Edward Osborne Wilson

Da Sotto le querce.

Correlato: Casa Naturale - Biofilia. Connessione vitale
Edward Osborne Wilson (Birmingham, 10 giugno 1929) è un biologo statunitense.

Si è occupato di vari temi di ricerca, quali la mirmecologia (la branca dell'entomologia che studia le formiche), la biodiversità e la sua distribuzione, attraverso la formulazione della teoria della biogeografia insulare. È noto in particolare per la fondazione del programma di ricerca della sociobiologia. È autore di numerosi saggi, due dei quali hanno ottenuto il Premio Pulitzer per la saggistica.

Simple-Award-Ribbon.png  Premio Pulitzer per la saggistica (1979)
Simple-Award-Ribbon.png  Premio Pulitzer per la saggistica (1991)
Edward Osborne Wilson (Birmingham, 10 giugno 1929) è un biologo statunitense.

Si è occupato di vari temi di ricerca, quali la mirmecologia (la branca dell'entomologia che studia le formiche), la biodiversità e la sua distribuzione, attraverso la formulazione della teoria della biogeografia insulare. È noto in particolare per la fondazione del programma di ricerca della sociobiologia. È autore di numerosi saggi, due dei quali hanno ottenuto il Premio Pulitzer per la saggistica.

Simple-Award-Ribbon.png  Premio Pulitzer per la saggistica (1979)
Simple-Award-Ribbon.png  Premio Pulitzer per la saggistica (1991)

Biophilia

The human bond with other species

1984

Wilson biophilia.jpg

incipitOn March, 1961, I stood in the Arawak village of Bernhardsdorp and looked south across the white-sand coastal forest of Surinam. For reasons that were to take me twenty years to understand, that moment was fixed with uncommon urgency in my memory. The emotions I felt were to grow more poignant at each remembrance, and in the end they changed into rational conjectures about matters that had only a distant bearing on the original event.
The object of the reflection can be summarized by a single word, biophilia, which I will be so bold as to define as the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes. Let me explain it very briefly here and then develop the larger theme as I go along.
incipitOn March, 1961, I stood in the Arawak village of Bernhardsdorp and looked south across the white-sand coastal forest of Surinam. For reasons that were to take me twenty years to understand, that moment was fixed with uncommon urgency in my memory. The emotions I felt were to grow more poignant at each remembrance, and in the end they changed into rational conjectures about matters that had only a distant bearing on the original event.
The object of the reflection can be summarized by a single word, biophilia, which I will be so bold as to define as the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes. Let me explain it very briefly here and then develop the larger theme as I go along.

Bernhardsdorp

In a twist my mind came free and I was aware ofthe hard workings of the natural world beyond the periphery of ordinary attention, where passions lose their meaning and history is in another dimension, without people, and great events pass without record or judgment. I was a transient of no consequence in this familiar yet deeply alien world that I had come to love. The uncounted products of evolution were gathered there for purposes having nothing to do with me; their long Cenozoic history was enciphered into a genetic code I could not understand. The effect was strangely calming. Breathing and heartbeat diminished, concentration intensified. It seemed to me that something extraordinary in the forest was very close to where I stood, moving to the surface and discovery.

I focused on a few centimeters ofground and vegetation. I willed animals to materialize, and they came erratically into view. Metallic-blue mosquitoes floated down from the canopy in search of a bare patch ofskin, cockroaches with variegated wings perched butterfly-like on sunlit leaves, black carpenter ants sheathed in recumbent golden hairs filed in haste through moss on a rotting log. I turned my head slightly and all ofthem vanished. Together they composed only an infinitesimal fraction ofthe life actually present. The woods were a biological maelstrom of which only the surface could be scanned by the naked eye. Within my circle of vision, millions of unseen organisms died each second. Their destruction was swift and silent; no bodies thrashed about, no blood leaked into the ground. The microscopic bodies were broken apart in clean biochemical chops by predators and scavengers, then assimilated to create millions of new organisms, each second.

