ON POLITICAL BOOKS: Mr. Green Genes

...Wilson’s book is at times so simple, so basic, that you can imagine it being read by junior high studentsno insult intended...

...The biological history of the Earth is marked by five major extinction spasms, the official names of which you no doubt have memorized as you would the names of your brothers and cousins: the Ordovician, the Devonian, the Permian, the Triassic, and the Cretaceous...

...That, at least, is the central thesis of Harvard biologist E. 0. Wilson’s scary, enlightening, delicious new book*, a treatise on the importance of “biodiversity...

...Sure, said Wilson, it’s theoretically possible to turn the planet into a much simpler ecosystem, to just have pigs and chickens and whatnot, but it would be almost impossible to keep things under control, to manage it...

...Wilson was practically called a Nazi by many of his peers (some of his Harvard colleagues formed a committee to attack sociobiology, and students were known to interrupt him in mid-lecture to accuse him of racism), but Wilson marched on, winning the Pulitzer Prize for his 1979 book On Human Nature (from the title, you can tell he was giving his critics the finger...

...He won his second Pulitzer a couple of years ago for the coffee table book, The Ants...

...The “plankton” that isn’t lucky enough to drift down on the volcanic soil will land in the ocean and die-which just goes to show that for most species, life isn’t just a struggle, it’s a gamble...

...At the Earth Summit in Rio a few months ago, there was almost no official discussiion of population pressures (instead of “birth control,” one official document referred to “appropriate technology dissemination...

...In the Arctic, where there are not many species, there are constant population explosions (lemmings, for example...

...The idea of “sustainable development” might be appealing to those who reside in the nexus of environmentalism and progressive capitalism, and it’s almost certainly the only path that the leaders of industrial nations will be willing to take...

...Maybe it’s wise that Wilson chose not to attend the Earth Summit...

...Wilson writes: The rural poor of the Third World are locked onto a downward spiral of poverty and the destruction of diversity...

...But no one can challenge Wilson’s credentials...

...There was so much talk that after a while I began to pray that Greenpeace would take the Rainbow Warrior 11 and just start ramming...

...Sorry to have ruined the suspense...

...They use domestic crops ill-suited to their environment, for too many years, because they know no alternative...

...Why, I asked, couldn’t we just settle for some pigs, cows, chickens, and other useful critters...

...He thinks that it would be wise IO launch a massive effort to catalogue all the species on the planet, so we would know what we’re dealing with...

...He patiently tells the story of how humans evolved...

...29.95...

...The bad news is that it takes at least 10 million years...

...If you eliminate the few cougars and pumas from a certain ecosystem you will see an explosion of small mamnials, who then will eat all the seeds of various trees, which then won’t be able to reproduce, and soon an entire forest will be in upheaval...

...Wilson spends much time defending the species concept...

...In the mid-seventies, sociobiology flew in the face of the orthodoxy within the academy, which had rejected all notion of “human nature” and embraced an almost exclusively environmental view of human behavior...

...But I’ve never seen a convincing explanation of how 10 billion people, or 15 billion people, or whatever the ultimate population will be before it levels off, could possibly live comfortably and indefinitely on this planet with an ever-increasing standard of living...

...Nor is there a hint in this book of the anti-modernism of Wendell Berry or the New Age spiritualism of the Gaia crowd...

...clysm, tends to diversify anew...

...He talks about how zookeepers can mate a tiger with a lion and get a little baby tigon (or is it a liger...

...Wilson’s book makes all this agonizingly clear...

...They hunt out the animals within walking distance, cut forests that cannot be regrown, put their herds on any land from which they cannot be driven by force...

...I don’t think that’s necessarily good news, but it’s interesting...

...Yet don’t mistake Wilson’s book as another screed on how mankind is ruining the planet...

...The cynical reader is tempted to answer: They can’t...

...Let down your guard, and suddenly you’d be knee-deep in pig POOP...

...Tiny spiders, fungus spores, seeds, and bacteria literally rain from the heavens all over the planet...

...Life, post-cata*The Diversiiv oflife...

