Biodiversity at the Crossroads

With species extinction accelerating at an ever increasing pace—as many as 10,000 species are now lost annually by some counts—biodiversity's biggest champion, world-renowned Harvard scientist E. O. Wilson, is stepping up efforts to raise public awareness of this issue and is hoping that politicians are listening.

Interviewed in November 1999 by ES&T, Wilson urges formation of a new environmental ethic, one that looks beyond mere consumption and economic security to real quality-of-life issues, in which preservation of biodiversity is given top-level priority. Noting science and technology's crucial role in solving food supply problems of the world's burgeoning population, he encourages companies to take more responsibility for protecting the environment, rather than just ensuring that new biological strains of agricultural foodstuffs are safe. He also admonishes politicians and the media for failing to recognize the importance of biodiversity and the need for carrying all species through the human bottleneck of overpopulation and environmental degradation.

A scientist extraordinaire, Wilson is an accomplished biologist, naturalist, environmentalist, ecologist, entomologist, and zoologist. He is credited with being the first to bring awareness of biodiversity issues to mainstream audiences. After earning his bachelor's and master's degrees in biology from the University of Alabama, Wilson went on to Harvard University, where, again in the field of biology, he received his Ph.D. His curriculum vitae reads like a virtual Who's Who among scientists. Highlights include two Pulitzer Prizes for general nonfiction; the 1990 Crafoord Prize, ecology's Nobel Prize; numerous positions on the advisory boards of major museums, environmental organizations, and scientific committees; and publication of more than 350 scientific articles. Although now retired from teaching, Wilson still serves as a research professor and an honorary curator in entomology at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology.

Not mentioned in his résumé, but certainly true: Wilson is courageous.

You have written that “the loss of genetic and species diversity … is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.” What will our descendants see that will lead them to prioritize this happenstance highest on their list of unforgiven ills?
We still haven't woken to the fact that while all the changes in the environment having to do with pollution, ozone depletion, and global warming are vitally important, they can be reversed, while on the other hand, species extinction, the loss of biodiversity, cannot be reversed. You could have climate, the atmosphere, and the world's resources all regulated for the use of a sustainable population of people, but you never will recover the loss of fauna and flora. We are not deliberately trying to wipe out the Creation, but we are, by general agreement among experts on biodiversity, heading toward extinction of as many as 20% of species in the next 30 years.

Why do I and other ecologists consider that unforgivable? Because each species is a masterpiece of evolution and, depending on the species, has been evolving into its present state for some thousands to tens of millions of years. The average life span of a species before humanity came along was between half a million years in mammals and, in some groups like the insects, 10 million years. To wipe out species at the rate we are now inflicting has been to increase the extinction rate by between a hundred and a thousand times.

By impoverishing the planet of life forms, we also reduce the productivity and stability of natural ecosystems. For example, imagine a forest consisting of one species, which is almost the case in some of our towns that are completely planted in one of several species of ornamental tree. And then imagine, as has happened over and over again, for example, with the American chestnut, elm, and hemlock, that you have a plague of insects or fungi capable of wiping out the entire population. If there are a hundred species of trees, a dozen species could be extinguished and still a beautiful forest would be standing. So stability, for the very preservation of some of the natural habitats, depends upon diversity.

What we lose in terms of natural products through the extinction of the species that uniquely produced them is extraordinary. A wondrous example of this is a substance discovered here at Harvard from a small tree collected in Sarawak, at the northern end of Borneo. Random screening of Calophyllum lanigerum revealed a substance that is completely effective against the AIDS virus. Upon closer study, the substance proved to be an inhibitor of reverse transcriptase, which stops reproduction of the AIDS virus in its tracks. When collectors were sent back to get more samples, the tree was gone; the forest around it had been cut over, and it took a long search to find other specimens of this rather rare tree. This substance never would have been discovered if the species had been extinguished completely, and it easily could have been extinguished before anyone did that survey.

Another example has to do with what we call ecosystems services. We need healthy, natural ecosystems with the biodiversity in them, as independently operating units, for holding and cleaning water in watersheds, soil renewal, and even the manufacture of the very air we breathe. In addition, we need them as carbon sinks to slow down the accumulation of greenhouse gases.

All of this should be kept in mind when we talk about why it matters that we have so many species.

What do you see as the most difficult environmental problems we face as we head into the new millennium?
That's easy. Land degradation and the loss of irreplaceable, nonrenewable natural resources, including the natural environment, by the combination of continued population growth and the drive of people everywhere to increase their consumption and, with it, their quality of life.