Ecologists speak of "chaotic regimes" that rise from orderly processes and give rise to others in turn during the passage of life from lower to higher levels of organization. The forest was a tangled bank tumbling down to the grassland's border. Inside it was a living sea through which I moved like a diver groping across a littered floor. But I knew that all around me bits and pieces, the individual organisms and their populations, were working with extreme precision. A few of the species were locked together in forms of symbiosis so intricate that to pullout one would bring others spiraling to extinction. Such is the consequence of adaptation by coevolution, the reciprocal genetic change ofspecies that interact with each other through many life cycles. Eliminate just one kind oftree out ofhundreds in such a forest, and some of its pollinators, leafeaters, and woodborers will disappear with it, then various of their parasites and key predators, and perhaps a species of bat or bird that depends on its fruit - and when will the reverberations end? Perhaps not until a large part ofthe diversity ofthe forest collapses like an arch crumbling as the keystone is pulled away. More likely the effects will remain local, ending with a minor shift in the overall pattern ofabundance among the numerous surviving species. In either case the effects are beyond the power of present-day ecologists to predict. It is enough to work on the assumption that all of the details matter in the end, in some unknown but vital way.

After the sun's energy is captured by the green plants, it flows through chains of organisms dendritically, like blood spreading from the arteries into networks of microscopic capillaries. It is in such capillaries, in the life cycles of thousands of individual species, that life's important work is done. Thus nothing in the whole system makes sense until the natural history of the constituent species becomes known. The study of every kind of organism matters, everywhere in the world.


Now to the very heart of wonder. Because species diversity was created prior to humanity, and because we evolved within it, we have never fathomed its limits. As a consequence, the living world is the natural domain of the most restless and paradoxical part of the human spirit. Our sense of wonder grows exponentially: the greater the knowledge, the deeper the mystery and the more we seek knowledge to create new mystery. This catalytic reaction, seemingly an inborn human trait, draws us perpetually forward in a search for new places and new life. Nature is to be mastered, but (we hope) never completely. A quiet passion burns, not for total control but for the sensation of constant advance.


Then a tragedy: this image is almost gone. Although perhaps as old as man, it has faded during our own lifetime. The wildernesses of the world have shriveled into timber leases and threatened nature reserves. Their parlous state presents us with a dilemma, which the historian Leo Marx has called the machine in the garden. The natural world is the refuge of the spirit, remote, static, richer even than human imagination. But we cannot exist in this paradise without the machine that tears it apart. We are killing the thing we love, our Eden, progenitrix, and sibyl. Human beings are not captive peccaries, natural creatures torn from a sylvan niche and imprisoned within a world of artifacts. The noble savage, a biological impossibility, never existed. The human relation to nature is vastly more subtle and ambivalent, probably for this reason. Over thousands ofgenerations the mind evolved within a ripening culture, creating itself out of symbols and tools, and genetic advantage accrued from planned modifications of the environment. The unique operations of the brain are the result ofnatural selection operating through the filter of culture. They have suspended us between the two antipodal ideals of nature and machine, forest and city, the natural and the artifactual, relentlessly seeking, in the words of the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, an equilibrium not of this world. […]

The impossible dilemma caused no problem for ancestral men. For millions ofyears human beings simply went at nature with everything they had, scrounging food and fighting off predators across a known world ofa few square miles. Life was short, fate terrifying, and reproduction an urgent priority: children, if freely conceived, just about replaced the family members who seemed to be dying all the time. The population flickered around equilibrium, and sometimes whole bands became extinct. Nature was something out there - nameless and limitless, a force to beat against, cajole, and exploit. […]

The world began to yield, first to the agriculturists and then to technicians, merchants, and circumnavigators. Humanity accelerated toward the machine antipode, heedless of the natural desire of the mind to keep the opposite as well. Now we are near the end. The inner voice murmurs You went too far, and disturbed the world, and gave away too much for your control of Nature. Perhaps Hobbes's definition is correct, and this will be the hell we earned for realizing truth too late. But I demur in all this. I suggest otherwise: the same knowledge that brought the dilemma to its climax contains the solution. Think ofscooping up a handful of soil and leaf litter and spreading it out on a white ground cloth, in the manner of the field biologist, for close examination. This unprepossessing lump contains more order and richness of structure, and particularity of history, than the entire surfaces of all the other (lifeless) planets. It is a miniature wilderness that can take almost forever to explore.


