A Humbling Message of Ants and Men
HARVARD’S EDWARD O. WILSON IS A WORLD-RENOWNED AUTHORITY on the variety of living organisms occupying the planet, an expertise based on a lifetime consumed with collecting and studying ants. Wilson’s book Naturalist is an autobiography that informs us of how the wonders of the natural world became the formative focus of his childhood and persist as the source of his creativity and environmental activism. He emphasizes that nature has been the wellspring of our biological and social origins, provides the biophysical underpinnings of our lives, and inspires us with wonder and endless mysteries to ponder.
Wilson’s story raises questions about our rush to lure students into science by stocking schools with expensive, glitzy interactive CD-ROMs and computers. The hi-tech machines carry an implicit worship of human technology and ingenuity, at whose altar much of the global environment has been sacrificed.
Wilson grew up in the Deep South during the Depression, a shy child whose parents divorced when he was seven. Yet his lost family life was compensated for by the education he received in the swamps of Alabama and on the coastal beaches of Florida. The very first memory he recounts is of a scyphozoan, a giant jellyfish, in the Gulf of Mexico. Like that of many scientists, Wilson’s research career grew out of his childhood fascination with nature. “A child comes to the edge of deep water with a mind prepared for wonder. He is like a primitive adult of long ago, an acquisitive early Homo.… [H]e is given a compelling image that will serve in later life as a talisman, transmitting a powerful energy that directs the growth of experience and knowledge. He will add complicated details and context from his culture as he grows older. But the core image stays intact.”
These days, acclaimed educational TV programs like Sesame Street perpetuate an accelerating information-and-sensory assault that precludes time for reflection or contemplation. Time is priceless. As Wilson writes:
Adults forget the depths of languor into which the adolescent mind descends with ease. They are prone to undervalue the mental growth that occurs during daydreaming and aimless wandering. When I focused on the ponds and swamp lying before me, I abandoned all sense of time. Net in hand, khaki collecting satchel hung by a strap from my shoulder, I surveilled the edges of the ponds, poked shrubs and grass clumps, and occasionally waded out into shallow stretches of open water to stir the muddy bottom. Often I just sat for long periods scanning the pond edges and vegetation for the hint of a scaly coil, a telltale ripple on the water’s surface, the sound of an out-of-sight splash.
Sadly, opportunities to duplicate that kind of childhood experience have become increasingly rare as wilderness vanishes and more and more children grow up surrounded by a human-created environment of concrete, tarmac, and television. But even in the most developed urban areas, there is an opportunity to experience wild creatures. All we have to do is focus on the realm of the small: “They are everywhere, dark and ruddy specks that zigzag across the ground and down holes, milligram-weight inhabitants of an alien civilization who hide their daily rounds from our eyes. For over 50 million years, ants have been overwhelmingly dominant insects everywhere on the land outside the polar and alpine ice fields. By my estimate, between 1 and 10 million billion individuals are alive at any moment, all of them together weighing, to the nearest order of magnitude, as much as the totality of human beings.”
Then Wilson offers this humbling thought: “If we were to vanish today, the land environment would return to the fertile balance that existed before the human population explosion.… But if the ants were to disappear, tens of thousands of other plant and animal species would perish also, simplifying and weakening the land ecosystem almost everywhere.”
After a life spent reveling in the abundance and variety of Earth’s life-forms, Wilson has an urgent message:
We are bound to the rest of life in our ecology, our physiology, and even our spirit.… When the century began, people still thought of the planet as infinite in its bounty. The highest mountains were still unclimbed, the ocean depths never visited, and vast wildernesses stretched across the equatorial continents.… In one lifetime, exploding human populations have reduced wildernesses to threatened nature reserves. Ecosystems and species are vanishing at the fastest rate in 65 million years. Troubled by what we have wrought, we have begun to turn in our role from local conqueror to global steward.… [O]ur perception of the natural world as something distinct from human existence has thus also changed fundamentally.
Wilson has observed catastrophic changes in tropical forests since his first field trips to the forests of Cuba and New Guinea in the 1950s. Escalating human numbers, consumption, and pollution have altered the planet, and to Wilson, the most harmful consequence is a steep decline in biodiversity. Life’s rich multiplicity constantly cleanses air and water, replenishes the soil, and re-creates biological abundance. Once a species disappears, it can never be re-created. However, “if diversity is sustained in wild ecosystems, the biosphere can be recovered and used by future generations to any degree desired and with benefits literally beyond measure. To the extent it is diminished, humanity will be poorer for all generations to come.”
Wilson points out that the most frightening aspect of the current extinction crisis is the enormity of our ignorance of what we are losing. Although only about 1.4 million species have been named by scientists, estimates of their number range from 10 to 100 million, with 10 to 30 million the most common guess. There are only 69,000 known species of fungi out of an estimated 1.6 million. Arthropods (which include insects), the most abundant group of species, have at least 8 or 10 million members in tropical rain forests alone. There are also probably millions of invertebrates that live on and beneath the ground and the bottom of deep ocean trenches.
But of all organisms, the ones we know least may be bacteria, of which a mere 4,000 species are recognized worldwide. Wilson cites a study carried out in Norway that found between 4,000 and 5,000 species among some 10 billion individuals in a gram of forest soil. Almost all of the species had never been identified before. When the biologists looked at soil taken from a nearby estuary, they discovered another 4,000 to 5,000 species; most of them were different from the forest sample and also new to science.
