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New York Times Magazine
May 30, 1993

Is Humanity Suicidal?
by Edward O. Wilson

Darwin's dice rolled badly for Earth

Imagine that on an icy moon of Jupiter - say Ganymede - the space
station of an alien civilization is concealed. For millions of
years its scientists have closely watched the earth. Because their
law prevents settlement on a living planet, they have tracked the
surface by means of satellites equipped with sophisticated sensors,
mapping the spread of large assemblages of organisms, from forests,
grasslands and tundras to coral reefs and the vast planktonic
meadows of the sea.

They have recorded millennial cycles in the climate, interrupted
by the advance and retreat of glaciers and scattershot volcanic
eruptions. The watchers have been waiting for what might be called
the Moment.

When it comes, occupying only a few centuries and thus a mere tick
in geological time, the forests shrink back to less than half
their original cover. Atmospheric carbon dioxide rises to the
highest level in loo,ooo years. The ozone layer of the stratosphere
thins, and holes open at the poles. Plumes of nitrous oxide and
other toxins rise from fires in South America and Africa, sere
in the upper troposphere and drift eastward across the oceans.

At night the land surface brightens with millions of pinpoints
of light, which coalesce into blazing swaths across Europe,
Japan and eastern North America. A semi-circle of fire spreads
from gas flares around the Persian Gulf.

It was all but inevitable, the watchers might tell us if we met
them, that from the great diversity of large animals, one species
or another would eventually gain intelligent control of Earth.
That role has fallen to Homo sapiens, a primate risen in Africa
from a lineage that split away from the chimpanzee line five
to eight million years ago. Unlike any creature that lived
before, we have become a geophysical force, swiftly changing
the atmospliere and climate as well as the composition of the
world's fauna and flora.

Now in the midst of a population explosion, the human species
has doubled to 5.5 billion during the past 50 years. It is
scheduled to double again in the next 50 years. No other
single species in evolutionary history has even remotely
approached the sheer mass in protoplasm generated by humanity.

Darwin's dice have rolled badly for Earth. It was a misfortune
for the living world in particular, many scientists believe,
that a carnivorous primate and not some more benign form of
animal made the breakthrough.

Our species retains hereditary traits that add greatly to our
destructive impact. We are tribal and aggressively territorial,
intent on private space beyond minimal requirements and oriented
by selfish sexual and reproductive drives. Cooperation beyond
the family and tribal levels comes hard. Worse, our liking for
meat causes us to use the sun's energy at low efficiency.

It is a general rule of ecology that (very roughly) only about
lo percent of the sun's energy captured by photosynthesis to
produce plant tissue is converted into energy in the tissue of
herbivores, the animals that eat the plants. Of that amount,
io percent reaches the tissue of the carnivores feeding on the
herbivores. Similarly, only 10 percent is transferred to carnivores
that eat carnivores. And so on for another step or two.

In a wetlands chain that runs from marsh grass to grasshopper
to warbler to hawk, the energy captured during green production
shrinks a thousandfold. In other words, it takes a great deal
of grass to support a hawk.

Human beings, like hawks, are top carnivores, at the end of the
food chain whenever they eat meat, two or more links removed from
the plants; if chicken, for example, two links, and if tuna,
four links. Even with most societies confined today to a mostly
vegetarian diet, humanity is gobbling up a large part of the rest
of the living world. We appropriate between 20 and 40 percent
of the sun's energy that would otherwise be fixed into the tissue
of natural vegetation, principally by our consumption of crops and
timber, construction of buildings and roadways and the creation
of wastelands. In the relentless search for more food, we have
reduced animal life in lakes, rivers and now, increasingly, the
open ocean. And everywhere we pollute the air and water, lower
water tables and extinguish species.

The 29th Day

The human species is, in a word, an environmental abnormality.
It is possible that intelligence in the wrong kind of species
was foreordained to be a fatal combination for the biosphere.
Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes
itself. This admittedly dour scenario is based on what can be
termed the juggernaut theory of human nature, which holds that
people are programmed by their genetic heritage to be so selfish
that a sense of global responsibility will come too late.