The handful of soil and litter is home for hundreds ofinsects, nematode worms, and other larger creatures, about a million fungi, and ten billion bacteria. Each of the species of these organisms has a distinct life cycle fitted, as in the case of the predatory fungus, to the portion ofthe microenvironment in which it thrives and reproduces. The particularity is due to the fact that it is programed by an exact sequence of nucleotides, the ultimate molecular units of the genes. The amount ofinformation in the sequence can be measured in bits. One bit is the information required to determine which of two equally likely alternatives is chosen, such as heads or tails in a coin toss. English words average two bits per letter. Asingle bacterium possesses about ten million bits of genetic information, a fungus one billion, and an insect from one to ten billion bits according to species. If the information in just one insect-sayan ant or beetle-were to be translated into a code ofEnglish words and printed in letters of standard size, the string would stretch over a thousand miles. Our lump of earth contains information that would just about fill all fifteen editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

« Every species is a magic well. »
« Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life. »
« Males competed and females made choices. »

The Poetic Species

Elegance is more a product of the human mind than ofexternal reality. It is best understood as a product of organic evolution. The brain depends upon elegance to compensate for its own small size and short lifetime. As the cerebral cortex grew from apish dimensions through hundreds ofthousands ofyears ofevolution, it was forced to rely on tricks to enlarge memory and speed computation. The mind therefore specializes on analogy and metaphor, on a sweeping together ofchaotic sensory experience into workable categories labeled by words and stacked into hierarchies for quick recovery. To a considerable degree science consists in orginating the maximum amount ofinformation with the minimum expenditure of energy. Beauty is the cleanness of line in such formulations, along with symmetry, surprise, and congruence with other prevailing beliefs. This widely accepted definition is why P. A. M. Dirac, after working out the behavior of electrons, could say that physical theories with some physical beauty are also the ones most likely to be correct, and why Hermann Weyl, the perfecter of quantum and relativity theory, made an even franker confession: "My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful."

Einstein offered the following solution to the dilemma oftruth versus beauty: "God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically." In other words, a mind with infinite memory store and calculating ability could compute any system as the sum of all its parts, however minute and numerous. Mathematics and beauty are devices by which human beings get through life with the limited intellectual capacity inherited by the species. Like a discerning palate and sexual appetite, these esthetic contrivances give pleasure. Put in more mechanistic terms, they play upon the circuitry of the brain's limbic system in a way that ultimately promotes survival and reproduction. They lead the scientist adventitiously into the unexplored fractions of space and time, from which he returns to report his findings and fulfill his social role. Riemannian geometry is declared beautiful no less than the bird of paradise, because the mind is innately prepared to receive its symmetry and power. Pleasure is shared, triumph ceremonies held, and the communal hunt resumed. In a memorial tribute to Hermann Minkowski, David Hilbert described this perpetual cycle with gentle botanic images:

Our Science, which we loved above everything, had brought us together. It appeared to us as a flowering garden. In this garden there were wellworn paths where one might look around at leisure and enjoy oneselfwithout effort, especially at the side of a congenial companion. But we also liked to seek out hidden trails and discovered many an unexpected view which was pleasing to our eyes; and when the one pointed it out to the other, and we admired it together, our joy was complete.

Scientific innovation sometimes sounds like poetry, and I would claim that it is, at least in the earliest stages. The ideal scientist can be said to think like a poet, work like a clerk, and write like a journalist. The ideal poet thinks, works, and writes like a poet. The two vocations draw from the same subconscious wellsprings and depend upon similar primal stories and images. But where scientists aim for a generalizing formula to which special cases are obedient, seeking unifying natural laws, artists invent special cases immediately. They transmit forms ofknowledge in which the knower himself is revealed. Their works are lit by a personal flame and above all else they identify, in Roger Shattuck's expression, "the individual as the accountable agent of his action and as the potential seat of human greatness."

