Summary: The Future of Life

In The Future of Life (New York: Knopf, 2002), ecologist E. O. Wilson argues that we have entered the “Century of the Environment,” a “post-ideological” era in which we must “shift to a culture of permanence” in order to avoid a planetary ecological catastrophe (22-23). Wilson begins by surveying the "membrane of organisms" that cover the Earth, showing that from "Everest's Peak to the floor of the Mariana Trench, creatures of one kind or another inhabit virtually every square inch of the planetary surface" (3). Only a small percentage of those creatures, about 1.5 million species, have been identified to science.

Increasingly, the Earth's living membrane is dominated by a single species, Homo Sapiens. Taken together, the planet's 6 billion people make up about 100 times more biomass than any other large animal species that has ever existed. And global population is projected to reach as much as 10 billion before stabilizing sometime later this century. Already, human beings consume 40 percent of the solar energy stored by the planet's green plants. And Wilson calculates that for “every person in the world to reach present U.S. levels of consumption with existing technology would require four more planet Earths” (23).

As a result of the massive growth of human population, natural habitats and biodiversity are declining at unprecendented rates. The primary causes are anthropogenic deforestation, pollution, climate change, and biological transfer. Species are disappearing at as much as one thousand times background extinction rates. As many as half of existing species may be extinct within a century. As a result, Wilson writes, "The most memorable heritage of the twenty-first century will be the Age of Loneliness that lies before humanity" (77).


What's being lost is of incalculable value, not only for its own sake, but also to human society. Forests, fisheries, and other ecosystems provide irreplacable economic inputs, and they are most productive when most biodiverse. More critically, almost all of world food production relies on a few dozen plants. Hundreds of thousands of potential cultivars exist in the wild, waiting to be developed into food plants or medicines. More importantly, Wilson argues, biophilia or love of nature is a fundamental element of our human nature. In a world without wild nature, we will lead deeply impoverished lives.

Wilson argues that the solution is a cultural revolution in which science and religion join forces. He places his hopes in the development of a global land ethic informed by solid environmental science. And he proposes a list of concrete goals including: protecting the world's biodiversity hotspots and old-growth forests, protecting critical freshwater and marine habitats, mapping the world's ecosystems to inform a planetary conservation strategy, restoring degraded ecosystems, gene-banking in zoos and gardens, and aggressive support for birth control programs.

Wilson points out that the cost of these efforts would be minimal: "The tropical wilderness areas and the hottest of the hotspots . . . which together contain perhaps 70 percent of Earth's plant and animal species, can be saved by a single investment of roughly $30 billion [which] is only about one-thousandth of the annual combined gross national products of the world" (183). And he concludes with kudos to the green NGOs that built the global justice movement of the 1990s who recognized that the two biggest problems confronting humanity are a "devastated environment" and "the press of land-hungry people with nowhere else to go" (189).