At the present time, the ecological footprint—the amount of productive land used per capita for food production, water and waste management, habitation, transportation, and other necessities—for the United States is about 12 acres. In developing countries, it's about 1 acre. So, with 80% of the world's population in the developing countries and virtually all of the projected population growth over the next few decades occurring there, the pressures upon the earth's resources and its flora and fauna are going to be enormous because these people are understandably anxious to increase their ecological footprint.

It is difficult to see how science and technology can see us through the difficulties created by population growth and environmental change. The great task of the 21st century is going to be to use as much of our ingenuity and resources in science and technology to get us through the bottleneck to the other side, where populations will have leveled off and begun to decline worldwide, without wrecking the planet in the process. Right now, the pressure being exerted in developing countries, where most of the world's biodiversity is located—as for example, in the tropical rain forests—is so intense as to have initiated mass extinction in order to allow increasing consumption by the burgeoning population.

We need to identify the world's conservation hot spots and go all out to save them. Hot spots are those natural environments that have the largest number of plants and animals found nowhere else and are themselves endangered. For example, Hawaii is one of the hottest spots in the world, with the highest rates of extinction as well as the greatest endangerment of plant and animal species. Other notorious hot spots include Madagascar, Ecuador's mountain forests, Brazil's Atlantic Forest, the Western Ghats of India, the forest on the southern slopes of the Himalayas, and now, increasingly, coral reefs in most parts of the world. The magnitude of the catastrophe has been measured, and there's nothing to be gained anymore by just wringing one's hands. We have to devise a strategy for the next century that can pull us through the bottleneck, and that will depend on the full engagement of the best we have to offer in science and technology. It's also going to have to involve a shift of world opinion away from purely econometric measures of success and progress, toward an environmental ethic that says what really counts is quality of life for all generations to come, above and beyond exclusively bottom-line consumption and economic security.

Do you have faith that the application of science and technology will prove an adequate remedy?
Yes. It's got to. The stakes are too high. Can we do it? There's a certain level of urgency, when one says, 'Yes, because we have no other choice,' and that is truly our current circumstance.

What positive movement have you seen with regard to increased scientific study of biodiversity, incorporation of biodiversity issues in economic development, curbing human population growth, and educating people to the value of biodiversity as a solution in turning around species extinction?
Countries are now setting a few areas of the world aside—where forests and other habitats were being wiped out and large numbers of species along with them—particularly, in the developing world where it's most needed. These countries signed on to the 1992 Earth Summit Convention on Biological Diversity. As a result of government intervention, the destruction is beginning to slow down—for example, in Brazil's Atlantic Forest. Also, in Brazil recently, a substantial amount of the Pantenal, the South American equivalent of the Everglades with a magnificently rich diversity of organisms, was purchased and set aside in a reserve. So bits and pieces around the world are being saved, but it's still far below what's needed—even below the 3% or 4% of the surface of the land composing the most important hot spots.

As for education, it's still entirely inadequate worldwide, even in this country, where awareness of the biodiversity crisis has been slowly spreading. Unfortunately, even though Al Gore, the environmentally best informed political leader in history, is among the front-runners in the presidential race, the issue of biodiversity and even the environment generally have not yet (as we speak) appeared on the radar screen.

Concerning preservation of biodiversity, is gene patenting part of the solution or part of the problem?
It's a potential problem, but it's certainly also, when handled right, a big part of the solution. Pharmaceutical companies have been slow to screen and make use of natural products because of fear of not being able to secure patent rights, because theoretically, or I should say legally, a natural product is not patentable. It takes an enormous amount of money to find, perfect, test, and market a new pharmaceutical. Unless you have iron-clad guarantees on the patent, it's a risky venture economically. It would be unfortunate to depend solely on the synthesis of new pharmaceuticals from the ground up, because millions of organisms have been in an arms race with one another for hundreds of millions of years, slugging it out with bacteria and developing all sorts of anticancer materials and other defensive substances by Darwinian trial and error. Each one is a potential pharmacopoeia of materials waiting to be discovered. For example, insects, which are the dominant and most diverse creatures on the land around the world, are surely loaded with substances of this kind, yet they have scarcely been looked at by government or commercial laboratories.

What's your opinion about biotechnological applications in the area of plant engineering as to their effect on biodiversity?
Here, I may run into trouble with some of my colleagues, but I'm all for biotechnology. We need all the science and technology we can get to sustain both humanity and the natural world. We need to push bioengineering to the limit in creating more productive crops, particularly crops that can live in already devastated, soil-impoverished environments, low-diversity saline environments, and other biologically marginal land where productivity can be increased to the maximum allowed by photosynthetic potential and with a minimal effect on biodiversity. We absolutely must increase the world food supply. Bioengineering is the best hope now of increasing the productivity of existing crops and agricultural lands, and if done right, it can take pressure off the remaining natural environments.