The aim of art is not to show how or why an effect is produced (that would be science) but literally to produce it. And not by just any cry from the heart-it requires mental discipline no less than in science. In poetry, T. S. Eliot explained, the often-quoted criterion of sublimity misses the mark. What counts is not the greatness of the emotion but the intensity of the artistic process., the pressure under which the fusion takes place. The great artist touches others in surgical manner with the generating impulse, transferring feeling precisely. His work is personal in style but general in effect.

The Serpent

Certain organisms have still more to offer because of their special impact on mental development. I have suggested that the urge to affiliate with other forms of life is to some degree innate, hence deserves to be called biophilia. The evidence for the proposition is not strong in a formal scientific sense: the subject has not been studied enough in the scientific manner of hypothesis, deduction, and experimentation to let us be certain about it one way or the other. The biophilic tendency is nevertheless so clearly evinced in daily life and widely distributed as to deserve serious attention. It unfolds in the predictable fantasies and responses of individuals from early childhood onward. It cascades into repetitive patterns of culture across most or all societies, a consistency often noted in the literature of anthropology. These processes appear to be part of the programs of the brain. They are marked by the quickness and decisiveness with which we learn particular things about certain kinds of plants and animals. They are too consistent to be dismissed as the result of purely historical events working on a mental blank slate.

Perhaps the most bizarre ofthe biophilic traits is awe and veneration of the serpent. The dreams from which the dominant images arise are known to exist in all those societies where systematic studies have been conducted on mental life. At least 5 percent of the people at any given time remember experiencing them, while many more would probably do so if they recorded their waking impressions over a period of several months. The images described by urban New Yorkers are as detailed and emotional as those ofAustralian aboriginals and Zulus. In all cultures the serpents are prone to be mystically transfigured. The Hopi know Palulukon, the water serpent, a benevolent but frightening godlike being. The Kwakiutl fear the sisiutl a kind ofthree-headed serpent with both human and reptile faces, whose appearance in dreams presages insanity or death. The Sharanahua of Peru summon reptile spirits by taking hallucinogenic drugs and stroking the severed tongues of snakes over their faces. They are rewarded with dreams of brightly colored boas, venemous snakes, and lakes teeming with caimans and anacondas. Around the world serpents and snakelike creatures are the dominant elements of dreams in which animals of any kind appear. Inspiring fear and veneration, they are recruited as the animate symbols of power and sex, totems, protagonists of myths, and gods.


To summarize the relation between man and snake: life gathers human meaning to become part ofus. Culture transforms the snake into the serpent, a far more potent creation than the literal reptile. Culture in turn is a product of the mind, which can be interpreted as an image-making machine that recreates the outside world through symbols arranged into maps and stories. But the mind does not have an instant capacity to grasp reality in its full chaotic richness; nor does the body last long enough for the brain to process information piece by piece like an all-purpose computer. Rather, consciousness races ahead to master certain kinds of information with enough efficiency to survive. It submits to a few biases easily while automatically avoiding others. A great deal ofevidence has accumulated in genetics and physiology to show that the controlling devices are biological in nature, built into the sensory apparatus and brain by particularities in cellular architecture.

The combined biases are what we call human nature. The central tendencies, exemplified so strikingly in fear and veneration of the serpent, are the wellsprings of culture. Hence simple perceptions yield an unending abundance of images with special meaning while remaining true to the forces of natural selection that created them.