Individuals place themselves first, family second, tribe
third and the rest of the world a distant fourth. Their genes
also predispose them to plan ahead for one or two generations
at most. They fret over the petty problems and conflicts of
their daily lives and respond swiftly and often ferociously
to slight challenges to their status and tribal security.

But oddly, as psychologists have discovered, people also
tend to underestimate both the likelihood and impact of
such natural disasters as major earthquakes and great storms.

The reason for this myopic fog, evolutionary biologists contend,
is that it was actually advantageous during all but the last
few millennia of the two million years of existence of the
genus Homo. The brain evolved into its present form during
this long stretch of evolutionary time, during which people
existed in small, preliterate hunter-gatherer bands. Life was
precarious and short. A premium was placed on close attention
to the near future and early reproduction, and little else.

Disasters of a magnitude that occur only once every few centuries
were forgotten or transmuted into myth. So today the mind still
works comfortably backward and forward for only a few years,
spanning a period not exceeding one or two generations. Those
in past ages whose genes inclined them to short-term thinking
lived longer and had more children than those who did not.

Prophets never enjoyed a Darwinian edge. The rules have recently
changed, however. Global crises are rising within the life
span of the generation now coming of age, a foreshortening
that may explain why young people express more concern about
the environment than do their elders. The time scale has
contracted because of the exponential growth in both the
human population and technologies impacting the environment.

Exponential growth is basically the same as the increase of
wealth by compound interest. The larger the population, the
faster the growth; the faster the growth, the sooner the
population becomes still larger.

In Nigeria, to cite one of our more fecund nations, the population
is expected to double from its 1988 level to 216 million by the
year 2010. If the same rate of growth were to continue to 2110,
its population would exceed that of the entire present population
of the world.

With people everywhere seeking a better quality of life, the
search for resources is expanding even faster than the population.
The demand is being met by an increase in scientific knowledge,
which doubles every 10 tO 15 years. It is accelerated further
by a parallel rise in environment devouring technology. Because
Earth is finite in many resources that determine the quality of
life-including arable soil, nutrients, fresh water and space
for natural ecosystems-doubling of consumption at constant time
intervals can bring disaster with shocking suddenness.
Even when a nonrenewable resource has been only half used,
it is still only one interval away from the end.

Ecologists like to make this point with the French riddle of
the lily pond. At first there is only one lily pad in the pond,
but the next day it doubles, and thereafter each of its
descendants doubles. The pond completely fills with lily pads
in 30 days.

When is the pond exactly half full? Answer: on the 29th day.

Yet, mathematical exercises aside, who can safely measure the
human capacity to overcome the perceived limits of Earth?

The question of central interest is this:
Are we racing to the brink of an abyss, or are we just gathering
speed for a takeoff to a wonderful future?

The crystal ball is clouded; the human condition baffles all
the more because it is both unprecedented and bizarre, almost
beyond understanding.

Human Prospects

In the midst of uncertainty, opinions on the human prospect
have tended to fall loosely into two schools. 'The first,
exemptionalism, holds that since humankind is transcendent
in intelligence and spirit, so must our species have been
released from the iron laws of ecology that bind all other
species. No matter how serious the problem, civilized human
beings, by ingenuity, force of will and-who knows-divine
dispensation, will find a solution.

Population growth? Good for the economy, claim some of the
exemptionalists, and in any case a basic human right,
so let it run.

Land shortages? Try fision energy to power the desalting of
sea water, then reclaim the world's deserts. (The process
might be assisted by towing icebergs to coastal pipelines.)

Species going extinct? Not to worry. That is nature's way.
Think of humankind as only the latest in a long line of
exterminating agents in geological time. In any case, because
our species has pulled free of old-style, mindless Nature,
we have begun a different order of life. Evolution should
now be allowed to proceed along this new trajectory.

Finally, resources? The planet has more than enough resources
to last indefinitely, If human genius is allowed to address
each new problem in turn, without alarmist and unreasonable
restrictions imposed on economic development. So hold the course,
and touch the brakes lightly.