...He explains things we take for granted, such as: Why are there so many species in the tropics...

...More studies...

...The book is also loaded with fun facts...

...What did it actually say...

...Global warning things around seem rather tarne...

...Animal house Mercifully, Wilson has written this book for everyone, including those of us whose knowledge of biology is limited to the idea that everything on earth is divided into the categories of Animal, Vegetable and Mineral...

...Nevertheless, Wilson thinks biodiversity can be preserved even as standards of living are improved for the people who live in the developing world, where many of the most valued and endangered ecosystems exist...

...A few months ago, faced with an impending deadline for one of my columns, I called Wilson and asked him why we needed so many species...

...Using an accountant’s trick, they record the sale of forests and other irreplaceable natural resources as national income without computing the permanent environmental losses as expenses...

...Answer: The Energy-StabilityArea Theory of Biodiversity...

...For the record, there are actually five kingdoms of life, according to one current scheme: plants, fungi, animals, protozoans, and bacteria...

...I choose to be an optimist, out of faith in human adaptability and my general suspicion that, despite all appearances, “progress” still describes the general direction of human history-bu t there’s no denying that we are already living in an age of environmental catastrophe...

...Today, Wilson has moved on to the somewhat more politically correct turf of biodiversity, although some will certainly dispute his thesis, or even the basic scientific assumptions that underlie it, such as the notion that species are the fundamental units by which the biological world should be measured...

...The final “treaty” on population never even hinted that there might be too many people on the planet...

...Harvard...

...They are the damnedest, most contradictory creatures you ever saw-big-brained but unwise, resourceful but self-destructive, kind-hearted but slightly homicidal...

...Don’t everyone step forward at once...

...he is one of the premier biologists on the planet (an entomologist, to be precise), not to mention an eloquent writer who is not afraid to digress into his personal philosophy or toss off an anecdote about wandering through some distant jungle...

...Some scientists would have been silent for a moment and then said, “Uh, who is this calling again...

...He also says that it is time for every nation to have a population policy...

...At the end of Wilson’s opening chapter, he asks a chilling question: “How much force does it take to break the crucible of life...

...Nor can the affluent northern hemisphere continue to chew through the world’s resources with so ravenous an appetite...

...He does not completely ignore the aesthetic and moral components of the crisis...

...And it was news to me that the sky is full of “aeolian plankton,” which is why those volcanic islands that are totally scorched and sterilized by an eruption don’t remain barren for long...

...Honey, my boss says if I work really hard on the beetles for the next three years, he’ll let me switch to nematodes...

...Those bad boys can swim for miles and miles across the open sea...

...He explained-as he does more fully in this book-that complex ecosystems are much more stable than simple ecosystems...

...he walks us through the general rules and theories...

...Cassandra was right, after all...

...But Wilson is used to being ideologically unfashionable...

...Remove a single “keystone” species from an ecosystem and it could be radically changed...

...Why do we need so many kinds of trees when pines and oaks ought to be good enough...

...Books represent too deep a well of thought...

...By Wilson’s best guess, if all the species on the planet could be identified, they would number about 100 million...

...In fact, he’s best known as the originator of “sociobiology,” the controversial theory that certain social behaviors, whether they be of insects or of humans, are rooted in biological drives and shaped by natural selection...

...the Earth Summit was an event designed for the position paper, the press conference, the seminar, the discussion in 1 he circle...

...Signals abound that the loss of life’s diversity endangers not just the body but the spirit,’’ he writes...

...So the issue, says Wilson, is this: “How can people in developing countries achieve a decent living from the land without destroying it...

...It’s like trying to shoot-the-moon in a game of hearts...

...Some of the greener environmentalists will see red when they read the fine print of his book...

...If you want dear writing, don’t get a bunch of contentious people together and ask them to reach a consensus...

...He suggests that 25,000 scientists could devote their lifetimes to research and classification, at a rate, he estimates, of 10 species per scientist per year...

...And by the way, if you go to one of those newly reforested volcanic islands and suddenly discover a 25foot reticulated python wrapping itself around your neck, don’t be confused: It did not rain from the sky like the spiders...