How could it be otherwise? The brain evolved into its present form over a period of about two million years, from the time of Homo habilis to the late stone age of Homo sapiens during which people existed in hunter-gatherer bands in intimate contact with the natural environment. Snakes mattered. The smell of water, the hum of a bee, the directional bend of a plant stalk mattered. The naturalist's trance was adaptive: the glimpse ofone small animal hidden in the grass could make the difference between eating and going hungry in the evening. And a sweet sense ofhorror, the shivery fascination with monsters and creeping forms that so delights us today even in the sterile hearts of the cities, could see you through to the next morning. Organisms are the natural stuff of metaphor and ritual. Although the evidence is far from all in, the brain appears to have kept its old capacities, its channeled quickness. We stay alert and alive in the vanished forests of the world.

The Right Place

Insofar as organisms have been scrutinized, the naturalist can place them: their linkage in the ecosystem, life cycle, behavior, genetics, evolutionary history, physiology, and from all this information something of their general significance by whatever philosophy guided the naturalist to his life's pursuit in the first place. He is conducting a hunt in another mode, not for the animal's body but for discoveries, new information that will become part of the permanent record about the species viewed as an enduring entity. The pursuit is peculiarly satisfying because it enters that part of the real world, largely unrecognized, where humanity evolved during most ofits two-million-year history. The vivifying eye ofthe naturalist is the orderly response to the original human environment.

What was that environment? To answer the question, we must turn natural history partly into an exercise in aesthetic judgment. The more habitats I have explored, the more I have felt that certain common features subliminally attract and hold my attention. Is it unreasonable to suppose that the human mind is primed to respond most strongly to some narrowly defined qualities that had the greatest impact on survival in the past? I am not suggesting the existence of an instinct. There is no evidence of a hereditary program hardwired into the brain. We learn most of what we know, but some things are learned much more quickly and easily than others. The hypothesis of biased learning is at least worth examining, and the logical point of departure is a pair of derived questions. What was the prevailing original habitat in which the brain evolved? Where would people go ifgiven a completely free choice?

The whole matter may seem imponderable at first, but a workable approach can be found in this generalization from ecology: the crucial first step to survival in all organisms is habitat selection. Ifyou get to the right place, everything else is likely to be easier. Prey become familiar and vulnerable, shelters can be put together quickly, and predators are tricked and beaten COllsistently. A great many of the complex structures in the sense organs and brain that characterize each species serve the primary function of habitat selection. They determine the sounds, sights, and smells individuals receive and the sequence of responses these stimuli evoke.


The question ofinterest is the preferred habitat of human beings. It is often said that Homo sapiens is the one species that can live anywhere - on top of ice floes, inside caves, under the sea, in space, anywhere - but this is just a half truth. People must jigger their environment constantly in order to keep it within a narrow range ofatmospheric conditions. And once they have managed to rise above the level of bare subsistence, they invest large amounts of time to improve the appearance oftheir immediate surroundings. Their aim is to make the habitat more "livable" according to what are usually called aesthetic criteria.

With aesthetics we return to the central issue of biophilia. It is interesting to inquire about the prevalent direction of this vector in cultural evolution, in other words the ideal toward which human beings unconsciously strive no less relentlessly than flycatchers and deer mice. For ifanimals choose habitats by orientation devices and prepared learning built in during generations ofnatural selection, it is possible that people do the same. Ifcertain human feelings are innate, they might not be easily expressed in rational language. A more promising approach is to explore the nature of the environment in which the brain evolved. The logical hypothesis I raised earlier can then be more precisely expressed. It is that certain key features ofthe ancient physical habitat match the choices made by modern human beings when they have a say in the matter.


The Body — Yes. But is the mind predisposed to life on the savanna, such that beauty in some fashion can be said to lie in the genes of the beholder? Three scientists, Gordon Orians, Yi-Fu Tuan, and the late Rene Dubos, have independently suggested that this is indeed the case. They point out that people work hard to create a savanna-like environment in such improbable sites as formal gardens, cemeteries, and suburban shopping malls, hungering for open spaces but not a barren landscape, some amount of order in the surrounding vegetation but less than geometric perfection. Orians in particular has elaborated the idea according to modern evolutionary theory and added a small but suggestive body of supporting evidence. According to his formulation, the ancestral environment contained three key features.

