http://www.radio.cbc.ca/programs/quirks/archives/01-02/mar1602.htm
Bob McDonald, host
of "Quirks and Quarks"
CBC Radio One
March 16, 2002
The
Future of Life - A feature interview with E.O. Wilson
Bob McDonald's
interview with Edward O. Wilson is 19 minutes long. The audio
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What do the
following things have in common: the Eastern fringed Prairie
orchid, the Shasta salamander, the San Francisco garter
snake, the Valley oak, the giant kangaroo rat, and the Western
lily?
Well they're
just a few of the thousands of endangered and extinct species
of life on this planet. And according to a new book by one
of America's most eminent scientists, that list is not only
growing daily, it could soon include - us.
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The
book is called "The Future of Life," and it's
written by the noted biologist, Edward O. Wilson. Dr. Wilson
argues that human activities are responsible for the ecological
crisis that's now facing the world. And unless we do something
soon we could lose half the plants and animals species on
earth by the end of the century.
E.O. Wilson is perhaps best known for his ground-breaking
work on the life of ants, but he's also won two Pulitzer
prizes for his writings on science. Dr. Wilson is now in
his 70s, but continues to be a research professor at Harvard
University, as well as the honorary curator in entomology
at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard.
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Bob McDonald:
It's a great pleasure to welcome Dr. E.O. Wilson to "Quirks
and Quarks."
Hello.
Dr. Wilson:
Hello, and thank you.
Bob McDonald:
Now, we've been talking about the human impact on the earth
for a long time, and on this program we've been doing it
for a couple of decades now. Yes, there is a problem.
Well, how serious is the problem, in your mind?
Dr. Wilson:
Well, it's catastrophic. We're in the early stages, I would say,
late early to beginning middle stages of this catastrophe
and already we've destroyed a lot of species on earth.
The more research we do, the more we realize humanity has
destroyed in the way of biodiversity. But all of the evidence
is that it's accelerating. I think the rate of disappearance
of species now is about one tenth of one percent of all the
species per year. But that is certainly accelerating.
Bob McDonald:
Some would say that a lot of the species that are being lost
are things like fungi and insects and bugs that you find under
dead trees and stuff and there are so many of those things around
that, you know, we can afford to lose a few. What are we losing?
Dr. Wilson:
We're losing the base of the ecosystem. By far the most abundant
and diverse organisms on earth are these "bugs." "The
little things
that run the world," is the way I like to call them. They're
the
ones that really move the energy and materials through the
ecosystem. We big creatures live off of that most of the time,
a kind of superstructure sucking up energy.
Then when you come
to bacteria and fungi whose losses and
biodiversity we have not yet been able to measure but almost
certainly those are occurring at a high rate as well. Now you
come to the very foundation of the ecosystem, because these are
the organisms that really are the ultimate base of a large part
of the food chain and absolutely essential to moving these
materials and energy around.
So we don't know the
full extent of the damage that we will
do when we remove a lot of that part of biodiversity, except
to say that it will be deep.
Bob McDonald:
In your book you talk about a bottleneck, which is not
the same as what we used to say was doom and gloom of the
environmentalists, "My god, we're destroying everything,
we're all going to die," You say that this is a bottleneck
that was created by technology, but that technology might
get us out of it, that it has another end.
How do you define that?
Dr. Wilson:
Well, yes, and this is the basis for what I confess to as guarded
optimism above the final outcome. We're going to lose
a lot of biodiversity. We're going to damage this planet still
more than it has been. We're going to create serious problems
for ourselves. But that aside, we can turn it around. And the
way to look at I think is in terms of a bottleneck that runs
through the 21st century. It started in the 20th and runs through
the 21st century.
It's a bottleneck of
overpopulation. Were going to go from
current a little more than 6 billion people on earth to,
that's the United Nation's estimate, somewhere in the vicinity
of 9 to 10 billion, there is a 50 percent increase, and
then there's every good hope that human population on the
planet will peak because fertility is dropping and the number
of children, the average number of children each woman has,
is dropping worldwide.
So it will peak at
around 9 or 10 billion, so in other words
were not just going to breed ourselves into oblivion, but
we're going to breed ourselves into a pretty tight situation
in terms of planet's resources.
And at the same time,
part of this bottleneck, is rising
average per capita consumption. So those two things combined
are putting a severe pressure on the world's resources and
on the rest of life, the biological diversity and the
rest of life.
What got us here, was
in fact, modern science and technology,
for reasons I think most people understand.