The opposing idea of reality is environmentalism, which sees
humanity as a biological species tightly dependent on the
natural world. As formidable as our intellect may be and
as fierce our spirit, the argument goes, those qualities
are not enough to free us from the constraints of the natural
environment in which our human ancestors evolved. We cannot
draw confidence from successful solutions to the smaller
problems of the past.

Many of Earth's vital resources are about to be exhausted,
its atmospheric chemistry is deteriorating and human
populations have already grown dangerously large. Natural
ecosystems, the wellsprings of a healthful environment,
are being irreversibly degraded. At the heart of the
environmentalist world view is the conviction that human
physical and spiritual health depends on sustaining the
planet in a relatively unaltered state.

Earth is our home in the full, genetic sense, where humanity
and its ancestors existed for all the millions of years
of their evolution. Natural, ecosystems-forests, coral reefs,
marine blue waters-maintain the world exactly as we would
wish it to be maintained.

When we debase the global environment and extinguish the
variety of life, we are dismantling a support system that
is too complex to understand, let alone replace, in the
foreseeable future.

Space scientists theorize the existence of a virtually
unlimited array of other planetary environments, almost
all of which are uncongenial to human life. Our own Mother
Earth, lately called Gaia, is a specialized conglomerate
of organisms and the physical environment they create on
a day-to-day basis, which can be destabilized and turned
lethal by careless activity.

We run the risk, conclude the environmentalists, of beaching
ourselves upon alien shores like a great confused pod of
pilot whales. If I have not done so enough already by
tone of voice, I will now place myself solidly in the
environmentalist school, but not so radical as to wish
a turning back of the clock, not given to driving spikes
into Douglas firs to prevent logging and distinctly uneasy
with such world movements as ecofeminism, which holds that
Mother Earth is a nurturing home for all life and should be
revered and loved as in premodern (paleolitlilc and archaic)
societies and that ecosystematic abuse is rooted in
androcentric that is to say, male-dominated-concepts,
values and institutions.

Still, however soaked in androcentric culture, I am radical
enough to take seriously the question heard with increasing
frequency.

Is humanity suicidal? Is the drive to environmental conquest
and self-propagation embedded so deeply in our genes as
to be unstoppable?

My short answer-opinion if you wish-is that humanity is
not suicidal, at least not in the sense just stated.
We are smart enough and have time enough to avoid all
environmental catastrophe of civilization-threatening
dimensions.

But the technical problems are sufficiently formidable
to require a redirection of much of science and technology,
and the ethical issues are so basic as to force a
reconsideration of our self-image as a species.

There are reasons for optimism, reasons to believe that
we have entered what might someday be generously called
the Century of the Environment. The United Nations Conference
on Environment and Development, held in Rio de Janeiro in
June 1992, attracted more than 120 heads of government,
the largest number ever assembled, and helped move environmental
issues closer to the political center stage; on Nov 18, 1992,
more than 1,500 senior scientists from 69 countries issued a
"Warning to Humanity," stating that overpopulation and
environmental deterioration put the very future of life
at risk. The greening of religion has become a global trend,
with theologians and religious leaders addressing environmental
problems as a moral issue. In May 1992, leaders of most of
the major American denominations met with scientists as guests
of members of the United States Senate to formulate a
"Joint Appeal by Religion and Science for the Environment."

Conservation of biodiversity is increasingly seen by both
national governments and major landowners as important to
their country's future. Indonesia, home to a large part of
the native Asian plant and animal species, has begun to
shift to land-management practices that conserve and
sustainably develop the remaining rain forests.

Costa Rica has created a National Institute of Biodiversity.
A pan-African institute for biodiversity research and
management has been founded, with headquarters in Zimbabwe.

Finally, there are favorable demographic signs. The rate
of population increase is declining on all continents, although
it is still well above zero almost everywhere and remains
especially high in sub-Saharan Africa. Despite entrenched
traditions and religious beliefs, the desire to use
contraceptives in family planning is spreading. Demographers
estimate that if the demand were fully met, this action
alone would reduce the eventual stabilized population
by more than two billion.