First, the savanna by itself, with nothing more added, offered an abundance of animal and plant food to which the omnivorous hominids were well adapted, as well as the clear view needed to detect animals and rival bands at long distances. Second, some topographic reliefwas desirable. Cliffs, hillocks, and ridges were the vantage points from which to make a still more distant surveillance, while their overhangs and caves served as natural shelters at night. During longer marches, the scattered clumps of trees provided auxiliary retreats sheltering bodies of drinking water. Finally, lakes and rivers offered fish, mollusks, and new kinds of edible plants. Because few natural enemies of man can cross deep water, the shorelines became natural perimeters of defense.

Put these three elements together: it seems that whenever people are given a free choice, they move to open tree-studded land on prominences overlooking water. This worldwide tendency is no longer dictated by the hard necessities of hunter-gatherer life. It has become largely aesthetic, a spur to art and landscaping. Those who exercise the greatest degree offree choice, the rich and powerful, congregate on high land above lakes and rivers and along ocean bluffs. On such sites they build palaces, villas, temples, and corporate retreats. Psychologists have noticed that people entering unfamiliar places tend to move toward towers and other large objects breaking the skyline. Given leisure time, they stroll along shores and river banks. They look along the water and up, to the hills beyond or to high buildings, expecting to see the sacred and beautiful places, the sites of historic events, now the seats of government, museums, or the homes of important personages. And they often do, in such landmarks as the Zahringen-Kyburg fortress ofThun, the Belvedere palace of Vienna, the cathedral of Saint Etienne, the chateau of Angers, and the Potala, and among the more imposing sites from past eras, Thingvellir, location of the ancient parliament of Iceland, the Parthenon, and the great plaza at Tenochtitlan.

The most revealing manifestation of the triple criterion occurs in the principles oflandscape design. When people are confined to crowded cities or featureless land, they go to considerable lengths to recreate an intermediate terrain, something that can tentatively be called the savanna gestalt. At Pompeii the Romans built gardens next to almost every inn, restaurant, and private residence, most possessing the same basic elements: artfully spaced trees and shrubs, beds of herbs and flowers, pools and fountains, and domestic statuary. When the courtyards were too small to hold much of a garden, their owners painted attractive pictures ofplants and animals on the enclosure walls - in open geometric assemblages. Japanese gardens, dating from the Heian period of the ninth to twelfth centuries (and hence ultimately Chinese in origin), similarly emphasize the orderly arrangement of trees and shrubs, open space, and streams and ponds. The trees have been continuously bred and pruned to resemble those ofthe tropical savanna in height and crown shape. The dimensions are so close as to make it seem that some unconscious force has been at work to turn Asiatic pines and other northern species into African acacias.


There is another way to measure the strength of human biophilia. Visualize a beautiful and peaceful world, where the horizon is rimmed by snowy peaks reaching into a perfect sky. In the central valley, waterfalls tumble down the faces of steep cliffs into a crystalline lake. On the crest of the terminal bluff sits a house containing food and every technological convenience. Artisans have worked across the terrain below to create a replica of one of Earth's landscape treasures, perhaps a formal garden from late eighteenth-century England, or the Garden of the Golden Pavilion at Kyoto, marked by an exquisite balance ofwater, copse, and trail. The setting is the most visually pleasing that human imagination can devise. Except for one thing-it contains no life whatever. This world has always been dead. The vegetation ofthe garden is artificial, shaped from plastic and colored by master craftsmen down to the last blade and stem. Not a single microbe floats in the lake or lies dormant in the ground. The only sounds are the broken rhythms of the falling water and an occasional whisper of wind through the plastic trees.