But is this technology something we might live to regret?
The risk involved, of course, is that new life forms can be created that penetrate and endanger natural ecosystems, or they may transfer their genes to natural species in ways that help lead to their extinction. But so far, there has been very little sign that this is a general risk. Intact, healthy, natural ecosystems are hard to penetrate, even by natural species introduced as invasive forms from other countries. Moreover, the production and use of newly engineered life forms can be monitored and regulated in much the same way that we monitor and regulate forms created by conventional breeding, and, in a different area, the way new drugs are tested for side effects before they become generally available to the public. The side effects that may produce newly engineered forms are indeed a risk, but I don't see them as a very large risk at this point. In any case, it's one worth taking, given the benefits and our ability (and responsibility) to monitor each situation and regulate it.

What ethical considerations should we be pondering as this technology moves forward?
I think there's a very strong moral argument to be made for getting the maximum gains possible through bioengineering, and as a result, increasing food production and creating new pharmaceuticals and other products.

But there is an equally strong moral argument to be made for protecting all the biodiversity we can. It seems to me that the research laboratories in companies at the cutting edge of this new technology should have as part of their standard practice a strong environmental program. They should not just be satisfied with ensuring that new biological strains are safe, but also take a proactive role in helping to preserve the natural environment. That is, they should have an ancillary stewardship role as part of their ethical policy. That, I believe, is something that's not too hard to sell, particularly as the mood shifts toward a more conservation-based environmental ethic worldwide. Corporate leaders, who will be judged accordingly, will want to play a prominent role.

How big, in your opinion, do land and marine reserves need to be to preserve all the world's biodiversity?
As big as we can manage to make them. I'll tell you why. As you reduce the size of a reserve, or any habitat, you automatically reduce the number of species that can live sustainably on that reserve. The amount of reduction is roughly the following: A 90% reduction in area eventually results in a 50% decrease in the number of species. Although it may take a number of years, it still happens very rapidly in ecological time.

You can see this principle illustrated in the national parks of the western United States and Canada, where the number of mammal species, which can be easily monitored, has been declining steadily and most rapidly in the smallest reserves. Tragically, we'll always lose species. It's part of the mission of conservation biology to figure out the designs and exchange of fauna and flora, recovery and enlargement of natural reserves, to lose as few as possible, and to keep as much biodiversity as possible. As a matter of principle, we must always try for large reserves.

We've been hearing a lot about looming global water shortages in the coming decades as a result of inefficient irrigation systems, population growth, and groundwater depletion. How do you see this problem affecting species diversity, particularly aquatic species, as more water is diverted from rivers to sustain growing population centers?
Desperate. Natural resource experts agree that the major environmental constraints of the future are two in number: arable land, which has been dropping per capita for over 40 years, and available freshwater.

The groundwater in most parts of the world is dropping. In some parts, a good part of the American plains, for example, it is dropping drastically. The result is that aquatic biodiversity—comprising freshwater fish, a vast array of freshwater insects, turtles, mollusks, and so on—has been the most damaged in the United States and elsewhere in the world. It has the highest extinction rate worldwide and the greatest level of endangerment.

In what ways might governments and citizens be persuaded to do more to protect biodiversity?
Education, education, education. To that end, what we need are more public philosophers, government advisors, and media people with a scientific background, or at least enough knowledge of biodiversity, so it comes into focus for them, and therefore for their audiences. This has been a major failure of the media in this country, particularly in presenting key scientific issues. It is scandalous in the case of biodiversity. I don't know how this could be done, exactly—bringing our Anthony Lewises and George Wills, for example, around to seeing the importance of these issues.

How can you interest the public? Granted there's nothing duller than river pollution. But it's different with vanishing ecosystems and species. We need to dramatize the real biodiversity issues of the world better because it's not getting across to Joe Sixpack as to why any of this matters. Unfortunately, as far as Congress is concerned, and forgive me, no senator's spouse has ever died because of an extinct species, unlike heart disease or cancer. It's not something that comes home, particularly to opinion makers and our leaders, in a personal way so as to inspire a commitment.

We haven't heard Al Gore, for example, say 'I come from a state that has lost dozens of species of freshwater mollusks. Our splendid and ancient heritage is threatened. I care about this.' We haven't heard any political leader talk like that. Of course, I don't expect them to do so immediately, because the climate is not right for this type of presentation. But what we need is the beginnings of an environmental ethic that can reach into the public discourse, and an ethic depends on education.