In summary, the will is there. Yet the awful truth remains
that a large part of humanity will suffer no matter what
is done. The number of people living in absolute poverty
has risen during the past 20 years to nearly one billion
and is expected to increase another loo million by the end
of the decade.

Whatever progress has been made in the developing countries,
and that includes an overall improvement in the average
standard of living, is threatened by a continuance of rapid
population growth and the deterioration of forests and arable
soil.

Our hopes must be chastened further still, and this is,
in my opinion, the central issue, by a key and seldom recognized
distinction between the nonliving and the living environments.
Science and the political process can be adapted to manage the
nonliving, physical environment. The human hand is now upon
the physical homeostat. The ozone layer can be mostly restored
to the upper atmosphere by elinination of CFC'S, with these
substances peaking at six times the present level and then
subsiding during the next half century. Also, with procedures
that will prove far more difficult and initially expensive,
carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases can be pulled back
to concentrations that slow global warming.

The human hand, however, is not upon the biological homeostat.
There is no way in sight to micromanage the natural ecosystems
and the millions of species they contain. That feat might be
accomplished by generations to come, but then it will be
too late for the ecosystems and perhaps for us.

Despite the seemingly bottomless nature of creation,
humankind has been chipping away at its diversity, and
Earth is destined to become an impoverished planet within
a century if present trends continue. Mass extinctions
are being reported with increasing frequency, in every
part of the world.

They include half the freshwater fishes of peninsular
Malaysia, 10 birds native to Cebu in the Phillppines,
half of the 41 tree snails Of Oahu, 44 of the 68 shallow-water
mussels of the Tennessee River shoals, as many as 90 plant
species growing on the Centinela Ridge in Ecuador, and
in the United States as a whole, about 200 plant species,
with another 680 species and races now classified as
in danger of extinction.

The main cause is the destruction of natural habitats,
especially tropical forests. Close behind, especially on
the Hawaiian archipelago and other islands, is the
introduction of rats, pigs, beard grass, lantana and
other exotic organisms that outbreed and extirpate
native species.

Humanity Destroying Habitats Where Evolution Can Occur

The few thousand biologists worldwide who specialize in diversity
are aware that they can witness and report no more than a very
small percentage of the extinctions actually occurring.

The reason is that they have facilities to keep track of only
a tiny fraction of the millions of species and a sliver of
the planet's surface on a yearly, basis. They have devised
a rule of thumb to characterize the situation: that whenever
careful studies are made of habitats before and after
disturbance, extinctions almost always come to light.

The corollary: the great majority of extinctions are never
observed. Vast numbers of species are apparently vanishing
before they can be discovered and named. There is a way,
nonetheless, to estimate the rate of loss indirectly.

Independent studies around the world and in fresh and marine
waters have revealed a robust connection between the size of
a habitat and the amount of biodiversity it contains. Even
a small loss in area reduces the number of species.

The relation is such that when the area of the habitat
is cut to a tenth of its original cover, the number of
species eventually drops by roughly onehalf. Tropical
rain forests, thought to harbor a majority of Earth's
species (the reason conservationists get so excited about
rain forests), are being reduced by nearly that magnitude.

At the present time they occupy about the same area as that
of the 48 coterminous United States, representing a little
less than half their original, prehistoric cover; and they
are shrinking each year by about 2 percent, an amount equal
to the state of Florida.

If the typical value (that is, 90 percent area loss causes
50 percent eventual extinction) is applied, the projected
loss of species due to rain forest destruction worldwide
is half a percent across the board for all kinds of plants,
animals and microorganisms.

When area reduction and all the other extinction agents
are considered together, it is reasonable to project a
reduction by 20 percent or more of the rain forest species
by the year 2020, climbing to 50 percent or more by mid-century,
if nothing is done to change current practice.

Comparable erosion is likely in other environments now under
assault, including many coral reefs and Mediterranean-type
heathlands of Western Australia, South Africa and California.

