'Acting Now To Save Life On Earth
by E.O. Wilson
by E.O. Wilson
Except for giant meteorite strikes or other such catastrophes, Earth has never experienced anything like the contemporary human juggernaut. We are in a bottleneck of overpopulation and wasteful consumption that could push half of Earth’s species to extinction in this century. As the newest reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stress, we are carelessly destabilizing the planetary surface in ways harmful to our own welfare. Paramount is the irreversible loss of natural ecosystems and species that make up the human life-support system.
Humanity must make a decision, and make it right now: Conserve Earth’s natural heritage, or let future generations adjust to a biologically impoverished world.
There is no way to weasel out of this choice. Some quixotic writers have toyed with the idea of last-ditch measures. They say, “Let’s conserve the millions of surviving species and races by deep-freezing fertilized eggs or tissue samples for later resurrection.” Or, “Let’s record the genetic codes of all the species and try to re-create organisms from them later.”
Either solution would be high-risk, enormously expensive and, in the end, futile. Even if Earth’s threatened biodiversity could be reanimated and bred into populations awaiting return to what might in the 22nd century pass for the “wild,” the reconstruction of independently viable populations is beyond reach. Biologists haven’t the slightest idea of how to build a complex autonomous ecosystem from scratch. By the time they find out, conditions on Earth may make such a reconstruction impossible.
Another option some have posed: Go ahead and pauperize the biosphere, in the hope that scientists may someday be able to create artificial organisms and species and put them together in synthetic ecosystems. Let future generations refill the niches of vanished nature with tigeroids programmed not to attack humans, synthetic tigers burning artificial bright in forestoids amid insectoids that neither sting nor bite. There are words appropriate for artifactual biodiversity: desecration, corruption, abomination.
All these default solutions are fatuous dreams. This is the time not for science fiction but for common sense. The only way to save Earth’s biodiversity is by preserving natural environments in reserves large enough to maintain wild populations sustainably.'
Humanity must make a decision, and make it right now: Conserve Earth’s natural heritage, or let future generations adjust to a biologically impoverished world.
There is no way to weasel out of this choice. Some quixotic writers have toyed with the idea of last-ditch measures. They say, “Let’s conserve the millions of surviving species and races by deep-freezing fertilized eggs or tissue samples for later resurrection.” Or, “Let’s record the genetic codes of all the species and try to re-create organisms from them later.”
Either solution would be high-risk, enormously expensive and, in the end, futile. Even if Earth’s threatened biodiversity could be reanimated and bred into populations awaiting return to what might in the 22nd century pass for the “wild,” the reconstruction of independently viable populations is beyond reach. Biologists haven’t the slightest idea of how to build a complex autonomous ecosystem from scratch. By the time they find out, conditions on Earth may make such a reconstruction impossible.
Another option some have posed: Go ahead and pauperize the biosphere, in the hope that scientists may someday be able to create artificial organisms and species and put them together in synthetic ecosystems. Let future generations refill the niches of vanished nature with tigeroids programmed not to attack humans, synthetic tigers burning artificial bright in forestoids amid insectoids that neither sting nor bite. There are words appropriate for artifactual biodiversity: desecration, corruption, abomination.
All these default solutions are fatuous dreams. This is the time not for science fiction but for common sense. The only way to save Earth’s biodiversity is by preserving natural environments in reserves large enough to maintain wild populations sustainably.'
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