And we can't turn it
around and go back. We can't say well
if everyone will simply return to a pastoral way of life
and become vegetarian, and so on, then we could settle down.
That's not going to happen. It's not physical possible anyway.
So we have to turn increasingly to our knowledge of how
the world really works. And what underlies what are resource
base is and what underlies our economic future. And that
can be done only through science and technology. And that's
what I meant when I said we have to move the big juggernaut
that was created. We can't stop it, but we can turn it ever
so slowly like an ocean liner and move it in a direction
that pays close attention to the preservation of our resources.
Bob McDonald:
Do you really believe that technology can do that, that
we can actually engineer our way out of this, when in fact
it was science and technology that got us into it in the
first place?
Dr. Wilson:
Let me complete the equation. Science and technology, which
was poorly understood, that's implication, poorly understood,
by the public and our political leaders and public intellectuals.
And inadequately attended to by moral reason.
Now we could have,
we will, we must have science and technology
which continues to advance and the breadth of knowledge that
it acquires and can pass on, combined with that broader public
understanding and a stronger moral sense about the long-term
future.
Bob McDonald:
Now what about, especially here in North America, consumption.
The fact that North Americans are consuming more resources of
the earth then anyone else on the planet, and that doesn't seem
to be stopping. How do you turn that around and say we've got
to give up some of the luxuries we have and start to turn this
juggernaut around.
Dr. Wilson:
This is certainly a serious problem and I don't think most people
realize how serious it is. We still occasionally hear naive arguments
about how, oh, there's a lot of space left on the planet and you
could take all 6 billion people and put them in Texas and they
still have have enough room for a ranch house and a yard.
But I can do better
than that, you can just figure that yourself
on the back of an envelope. You can take 6 billion people and
log-stack them, they'd fill a cube volume of about 3 cubic miles.
You can take all of them and lower them into the Grand Canyon
out of sight. But that's not the point. How many humans there
are, how much physical space we take standing and sitting and
lying down.
The point is how much
of the productive earth's surface each
one of us uses. That's known as ecological footprint and in the
U.S., Canada is a little less than the U.S., so we'll take the
U.S., that's the maximum, the average person about 24 acres,
according to latest estimates, of productive land. That is,
land, little bits of which were taken from all around the world,
you know, a little bit of Saudi Arabia for each one of our
consumption of oil, a little bit of Ghana for our cocoa,
and so on.
The average U.S. citizen
takes 24 acres and the average person
in the developing world takes about 1/10 as much as what the
U.S. does. Another misconception you constantly hear, kind
of a philosophical misdirection, is that, well, U.S. policy
anyway, ought to be to bring the rest of the world, the
developing world, as 80 percent of the people living in those
countries up to U.S. standards, automobiles, computers, the
whole bit. But that's impossible, because it's not too difficult
to calculate that in order to bring everybody up to current
U.S. standard at present technology would require four more
planet Earths.
So what we going to
do about this? That's the problem, and
that's what the environmentalists have been urging on us that
we don't need to lower our standard of living, we just need
to lower our patterns of consumption and change our energy
sources and the materials we use and so on to live a more
prudent lifestyle.
Bob McDonald:
But when we look around the world, especially in developing
countries, They want the U.S. standard. Look at China.
Look what's happening there.
Dr. Wilson:
Well, we have to lead by moving to sustainable energy, less
polluting sources of energy and materials, and we're not doing
that. In other words, what we need to do is to have a crash
program in the developing world with the goal of improving our
standard of living and personal and national security, but
at the same time steadily lowering our consumption. We need
a Manhattan project in the next 10 years which says that
we will turn this entire energy economy around in a given
period of time, say, within 10 years. And now let's get
started on it.
It requires subsidies.
It requires pumping up technological
research and providing rewards for it. It includes compensating
of industries and individual workers for jobs lost as in fact
the U.S. did undertake when our steel industry started to fail
in the Rust Belt.
So this is within our
grasp if we make it a national enterprise
with the long-term, meaning 10, 20 years down the line,
as our real priority instead of next year's bottom line.
Bob McDonald:
I'd like to pick up on that idea in a moment, but for those
who've just tuned in, I'm Bob McDonald, and you're listening
to Quirks and Quirks on CBC Radio One and I'm in conversation
with eminent American biologist Dr. E. O. Wilson, and we're
discussing his new book, "The Future of Life."
