The Diversity of Life

"I should start by saying that in my field, genetics, stuff that people publish is generally out of date within six months. The kind of literature I read is really fast-moving, short papers published in journals, and there’s often a rush to get them out. There are a few books that everybody reads. I chose this book, The Diversity of Life as E. O. Wilson is really well known as the king of biodiversity studies. He’s a conservation biologist, a really deep-thinking ecologist and he cares a lot about understanding how life exists, the diversity of life that exists, how many species there are, how many different habitats there are, and in particular what our influence on these different habitats has been. In this book, he walks through multiple extinction events. The most famous extinction event is the end of the Cretaceous, when the dinosaurs went extinct. But the most dramatic was the end of the Permian, which was about 245 million years ago, when something like 95% of all species on the planet went extinct at the same time. He points out that after each of these extinction events, biodiversity of life on the planet has recovered, and it’s often different. The dinosaurs went extinct, making way for our species. If the dinosaurs hadn’t gone extinct, we probably wouldn’t be the most powerful, brainy thing wandering around the planet. But the dinosaur extinction happened and it made way for mammals to diversify. This book was published in the early 1990s, but he’s recently been promoting this idea that we should preserve 50% of the planet for everything else. So we get 50%, everything else gets 50%. Right now we have about 90% and everything else has about 10%, which hardly seems fair. If you think about the fact that we’re one species and everything else gets only 50%, it also doesn’t seem fair, but it’s something to aim for. He’s particularly keen on connectivity between preserved habitat. He thinks this is important because, as the climate changes, temperatures might not exist any more in particular temperature regions, but might still exist further north. But if there isn’t connectivity between preserved regions, there’s no corridor these species can use to disperse, and then they go extinct. E. O. Wilson has been and is and continues to be a very powerful and dominant voice in conservation literature and this is an important contribution of his. I would like to say yes, but I don’t know. Conservation is a strange world and people who care deeply about conserving species often believe that more people exist that are like them. But I fear the majority of people really don’t care about extinctions and biodiversity if it doesn’t effect them personally. The goal of of people like E. O. Wilson and others who have written about extinctions – I’ll get to Elizabeth Kolbert’s book at the very end – is to try to make people have some personal link to the diversity that exists on the planet. To know something, to feel something personally that actually motivates them to care. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter One of the interesting things about de-extinction is that it’s not possible and it’s kind of crazy, it makes some people really angry and it makes other people really excited, but it is a new way of thinking about biodiversity conservation. People often say to me when I speak, ‘You’re sucking away from something that’s already way underfunded, don’t you feel terrible about that?’ But I don’t think it is. If you look at the funding that goes to conservation, people give to causes that they personally care about: that’s how you get people involved. You couldn’t convince somebody who wants to save the polar bear to give money to save the snowy owl, for example. Or you couldn’t convince somebody who cares about frogs to give money to save the polar bear. I don’t think that by introducing this new crazy, wacky, potential tech solution we’re taking money away. My hope is that we’re attracting people who otherwise wouldn’t even think about it."