By comparing the estimated rate of species loss today with the changes observed in the fossil record, Wilson concludes: “The number of species on Earth is being reduced by a rate of 1,000 to 10,000 times higher than existed in prehuman times.” The annual loss of about 1.8 percent of tropical rain forest, home to more than half of all species on Earth, extinguishes or endangers perhaps 0.5 percent of species. Wilson calculates that if there are 10 million species in these habitats, more than 50,000 species may vanish each year. This is a very conservative estimate that ignores the effects of pollution and of competing exotic species in different parts of the world.
Species relationships that evolved over millions of years are being wiped out in a geological blink of an eye. Wilson predicts, “Unchecked, 20 percent or more of the earth’s species will disappear or be consigned to early extinction during the next thirty years. From prehistory to the present time, humanity has probably already eliminated 10 or even 20 percent of the species.”
Extinction is a part of the evolutionary process. In the past, there have been episodes of mega-extinction, the most recent of which wiped out the dinosaurs. Wilson points out that there have been five major extinction spasms over the past 550 million years. On average, it took about 10 million years for evolution to restore the species abundance and diversity lost in each episode. So the catastrophic loss of a species taking place in a single lifetime will never be made up during our species’ existence.
I have heard it suggested that since human beings are a part of nature, whatever we do must also be regarded as “natural.” It therefore doesn’t matter if we instigate a wave of extinction. Wilson replies: “The vast material wealth offered by biodiversity is at risk. Wild species are an untapped source of new pharmaceuticals, crops, fibers, pulp, petroleum substitutes, and agents for the restoration of soil and water. This argument is demonstrably true … but it contains a dangerous practical flaw when relied upon exclusively. If species are to be judged by their potential material value, they can be priced, traded off against other sources of wealth, and—when the price is right—discarded. Yet who can judge the ultimate value of any particular species to humanity?”
I was a guest at a meditation session for cancer patients who had ridden a roller-coaster of hope and despair after chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery. Many spoke of “truly living” for the first time. Almost all made reference to the importance of “being in nature,” whether walking in a woods, strolling a beach, or resting on a farm or at the cottage.
Watch children respond to a wasp or butterfly. Infants seem drawn to an insect’s movement and color, often reaching out to touch it. They exhibit neither fear nor disgust, only fascination. Yet by kindergarten, this enchantment with nature somehow gives way to revulsion as many children recoil in fear or loathing at the sight of a beetle or fly.
Edward O. Wilson believes nature’s attraction for cancer patients and infants is a natural inclination. He has coined the term biophilia (based on the Greek words for “life” and “love”) to describe what he believes is a genetically programmed psychological need humans have for other beings. In his book Biophilia: The Human Bond with Other Species, he defines biophilia as “the innate tendency to focus on life and life-like processes.” It leads to an “emotional affiliation of human beings to other living things.… Multiple strands of emotional response are woven into symbols composing a large part of culture.”
Wilson suggests the origin of biophilia lies in our evolutionary history, which “began hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago with the origin of the genus Homo. For more than 99 percent of human history, people have lived in hunter-gatherer bands totally and intimately involved with other organisms.… They depended on an exact knowledge of crucial aspects of natural history.… The brain evolved in a biocentric world, not a machine-regulated world. It would be therefore quite extraordinary to find that all learning rules related to that world have been erased in a few thousand years.”
Wilson’s ideas echo those of the late microbiologist René Dubos: “We are shaped by the Earth. The characteristics of the environment in which we develop condition our biological and mental being and the quality of our life.”
But today most people in industrialized countries live in urban environments in which the rich tapestry of other living things has been drastically reduced. Wilson believes that the “biophilic learning rules are not replaced by modern versions equally well adapted to artifacts. Instead, they persist from generation to generation, atrophied and fitfully manifested in the artificial new environments into which technology has catapulted humanity. For the indefinite future, more children and adults will continue, as they do now, to visit zoos than attend all major sports combined.”
The notion of biophilia provides a conceptual framework through which human behavior can be examined and evolutionary mechanisms suggested. The Biophilia Hypothesis, edited by Wilson and Stephen R. Kellert, compiles articles examining biophilia and its implications. The papers add up to strong support for the theory. For example, the architecture professor Roger S. Ulrich reports that “a consistent finding in well over 100 studies of recreation experiences in wilderness and urban natural areas has been that stress mitigation is one of the most important verbally expressed perceived benefits.”
Yale professor Kellert says:
The biophilia hypothesis proclaims a human dependence on nature that extends far beyond the simple issues of material and physical sustenance to encompass as well the human craving for aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual meaning and satisfaction … a scientific claim of a human need … deep and intimate association with the natural environment.… The degradation of this human dependence on nature brings the increased likelihood of a deprived and diminished existence.… Much of the human search for a coherent and fulfilling existence is intimately dependent upon our relationship to nature.
To Kellert, our need for nature makes evolutionary sense: “Discovery and exploration of living diversity undoubtedly facilitated the acquisition of increased knowledge and understanding of the natural world, and such information almost certainly conferred distinctive advantages in the course of human evolution.”
In the end, Wilson believes biophilia adds a spiritual dimension: “The more we know of other forms of life, the more we enjoy and respect ourselves.… Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life.”