E.O. Wilson Outlines the Need for Sustainability

BEREA, Ohio — At a standing-room only lecture at a small Methodist college, entomologist and social biologist E.O. Wilson talked about the need for maintaining the planet’s species in the face of a rising tide of extinctions.

The noted ant researcher, who invented the field of social biology in the 1970s, spoke recently at Baldwin-Wallace College as part of the school’s ongoing lecture series. 

“It’s a humble occupation, being an expert on ants, but I don’t mind,” said Wilson, who spoke for an hour in his approachable, down-to-earth style.

He said the Earth is home to 1.8 million known species (and as many as 8 million more that scientists haven’t yet identified). Of those that have been found, 900,000 are insects; only 5,000 are mammals. And all those species, from humans to horses to termites to bacteria, are vital to the survival of the planet, Wilson said.

Wilson gave some statistics and data to illustrate the immense amount of life on the planet:

• Wilson found 42 species of ants on a single tree in the Peruvian rain forest; that’s the same number of species that exist in the entire United Kingdom.
• Tropical rain forests — in places like Brazil, Congo and Papua New Guinea — take up about 6 percent of the planet’s surface (about the same size as the lower 48 states), but are the most diverse areas on the planet.
• 50 percent of the Earth’s species exist on 4 percent of its land surface.
• If you decrease a population’s available living space — an island, an ocean or a tree — by 10 percent, you decrease the number of species that space can support by 50 percent.
• The DNA — the blueprints of life — in one cell in a human body, if unwound, would stretch one meter. But you can’t see it because it’s only 20 billionths of a meter wide.

“That’s what we lose when we lose a species,” Wilson said. “We’re losing something that has been here…usually in the hundreds of thousands of years.”

He said that Americans slowly are starting to realize the importance of sustainability. Humans, he said, have “Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions and God-like technology. That’s the source of our problems.

“If you save the living environment, you will automatically save the physical environment,” he said. “The loss is going to inflict a heavy price on wealth, security and spirit.”

He estimates it would take $50 billion — about one one-thousandth of the world’s GDP — to establish sustainability programs to protect the planet’s species and remaining rain forests. But the problem is maintaining a balance between sustaining nature and ensuring the world’s poor — who inhabit much of these areas — to an enduring quality of life.

“It’s a political and economic solution we should be pressing,” he said. “The solution has to flow from recognizing that both depend on the other.”

The author is assistant editor of PCT magazine.

Want to help?
Wilson said that it doesn’t take millions of dollars or a fancy degree to start helping the environment. He suggested joining local efforts to maintain nature preserves and other natural areas.

Some of his suggestions included: 

• Audubon Society
• Nature Conservancy
• Sierra Club
• World Wildlife Fund
• Conservation International

Even more E.O.

Read an interview between Wilson and PCT.

Want to learn more about the 10 million species scientists have discovered? Check out the Encyclopedia of Life.

Ants, bees and other organisms can operate without a leader. In fact, they put together complex societies. Listen to this Feb. 2005 episode of Radio Lab to hear Wilson and other insect experts explain how they do it.