Now, Dr. Wilson, earlier
this season, I interviewed the Danish
statistician Bjorn Lomborg about his very controversial book
called "The Skeptical Environmentalist." Now he argues
that
were actually in better shape than ever. He said we're richer,
we're more prosperous, that pollution is on the decline,
we have our resources, there's the forests, they are
regenerating, and he says the whole environmental concern
is overstated. How do you respond to that?
Dr. Wilson:
I think I can respond to that particular book on behalf of
virtually all of the environmental scientists who have any
familiarity with it, with one word:
Garbage.
Bob McDonald:
So what's the flaw in the reasoning there, in saying that
we are more prosperous, it looks like we're better off than
we were 100,000 years ago?
Dr. Wilson:
Yeah, the per capita production and consumption are going up.
But we are achieving that by eating up our capital. In other
words, if you just look around the world superficially, you
see that the forests of the world, including the tropical rain
forests, are disappearing at an accelerating rate, that is
the natural forests, including tree farms.
And that our fisheries
have been driven down worldwide to less
than sustainable levels, and so on and on, but naturally, if you
eat up the capital fast, you consume faster and faster, which
our technology allows us to do, and then you can have just a
fine time of it until the capital is down so far that you find
yourself in a corner.
I'm astonished that
there are some economists who still cite
that matter of increasing consumption, of all things, per capita
consumption, worldwide, as evidence that the world is in a
better condition environmentally.
Bob McDonald:
The final chapter of your book is called "The Solution,"
which was refreshing to come to, because, frankly, it's
really depressing in hearing all of your statistics about
how bad the situation really is, and in that you talk about
the need to preserve hotspots immediately and all of that,
but you have one main point that you make, which is to make
conservation profitable. How do you do that?
Dr. Wilson:
It's not as hard as you think. In fact, one reason why I wrote
that book and concluded it with a chapter modestly entitled
"The Solution", was the promising signs and particularly
in the tropical countries, the developing countries, where
most of the biodiversity is located.
Let me just give you
one example of why there is reason for
optimism.
Until fairly recently,
we thought of the international timber
extraction industry as being essentially unstoppable. In other
words, that there was a kind of insoluble independent life
to the destruction of forests everywhere in the world because
costs were so low and profits were so high that the developing
countries needed the money so badly that there was no way of
convincing people that what lay 10 or 20 or 30 years down the
line for these countries could be disastrous. You couldn't
stop it. But that turned out not to be the case.
The profit margin of
the logging companies is razor thin,
for a number of reasons, we understand, and they are able
to pay out only very small amounts to these developing
countries where these forests they are destroying most
rapidly.
It turns out that it's
possible to replace logging concessions
with what are called conservation concessions, funded, in one
case, for example in the country of Surinam, on the north coast
of South America, which has one of the great pristine forests,
in this case, a $15 million pledge to actually set up concessions
and accompany it with technological help and economic advice on
non-invasive use of the forests, including tourism in a way
that, in this case, the whole country's been turned around.
It's cancelled its logging concessions and is now on a
environmentally bent economic program which actually
will bring more money.
Bob McDonald:
Having been in the environmental watchdog business,
if I can say that, for a long time, you've seen the damage,
you've seen the consumption here in North America, you've
seen denial, you've seen inaction.
How do you remain an
optimist that we will actually manage
to turn this juggernaut around, as you say ?
Dr. Wilson:
Well, there are a number of favorable signs, I should say
that the damage goes on with only a slight alleviation,
but there are favorable signs. For one thing, religious
leadership is beginning to go green. I won't document that
at length. I have in the book. That's a promising sign.
Public opinion is beginning to change. In the United States,
for example, the membership, just to cite one figure, of the
world wildlife fund, went from 100,000 to one million during
the 1980s. The operating budget for the large global
environmental movement are now at the $100 million level
and recently one of them received a $261 million dollar grant
to apply to these solutions that I was just referring to.
I think now with security
issues, especially perceived
in the United States, the plight of the developing
countries are coming into focus, not just for humanitarian
reasons, but also for national security reasons and as a
consequence too of globalization and the need to develop
new markets. I think it's very likely that we will be
seeing all of these problems that we've been talking
about in a new light. I hope so anyway.
Bob McDonald:
Dr. Wilson, it's a pleasure to talk to you.
Dr. Wilson:
Thank you for having me.
Bob McDonald:
Dr. E. O. Wilson is a research professor at Harvard University
and the author of "The Future of Life," published by
Random
House, Knopf.
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