...He suggests, for instance, that we need more research...

...I spent a week there and hardly ever saw an actual book...

...But who will tell the alligators...

...Wilson seems to understand that the simplest questions-like, why are there so many species?-are neither childish nor particularly easy to answer...

...We are living in the sixth extinction spasm...

...To him, biodiversity is a resource for economic exploitation-nature, after all, has spent millions of years syrithesizing chemicals that give plants and animals immunity against predators and disease...

...At no time, though, does Wilson seem like a scientist straining to communicate with a lay audience...

...Figure this: Throughout the history of planet Earth there have been many kinds of plants and animals that have dramatically altered the environment around them, but it has taken a species that’s extraordinarily intelligent, reflective, emotionally complex, and technologically adept to screw up the situation so badly that there are doubts about the future of life itself...

...Lacking access to markets, hammered by exploding populations, they turn increasingly to the last of the wild biological resources...

...You know: Men watch ESPN because a million years ago it was the man’s job to figure out which of the wildebeests was the slowest...

...It is a siren call, a warning for the lay public...

...One of the reasons Wilson wants to maintain the earth’s dizzyingly rich crowd of plants and animals is that it is profitable to keep all that nature around...

...in the tropics, where there are thousands of species of plants and animals in and around a single tree, the environment is far more stable...

...There’s no way to be sure which species is the “keystone...

...Biodiversity is even greater than that, of course, because there is the diversity within species, an almost infinite number of ways that genes can arrange themselves...

...Green Genes E. 0. Wilson thinks it’s okay to mess with Mother Nature by Joel Achenbach Some of my best friends are humans...

...So Wilson takes things fairly slowly...

...among non-governmental activists, the tension between northern and southern environmentalists prevented any meaningful agretement on what to do about overpopulation...

...He goes so far as to say that some habitats can be destroyed if they are judged without significant value...

...Wilson argues that the planet is in the midst of the greatest extinction spasm since the last of the dinosaurs disappeared about 66 million years ago...

...today it is the human race that has slammed into the planet with a lethal force, appropriating or altering 90 percent of the earth’s land environment...

...Rather than lament the existence of the logging industry, he argues in favor of “strip logging,” which limits soil erosion and allows natural regeneration of forests...

...Tough stuff...

...It is perhaps cowardly and unconstructive to react to the environmental crisis with mere despair, but it is not an irrational position...

...These may not be the last days, but you can build a strong argument that the penultimate days are upon us...

...Though only 6 percent of the world’s land mass, the tropical rain forests may contain half the species of organisms on the planet...

...Edward 0. Wilson...

...I read it several times, and the only thing I learned is that free trade is bad...

...Wilson didn’t flinch...

...the reason most scientific writing is impenetrable or detail-heavy is that it’s difficult to master the information well enough to make clear communication possible...

...The dinosaurs were probably doomed by the climatic aftereffects of an asteroid impact...

...It’s a sensible idea, but he doesn’t delve into the painful political reality: The intelligentsia of the developing world thinks this is a racist, blame-shifting attitude, the paranoid fetish of rich white guys in suburban AmeIica who can’t sleep at night because of all the dark-skinned babies out there...

...The fu If there’s one major disappointment in this book, it’s that after Wilson delivers his devastating global forecast, after he gets us all in a lather about the destruction of life on earth, his prescriptions for turning ture we had feared has become tlhe present...

...Like: There are probably still some species of deep sea sharks yet to be discovered...

...And we are the spasm-inducers...

...He writes the syndicated column “Why Things Are...

...The good news is that the Earth has recovered from these extinction spasms before...

...Wilson sounds like your basic Al Gore ecologist, grounding his appeal for the preservation of biodiversity on economic and scientific reasons...

...Though it does seem awfully unfair that protozoans and bacteria get to be part of entirely separate biological kingdoms given that I’m lumped into the same one as Pat Buchanan...

...Why can’t the planet survive as a kind of farm...

...Joel Achenbach is a reporter for the Style section of The Washington Post...