How can international institutions aid in this effort?
They're vital. In fact, today some of the very best work is being done by international nongovernmental organizations. They've raised hundreds of millions of dollars, and they are actually in the field, the hot spots, among the people who live there in the developing countries especially, working to the limit of their ability. They include Conservation International, World Wildlife Fund (U.S.); the Worldwide Fund for Nature (international); the World Conservation Union; and the Nature Conservancy. I realize I'm leaving out other organizations like the Sierra Club, which are certainly very effective at the national level, but not on the global scale that these others are.

And then there are other institutions like the Museum of Natural History in London, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the New York Botanical Garden, which have very vigorous programs on biodiversity research and education. They're also having a very important effect. The fact that I'm on the boards of directors of three of them is something of a conflict of interest, but even if I'd been thrown out years ago, I'd still say it: These are the ones that are right at the top in terms of effectiveness.

Do you think recent efforts by the National Science Foundation (Environ. Sci. Technol. 1999, 33 (9), 188A) and EPA (Environ. Sci. Technol. 1999, 33 (13), 276A-279A) to do more multidisciplinary research, and view ecosystems as a whole, is a step in the right direction?
Yes, it is just that NSF is underfunded, but I give a lot of credit to it, including its present director, Rita Colwell, who has considerable vision and foresight. But clearly, given the political situation in this country and the lack of awareness among the electorate of environmental problems, especially biodiversity, we are not likely to see the kinds of federal support needed—and nowhere near that given for biomedicine.

We're going to have to depend a lot more on the nongovernmental organizations, including those I just mentioned, for that kind of effort, along with involvement by corporations and wealthy private supporters. Among the latter has been Ted Turner, and in the realm of conservation more strictly, Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel. Moore has contributed very substantially and usefully to the world—supporting just the kind of research and field programs that are the most effective in global conservation. One person like that, with the stroke of a pen, can sometimes do more good than the entire federal government. That's the way the world works right now. In fact, it's heartening, and we should make the most of it.

In your book Consilience, you propose unifying all the major branches of knowledge, in effect, combining sociology, economics, the arts, and religion under the umbrella of science. What does your ideal curriculum look like for students in the 21st century?
Let me say right away that I'm not exactly urging unification; I'm reporting that it is happening and urging that it be speeded up. The idea of consilience has great importance for higher education and for future scholarship. The social sciences, by general agreement, are far weaker than they should be for the problems that they're supposed to solve. In my opinion, the major reason for that inadequacy is that they lack a foundation of the kind that biology has in chemistry and chemistry has in physics. Natural science is now completely consilient, from subatomic particles to ecosystems.

Clearly, the foundation of the social sciences, which actually deal with the workings of the human mind and social institutions, is biology. In Consilience, I argue that the rapid advance of three fields of science has made the connection between biology and the social sciences more realistic. It's beginning to happen. Those three fields are cognitive science, often known as the brain sciences; human genetics—now we call it human genomics, because we're presently dealing with the entire genome; and evolutionary biology, especially sociobiology, sometimes called evolutionary psychology, which is becoming more successful in tracing the likely origins of human social instinct and explaining its significance.

Do you advocate a more expanded curriculum in institutions of higher learning or do you lean toward a more open, free exchange among specialists?
I think one of the real benefits of universal consilience, which is a hierarchically arranged webwork of cause-and-effect explanation, is the renaissance of general education—what is often called the liberal arts. And that's the notion of teaching— from high school on, but especially at the college level—a core curriculum, a common body of knowledge that consists of a clear statement of the world's problems and the search for meaning in life.

Even when scholars and teachers disagree about consilience, their discussion of it raises the issues that count in intellectual growth such as: Can we really have a scientific explanation of the mind? Will it be possible to restructure economics to take into account human instinct as disclosed by psychology and evolutionary biology? Will the origins of ethics and religion be illuminated? These are key questions, and scientists tend to say yes, yes, yes to them. Some social scientists and humanities scholars agree, but a lot still say no, no, no; this is reductionism taken too far. It's not going to work; the great branches of learning will stand on their own.

Well, maybe the critics are right—although, of course, I don't think so. But the point is that just by having the matter focused in this way, you're calling the attention of students and the general public to the exciting frontiers of science and scholarship most likely to shape their lives. And furthermore, you are resuming an examination of the great questions of the human condition: What is the meaning of human existence? Why are we here? Questions long ago abandoned by the philosophers are now being picked up as a franchise by the natural sciences.

How might this consilience approach provide solutions to our environmental problems?
I think in many ways. First of all, environmental problems are not going to be solved without the full engagement of the very best the intellect can give. The social sciences, in particular, are going to live in a dreamworld as far as the environment is concerned until they become linked more solidly to biology—not just the biology of the mind and a realistic view of the human condition, but biology that includes studies of the environment. In other words, the real world.