They want to know what to do.

  It can be just being locally active in saving a woodland along a nearby river or regionally allying yourself with a department of the environment, or one of the conservation organizations working locally to ensure that a certain biologically rich area or wetland is set aside as a park and a reserve rather than being turned over to developers. But let me tell you one that I think most might know. We desperately need leadership that works off of what we have learned through science, that has produced a consensus about what is happening to the earth’s environment, including the living creation. Leadership that sees the potential in it and not just the need in it and gives, in this country especially, the kind of vision of a future that we can work toward as a people.

  There is a bias at the moment against science—that it disrupts our religious belief or diminishes our economic growth—you know, the bias against climate science.

  Both based upon misconceptions. A greening of America means new markets, new ways of developing resources, new technologies, new directions, new areas of education, training, and on. As far as the economy is concerned, that’s a no-brainer. As far as religion is concerned, I have a very different view from what many scientists and environmentalists have of the religious community. I grew up as a Southern Baptist.

  You answered the altar call. You were baptized.

  I did. And I grew up in one of the reddest of the red states. I have the highest respect for folks who are called fundamentalists. I like them. I think they’re highly intelligent, and a large percentage of them are highly educated. So it’s always occurred to me that the schism between scientists, who are mostly liberal and nonbelievers, and the great majority of Americans, more than 75 percent of who could be called religious, to some extent might be an artifact.