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.
