Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life

by Edward O. Wilson

Overview

Half-Earth proposes an achievable plan to save our imperiled biosphere: devote half the surface of the Earth to nature.

In order to stave off the mass extinction of species, including our own, we must move swiftly to preserve the biodiversity of our planet, says Edward O. Wilson in his most impassioned book to date. Half-Earth argues that the situation facing us is too large to be solved piecemeal and proposes a solution commensurate with the magnitude of the problem: dedicate fully half the surface of the Earth to nature.

If we are to undertake such an ambitious endeavor, we first must understand just what the biosphere is, why it's essential to our survival, and the manifold threats now facing it. In doing so, Wilson describes how our species, in only a mere blink of geological time, became the architects and rulers of this epoch and outlines the consequences of this that will affect all of life, both ours and the natural world, far into the future.

Half-Earth provides an enormously moving and naturalistic portrait of just what is being lost when we clip "twigs and eventually whole braches of life's family tree." In elegiac prose, Wilson documents the many ongoing extinctions that are imminent, paying tribute to creatures great and small, not the least of them the two Sumatran rhinos whom he encounters in captivity. Uniquely, Half-Earth considers not only the large animals and star species of plants but also the millions of invertebrate animals and microorganisms that, despite being overlooked, form the foundations of Earth's ecosystems.

In stinging language, he avers that the biosphere does not belong to us and addresses many fallacious notions such as the idea that ongoing extinctions can be balanced out by the introduction of alien species into new ecosystems or that extinct species might be brought back through cloning. This includes a critique of the "anthropocenists," a fashionable collection of revisionist environmentalists who believe that the human species alone can be saved through engineering and technology.

Despite the Earth's parlous condition, Wilson is no doomsayer, resigned to fatalism. Defying prevailing conventional wisdom, he suggests that we still have time to put aside half the Earth and identifies actual spots where Earth's biodiversity can still be reclaimed. Suffused with a profound Darwinian understanding of our planet's fragility, Half-Earth reverberates with an urgency like few other books, but it offers an attainable goal that we can strive for on behalf of all life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631490828
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	03/07/2016
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Edward O. Wilson (1929-2021) was the author of more than thirty books, including Anthill, Letters to a Young Scientist, and The Conquest of Nature. The winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, Wilson was a professor emeritus at Harvard University and lived with his wife in Lexington, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

Part I The Problem

1 The World Ends, Twice 7

2 Humanity Needs a Biosphere 11

3 How Much Biodiversity Survives Today? 19

4 An Elegy for the Rhinos 29

5 Apocalypses Now 35

6 Are We As Gods? 47

7 Why Extinction is Accelerating 53

8 The Impact of Climate Change: Land, Sea, and Air 65

9 The Most Dangerous Worldview 71

Part II The Real Living World

10 Conservation Science 83

11 The Lord God Species 95

12 The Unknown Webs of Life 101

13 The Wholly Different Aqueous World 113

14 The Invisible Empire 121

15 The Best Places in the Biosphere 133

16 History Redefined 155

Part III The Solution

17 The Awakening 169

18 Restoration 175

19 Half-Earth: How to Save the Biosphere 185

20 Threading the Bottleneck 189

21 What Must Be Done 209

Sources and Further Reading 213

Glossary 227

Appendix 2:9 Illustration Credits 233

Acknowledgments 237

Index 239

Editorial Reviews

"If humankind finds a way to live in peace together, and in harmony with nature, Wilson will have played a unique role in that deliverance."

Jeffrey Sachs

"Edward O. Wilson possesses a rare, almost unique, combination of immense scientific knowledge and deep humane intelligence. Looking around him at the beloved natural world he has done so much to understand and taking the measure of the massive damage to it caused by human stupidity and greed, he has every reason to succumb to despair. But Half-Earth is not a bitter jeremiad. It is a brave expression of hope, a visionary blueprint for saving the planet."

Stephen Greenblatt

"Wilson speaks with a humane eloquence which calls to us all."

Oliver Sacks

10/01/2015
Are we inevitably heading toward extinction? No, says Harvard emeritus biologist/naturalist Wilson, so huge in his field that PBS will air a miniseries about him this fall. But we can't just engineer our own safe place on Earth. Wilson passionately argues that we can counter mass extinction by letting biodiversity thrive as we expand the natural reserves where humans cannot intervene until they take up half the globe.

Library Journal

2015-12-17
The noted naturalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author again waxes eloquent on behalf of the biosphere. In this final volume of his trilogy, Wilson (The Meaning of Human Existence, 2014, etc.) opens with a compelling proposal on how to slow current species extinction rates: set aside half of the planet (noncontiguously) as wilderness preserves free from human encroachment, a measure that the author claims would stabilize more than 80 percent of species. After all, it's the spread of humanity that has accelerated rates of extinction by 1,000 times, and it is human activity that is the driving force of the mass extinction currently underway, a threat to biodiversity equal to the destructive power of the Chicxulub asteroid strike that wiped out 70 percent of species 65 million years ago. Wilson, the world's leading myrmecologist, who has described roughly 450 new ant species during his career, predicts that, under current conditions, one-quarter to one-half of currently surviving species will survive to the end of the century. If the rhetoric sounds familiar, it's because this is ground that Wilson has covered extensively in previous publications. In this latest version, the author speaks against a growing movement of Anthropocene extremists who hold that biodiversity should be judged according to its usefulness to humanity. Countering that it is humanity that now needs to act in the interests of the biosphere, Wilson delves into the plights of specific species, including rhinos, frogs, monarch butterflies, woodpeckers, and beetles. Though unquestionably well-versed in the nature of the problem, the author is fuzzy on the solution. In the final pages, he skirts the issue of how we're to set aside 50 percent of the planet, instead making speculations about technological innovation and intensive economic growth intrinsically altering the behavior of individuals and changing the world. Not so much a potent plan as another informed plea for humanity to act as stewards of the biosphere rather than owners.

Kirkus Reviews

"An audacious idea that might jump-start a lagging conversation about a burning issue…[I]f Half-Earth takes us any closer to sparking greater effort, it will cement Wilson’s already remarkable legacy."

Philadelphia Inquirer - Mike Weilbacher

"Wilson’s passion for the planet shines through on these pages. He looks at life in its broadest, grandest sweep…Wilson is a thinker in the tradition of Alexander von Humboldt."

The National - Matthew Price

"Few experts have offered such an exuberant and optimistic plan for dealing with [climate change] as biologist Edward O. Wilson…The strength of his argument lies in his ability to elegantly unveil the bigger picture, and to define and examine what in our essential human nature has led us to this point…[W]e need Wilson’s reminder that we are not demigods, but are instead, as he puts it, ‘a biological species tied to this particular biological world.’"

Sierra - Jessi Phillips

"As an outline of our terrible ecological plight, it does a first-class job."

Guardian - Robin McKie