Through the years, E.O. Wilson has moved from small insects to big ideas. Now he's sharing a very big idea, one made more urgent by the problems of climate change.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Next: Scientist and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward O. Wilson first gained fame for his study of ants. Through the years, he’s moved from small insects to big ideas, and now a very big one, one made more urgent by the problems of climate change.
Jeffrey Brown has our profile in his second report from Southern Alabama.
E.O. WILSON, Author, “Half Earth”: I was just a 12-, 13-year-old boy, and it was just a wonderland to me.
JEFFREY BROWN: Edward O. Wilson spent his formative years in Mobile, Alabama, looking for snakes and insects in the surrounding delta.
E.O. WILSON: If I could, I would just do the same thing today that I did then, but it would look funny.
(LAUGHTER)
JEFFREY BROWN: The experience would shape him, as biologist, evolutionary theorist, naturalist, and at age 86 perhaps most important to him now conservationist.
E.O. WILSON: What is man? Storyteller, mythmaker, and destroyer of the living world.
JEFFREY BROWN: His new book, “Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight For Life,” takes on nothing less than the survival of plant and animal life on earth.
E.O. WILSON: Yearning to be more master than steward of the declining planet.
JEFFREY BROWN: Wilson’s solution is in the title, setting aside half the Earth as natural habitat.
We spoke beneath the old live oak trees at Fort Blakeley Historic Park, where Wilson’s great-grandfather fought in one of the last battles of the Civil War.
Half Earth. Are you serious?
E.O. WILSON: I’m serious. I know it sounds radical, but we must have it if we’re going to save most of the species remaining on Earth. And it’s easier to do than most people might think.
JEFFREY BROWN: It sounds impossible. It sounds for some people crazy.
E.O. WILSON: I was just going to use the word insane.
JEFFREY BROWN: Yes.
E.O. WILSON: Yes, it sounds that way, because they envision cutting the Earth into two hemispheres, one for us and one for the other 10 million species. But, no, we mean giving 50 percent or setting it aside, patches, some large wilderness areas, others far, far smaller, in order to make that amount of reserve area.
JEFFREY BROWN: Your ideas on this and what should happen have gotten bigger and bolder.
E.O. WILSON: Well, they have.
My alarm went from yellow to red when I read the papers authored by large numbers of scientists and team efforts that showed just how far off the goal the conservation organizations were, how — all our efforts around the world in slowing down extinction rates.
JEFFREY BROWN: One key to Wilson’s argument is how little we know of life on Earth, only two million species identified out of a total probably closer to 10 million, even as species go extinct at 1,000 times the normal rate, thanks chiefly to human population growth and corresponding habitat loss.
Conservation efforts worldwide have thus far set aside a little more than 15 percent of the Earth for habitat. Wilson would triple that.
E.O. WILSON: We would be taking a first step towards securing enough space and natural habitat to preserve, by my estimate, more than 80 percent of the species left. If we don’t do this, we’re going to go down to 50 percent or more in a fairly short period of time in this century.
JEFFREY BROWN: Wilson is attempting such a thing right here, to give national protection, either a park or wildlife refuge status, to parts of the Mobile-Tensaw River Delta, one of the most biologically diverse areas in North America.
There’s opposition in this conservative state. But Wilson is not deterred.
E.O. WILSON: I think it’s a moral thing to do. I believe morality is going to enter very strongly into what I hope will be a shift of perception and precepts and reasoning about this, that we really should take extra measures to save the rest of life on Earth.
And who are we, one species, to wipe out a majority of the species remaining that live with us on this planet just for — without even thinking about it, for our particular selfish needs?
JEFFREY BROWN: Wilson acknowledges that the world’s population will continue to grow from its current 7.3 billion to around 11 billion, before leveling out. But he thinks advancements in technology will help shrink our ecological footprint.
So what are the stakes?
E.O. WILSON: The stakes are the future of life, the future of the living part of the environment.
Mind you, we are beginning to make meaningful progress toward controlling the forces of climate change and of pollution. And the other parts of the nonliving environment that have been causing a large part of the destruction.
If we allow the living part of the environment to disappear, for me, it would be by future generations regarded as one of the most catastrophic, even evil periods in human history, for our descendants to look back and say, they wiped out half or more of all of the rest of life on Earth, the variety of life on Earth.
JEFFREY BROWN: A thoroughly depressing prospect. But to spend a day with Edward Wilson is anything but depressing.
E.O. WILSON: Science needs to have a goal and actually achieve that goal. We really want to see on the front page of the newspaper scientists announce cure for cancer, or cure for lung cancer, shall we say?
What galvanizes public support and puts spirit into it is to say, this is the goal that we must reach. Let’s set that goal, and let’s get there.
JEFFREY BROWN: From Fort Blakeley Historic Park outside Mobile, Alabama, I’m Jeffrey Brown for the “PBS NewsHour.”