The ongoing loss will not be replaced by, evolution in any
period of time that has meaning for humanity. Extinction is
now proceeding thousands of times faster then the production
of new species.

The average life span of a species and its descendants in past
geological eras varied according to group (like molluscs,
echinoderms or flowering plants) from about 1 to 10 million
years.

During the past 500 million years, there have been five great
extinction spasms comparable to the one now being inaugurated
by human expansion. The latest, evidently caused the strike of
an asteroid, ended the Age of Reptiles 66 million years ago.

In each case it took more than 10 million years for evolution
to completely replenish the biodiversity lost. And that was in
an otherwise undisturbed natural environment.

Humanity is now destroying most of the habitats where evolution
can occur. The surviving biosphere remains the great unknown
of Earth in many respects. On the practical side, it is hard
even to imagine what other species have to offer in the way
of new pharmaceuticals, crops, fibers, petroleum substitutes
and other products.

We have only a poor grasp of the ecosystem services
by which other organisms cleanse the water, turn soil
into a fertile living cover and manufacture the very
air we breathe. We sense but do not fully understand
what the highly diverse natural world means to our esthetic
pleasure and mental well-being.

Scientists are unprepared to manage a declining biosphere.
To illustrate, consider the following mission they might be
given. The last remnant of a rain forest is about to be cut over.
Environmentalists are stymied. The contracts have been signed,
and local landowners and politicians are intransigent.

In a final desperate move, a team of biologists is scrambled
in an attempt to preserve the biodiversity by extraordinary
means. Their assignment is the following: collect samples of
all the species of organisms quickly, before the cutting starts;
maintain the species in zoos, gardens and laboratory cultures
or else deep-freeze samples of the tissues in liquid nitrogen,
and finally, establish the procedure by which the entire community
can be reassembled on empty ground at a later date, when social
and economic conditions have improved.

The biologists cannot accomplish this task, not if thousands
of them came with a billion-dollar budget. They cannot even
imagine how to do it. In the forest patch live legions of species:
perhaps 300 birds, 500 butterflies, 200 ants, 50,000 beetles,
1,000 trees, 5,000 fungi, tens of thousands of bacteria and
so on down a long roster of major groups.

Each species occupies a precise niche, demanding a certain place,
an exact microclimate, particular nutrients and temperature
and humidity cycles with specified timing to trigger phases
of the life cycle. Many, perhaps most, of the species are locked
in symbioses with other species; they cannot survive and reproduce
unless arrayed with their partners in the correct idiosyncratic
configurations.

Even if the biologists pulled off the taxonomic equivalent of
the Manhattan Project, sorting and preserving cultures of all
the species, they could not then put the community back
together again. It would be like unscrambling an egg with
a pair of spoons.

The biology of the microorganisms needed to reanimate the soil
would be mostly unknown. The pollinators of most of the flowers
and the correct timing of their appearance could only be guessed.
The "assembly rules," the sequence in which species must be allowed
to colonize in order to coexist indefinitely, would remain in the
realm of theory.

In its neglect of the rest of life, exemptionalism fails
definitively. To move ahead as though scientific and
entrepreneurial genius will solve each crisis that arises
implies that the declining biosphere can be similarly manipulated.

But the world is too complicated to be turned into a garden.
There is no biological homeostat that can be worked by humanity;
to believe otherwise is to risk reducing a large part of Earth
to a wasteland.

The environmentalist vision, prudential and less exuberant than
exemptionalism, is closer to reality. It sees humanity entering
a bottleneck unique in history, constricted by population and
econoniic pressures.

In order to pass through to the other side, within perhaps
50 to 100 years, more science and entrepreueurship will have
to be devoted to stabilizing the global environment. That
can be accomplished, according to expert consensus, only
by halting population growth and devising a wiser use of
resources than has been accomplished to date.

And wise use for the living world in particular means
preserving the surviving ecosystems, micromanaging them
only enough to save the blodiversity they contain, until
such time as they can be understood and employed in the
fullest sense for human benefit.

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