Where are we? If the ultimate act ofcruelty is to promise everything and withhold just the essentials, the locality is a department of hell. It is a tomb built on a lunar landscape with air and elaborate contrivances added. This is a world (and more than a theoretical possibility in the age of space travel) where people would find their sanity at risk. Without beauty and mystery beyond itself, the mind by definition is deprived of its bearings and will drift to simpler and cruder configurations. Artifacts are incomparably poorer than the life they are designed to mimic. They are only a mirror to our thoughts. To dwell on them exclusively is to fold inwardly over and over, losing detail at each translation, shrinking with each cycle, finally merging into the lifeless facade of which they are composed.

The Conservation Ethic

Ethical philosophy is a much more important subject than ordinarily conceded in societies dominated by religious and ideological orthodoxy. It faces an especially severe test in the complexities of the conservation problem. When the time scale is expanded to encompass ecological events, it becomes far more difficult to be certain about the wisdom of any particular decision. Everything is riddled with ambiguity; the middle way turns hard and general formulas fail with dispiriting consistency. Consider that a man who is a villain to his contemporaries can become a hero to his descendants. If a tyrant were to carefully preserve his nation's land and natural resources for his personal needs while keeping his people in poverty, he might unintentionally bequeath a rich, healthful environment to a reduced population for enjoyment in later, democratic generations. This caudillo will have improved the long-term welfare ofhis people by giving them greater resources and more freedom of action. The exact reverse can occur as well: today's hero can be tomorrow's destroyer. A popular political leader who unleashes the energies of his people and raises their standard of living might simultaneously promote a population explosion, overuse of resources, flight to the cities, and poverty for later generations. Ofcourse these two extreme examples are caricatures and unlikely to occur just so, but they suffice to illustrate that, in ecological and evolutionary time, good does not automatically flow from good or evil from evil. To choose what is best for the near future is easy. To choose what is best for the distant future is also easy. But to choose what is best for both the near and distant futures is a hard task, often internally contradictory, and requiring ethical codes yet to be formulated.


An enduring code of ethics is not created whole from absolute premises but inductively, in the manner ofcommon law, with the aid of case histories, by feeling and consensus, through an expansion of knowledge and experience, influenced by the epigenetic rules ofmental development, during which well-meaning and responsible people sift the opportunities and come to agree upon norms and directions. […]

The modern practice ofconservation has moved steadily forward from such primitive beginnings, but its philosophical foundations remain shaky. It still depends almost entirely on what may be termed surface ethics. That is, our relationship to the rest of life is judged on the basis of criteria that apply to other, more easily defined categories ofmoral behavior. This mode of reasoning is approximately the same as promoting literature because good writing helps to sell books, or art because it is useful for portraiture and scientific illustration. Of course the criteria are not in error-just spectacularly incomplete.


The only way to make a conservation ethic work is to ground it in ultimately selfish reasoning-but the premises must be of a new and more potent kind.

An essential component of this formula is the principle that people will conserve land and species fiercely if they foresee a material gain for themselves, their kin, and their tribe. By this economic measure alone, the diversity of species is one of Earth's most important resources. It is also the least utilized. We have come to depend completely on less than 1 percent of living species for our existence, with the remainder waiting untested and fallow. In the course of history, according to estimates recently made by Norman Myers, people have utilized about 7,000 kinds of plants for food, with emphasis on wheat, rye, maize, and about a dozen other highly domesticated species. Yet at least 75,000 exist that are edible, and many of these are superior to the crop plants in use. The strongest of all arguments from surface ethics is a logical conclusion about this unrealized potential: the more the living world is explored and utilized, the greater will be the efficiency and reliability of the particular species chosen for economic use. Among the potential star species are these:

  • The winged bean (Psophocarpus tetragonolobus) ofNew Guinea has been called a one-species supermarket. It contains more protein than cassava and potato and possesses an overall nutritional value equal to that ofsoybean. It is among the most rapidly growing of all plants, reaching a height of fifteen feet within a few weeks. The entire plant can be eaten, tubers, seeds, leaves, flowers, stems, and all, both raw and ground into flour. A coffeelike beverage can be made from the liquefied extract. The species has already been used to improve the diet in fifty tropical counrries, and a special institute has been set up in Sri Lanka to study and promote it more thoroughly.
  • The wax gourd (Benincasa hispida) of tropical Asia grows an inch every three hours over the course offour days, permitting multiple crops to be raised each year. The fruit attains a size of up to 1 by 6 feet and a weight of80 pounds. Its crisp white flesh can be eaten at any stage, as a cooked vegetable, a base for soup, or a dessert when mixed with syrup.
  • The Babussa palm (Orbigyna martiana) is a wild tree of the Amazon rain forest known locally as the "vegetable COW." The individual fruits, which resemble small coconuts, occur in bunches ofup to 600 with a collective weight of200 pounds. Some 70 percent ofthe kernel mass is composed ofa colorless oil, used for margarine, shortening, fatty acids, toilet soap, and detergents. A stand of 500 trees on one hectare (2.5 acres) can produce 125 barrels of oil per year. After the oil has been extracted the remaining seedcake, which is about one-fourth protein, serves as excellent animal fodder.

Even with limited programs of research, biologists have compiled an impressive list of such candidate organisms in the technical literature. The vast majority ofwild plants and animals are not known well enough (certainly many have not yet been discovered) even to guess at those with the greatest economic potential. Nor is it possible to imagine all the uses to which each species can be put. Consider the case of the natural food sweeteners. Several species of plants have been identified whose chemical products can replace conventional sugar with negligible calories and no known side effects. The katemfe (Thaumatococcus danielli) ofthe West African forests contains two proteins that are 1,600 times sweeter than sucrose and are now widely marketed in Great Britain and Japan. It is outstripped by the well-named serendipity berry (Dioscoreophyllum cumminsii), another West African native whose fruit produces a substance 3,000 times sweeter than sucrose.

Natural products have been called the sleeping giants of the pharmaceutical industry. One in every ten plant species contains compounds with some anticancer activity. Among the leading successes from the screening conducted so far is the rosy periwinkle, a native of the West Indies. It is the very paradigm of a previously minor species, with pretty five-petaled blossoms but otherwise rather ordinary in appearance, a roadside casual, the kind of inconspicuous flowering plant that might otherwise have been unknowingly consigned to extinction by the growth of sugarcane plantations and parking lots. But it also happens to produce two alkaloids, vincristine and vinblastine, that achieve 80 percent remission from Hodgkin's disease, a cancer ofthe lymphatic system, as well as 99 percent remission from acute lymphocytic leukemia. Annual sales of the two drugs reached $100 million in 1980.

A second wild species responsible for a medical breakthrough is the Indian serpentine root (Rauwolfia serpentina). It produces reserpine, a principal source oftranquilizers used to relieve schizophrenia as well as hypertension, the generalized condition predisposing patients to stroke, heart malfunction, and kidney failure.

The natural products of plants and animals are a select group in a literal sense. They represent the defense mechanisms and growth regulators produced by evolution during uncounted generations, in which only organisms with the most potent chemicals survived to the present time. Placebos and cheap substitutes were eliminated at an early stage. Nature has done much of our work for us, making it far more efficient for the medical researcher to experiment with extracts ofliving tissue than to pull chemicals at random offthe laboratory shelf. Very few pharmaceuticals have been invented from a knowledge of the first principles of chemistry and medicine. Most have their origin in the study of wild species and were discovered by the rapid screening of large numbers of natural products.


I will now add a note of optimism that I know is shared by many biologists. The exploration of natural resources is the kind of research most readily justified in the underdeveloped countries, especially those in the tropics. It is also the kind they can most easily afford. These nations occasionally need accelerators, satellites, mass spectrometers, and the other accouterments of big science, but such equipment can be borrowed during cooperative ventures with the richer countries. The economically less developed countries can do better with skilled and semiskilled workers who make expeditions into the wild, collect and prepare specimens, culture promising varieties, and spend the long hours ofclose observation needed to understand growth and behavior. This kind of science is labor-intensive, best performed by people who love the land and organisms for their own sake. Its results will gain worldwide recognition and serve as a source ofnational pride.