Edward Osborne "E. O." Wilson FMLS[1] (born June 10, 1929) is an American biologist, researcher (sociobiology, biodiversity, island biogeography), theorist (consilience, biophilia), naturalist (conservationist) and author. His biological specialty ismyrmecology, the study of ants, on which he is considered to be the world's leading expert.[2][3]
Wilson is known for his scientific career, his role as "the father of sociobiology" and "the father of biodiversity",[4] his environmental advocacy, and his secular-humanist anddeist ideas pertaining to religious and ethical matters.[5] Among his greatest contributions to ecological theory is the theory of island biogeography, which he developed in collaboration with the mathematical ecologist Robert MacArthur, and which is seen as the foundation of the development of conservation area design, as well as the unified neutral theory of biodiversity of Stephen Hubbell.
Wilson is (2014) the Pellegrino University Research Professor, Emeritus in Entomology for the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, a lecturer at Duke University,[6] and a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He is a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism.[7][8] He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and a New York Times bestseller for The Social Conquest of Earth,[9] Letters to a Young Scientist,[9] and The Meaning of Human Existence.
Contents
[hide]主な著書[編集]
- The Theory of Island Biogeography, 1967, Princeton University Press (2001 reprint), ISBN 0-691-08836-5, with Robert H. MacArthur
- The Insect Societies, 1971, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-45490-1
- 『社会生物学』 1983,1999 新思索社 坂上昭一他訳 Sociobiology: The New Synthesis 1975, Harvard University Press, (Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition, 2000 ISBN 0-674-00089-7) 《社會生物學：新綜合理論 1 社會演化的原動力》台北：左岸文化 ，2012 薛絢
- Genes, Mind and Culture: The coevolutionary process, 1981, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-34475-8
- 『精神の起源について』 1990 思索社 松本 亮三 Promethean fire: reflections on the origin of mind, 1983, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-71445-8
- Biophilia, 1984, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-07441-6
- Success and Dominance in Ecosystems: The Case of the Social Insects, 1990, Inter-Research, ISSN 0932-2205
- The Ants, 1990, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-04075-9, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, with Bert Hölldobler
- 『生命の多様性 上・下』 2004 岩波書店 大貫昌子、 牧野俊一訳 The Diversity of Life, 1992, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-21298-3,The Diversity of Life: Special Edition, ISBN 0-674-21299-1 譯《繽紛的生命：造訪基因庫的燦爛國度》金恆鑣譯，台北：天下文化，1997
- 『バイオフィリア－人間と生物の絆』 1994 平凡社 狩野秀之 Biophilia|The Biophilia Hypothesis, 1993, Shearwater Books, ISBN 1-55963-148-1, with Stephen R. Kellert
- 『蟻の自然史』 1997 朝日新聞社 辻和希、松本忠夫訳 Journey to the Ants|Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration, 1994, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-48525-4, with Bert Hölldobler
- 『ナチュラリスト』 1996 法政大学出版局 荒木正純 Naturalist, 1994, Shearwater Books, ISBN 1-55963-288-7 《大自然的獵人：博物學家威爾森》楊玉齡譯，台北：天下文化，1997
- 『生き物たちの神秘生活』 1999 徳間書店 広野喜幸訳 In Search of Nature, 1996, Shearwater Books, ISBN 1-55963-215-1, with Laura Simonds Southworth
- 『知の挑戦』 2002 角川書店 山下篤子 Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, 1998, Knopf, ISBN 0-679-45077-7《》
- 『生命の未来』 2003 角川書店 山下篤子 The Future of Life, 2002, Knopf, ISBN 0-679-45078-5《生物圈的未來》楊玉齡譯，台北：天下文化，2004
- Pheidole in the New World: A Dominant, Hyperdiverse Ant Genus, 2003, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-00293-8
- 『人間の本性について』 1997 筑摩書房 岸由二On Human Nature, 1979/2004, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-01638-6
- From So Simple a Beginning: Darwin's Four Great Books. 2005, W. W. Norton.
- 『創造－生物多様性を守るためのアピール』 2010 紀伊國屋書店 岸由二 訳 The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, September 2006, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. ISBN 978-0393062175
- Nature Revealed: Selected Writings 1949-2006, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. ISBN 0-8018-8329-6
- On Human Nature, 1979, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-01638-6, winner of the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.愛德華‧威爾森/著《論人性》 鄭清榮譯 ， 時報出版 ，2002
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Naturalist By "E. O." Wilson 回憶錄 (66歲，2015年86歲)《大自然的獵人：博物學家威爾森》----1997年，天下文化出版社的極盛年，初刷7000本，482頁，定價才380元。喜歡擅改原書名，也是其作風。金恆鑣先生的導讀《獨具慧眼的田野生物學家 》很可一讀。
