The Creation

Edward O. Wilson, a Harvard biologist and lifelong student of biodiversity, structures his book as an extended letter to an unnamed Southern Baptist pastor. Wilson, who grew up Southern Baptist in Alabama before becoming a secular humanist, addresses the pastor across a deep worldview divide. The pastor is a literalist interpreter of Scripture who believes in salvation through Christ; Wilson holds that humanity evolved from apelike ancestors and that ethics arises from reason rather than divine will. Despite these differences, Wilson argues both men share imperatives of security, dignity, and a need for a cause larger than themselves. His core appeal is direct: The Creation, meaning living Nature, is in deep trouble. Scientists estimate that if habitat destruction continues at present rates, half of all plant and animal species could be gone or fated for extinction by century's end. Religion and science, Wilson contends, are the two most powerful forces in the world, and if united on the common ground of biological conservation, the problem could be solved.

Wilson reframes the biblical narrative of Eden in ecological terms. Humanity was not driven from its natural cradle; it destroyed most of that cradle to improve its lot and multiply. He traces the wrong turn to the Neolithic revolution roughly 10,000 years ago, when agriculture fostered an illusion of freedom from Nature. A second betrayal followed with the modern technoscientific revolution, which encouraged the belief that urban material life is sufficient for human fulfillment. Wilson characterizes modern humanity as a chimera of Stone Age emotion, medieval self-image, and godlike technology, and argues that the species must ascend to Nature rather than away from it.

To establish what is at stake, Wilson defines Nature as the part of the original environment and its life forms that remains after human impact. He describes wilderness at multiple scales, from vast tropical forests and the taiga, the belt of coniferous forests stretching across North America and Siberia, to microwildernesses, where a single gram of soil may contain 10 billion bacteria of up to 6,000 species. He contrasts the staggering biodiversity of tropical rainforests, which cover about 6 percent of land surface yet harbor over half of known species, with the impoverished pastures that replace them.

Wilson articulates what he calls the First Principle of Human Ecology: Homo sapiens is confined to an extremely small niche. Earth's biosphere provides a self-regulating system sustaining humanity indefinitely, but it is a fragile membrane. He catalogs humanity's impact: altering the atmosphere, spreading toxic chemicals, appropriating 40 percent of solar energy available for photosynthesis, damming most rivers, and approaching exhaustion of fresh water. Of all these impacts, species extinction is the only irreversible one. Wilson argues for biodiversity's practical value: the rosy periwinkle from Madagascar yielded alkaloids that cure most cases of Hodgkin's disease and acute childhood leukemia, a Norwegian fungus enabled the organ transplant industry, and wild species collectively enrich soil, cleanse water, and pollinate crops.

To dramatize humanity's dependence on small organisms, Wilson presents a thought experiment. If all humans vanished, virtually no insect species would go extinct, and ecosystems would regenerate within centuries. If insects disappeared, most flowering plants would cease reproducing, birds and vertebrates would follow, and human populations would collapse amid starvation and warfare.

Wilson uses the history of fire ants in the Americas to illustrate how easily ecosystems can be disrupted by a single invasive species. He connects a 1518 ant plague on Hispaniola, documented by the chronicler Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, to the tropical fire ant (Solenopsis geminata), whose populations exploded after newly introduced sap-sucking insects provided them with abundant food. He ties this to personal experience: at 13, he discovered one of the earliest recorded nests of the red imported fire ant (Solenopsis invicta) near Mobile, Alabama, and at 19 surveyed the species' spread and environmental impact. The broader lesson concerns invasive species worldwide, whose most insidious long-term effect is the homogenization of ecosystems as native species are replaced by alien competitors.

Wilson profiles two species to illustrate every life form's irreplaceable uniqueness. The wolverine, a solitary predator of the subarctic forest, embodies wildness; Wilson hopes never to see one, because its unseen existence confirms that untrammeled habitats remain. The pitchfork ant (Thaumatomyrmex), the rarest ant genus in the world, has bizarre pitchfork-shaped jaws whose function remained a mystery until Brazilian entomologists discovered they pierce bristle-coated millipedes. Wilson introduces biophilia, a term he coined in 1984 for the innate human tendency to affiliate with life. He cites evidence that across cultures, people prefer savanna-like habitats consistent with the African environments in which the species evolved.

Turning to the crisis's scale, Wilson compares the current extinction wave to five previous mass extinctions in Earth's history, the most recent being the meteorite impact 65 million years ago that eliminated the dinosaurs. He introduces the HIPPO acronym ranking threats by destructiveness: Habitat loss, Invasive species, Pollution, human overpopulation, and Overharvesting. Current extinction rates stand at roughly 100 times the prehuman baseline and are expected to rise to 1,000 times or higher. Without action, Wilson warns, the sixth extinction could reach catastrophic levels by century's end, ushering in what he calls the Eremozoic Era, or the Age of Loneliness.

Wilson dismantles what he calls exemptionalism, the belief that humanity's special status lifts it above Nature's laws. He refutes successive stages of denial: that extinction is natural, that most species are dispensable, and that saving them can wait. The only viable solution is preserving natural environments in reserves large enough to maintain wild populations. Species concentrate in geographical hot spots; 25 of the most critical cover only 2.3 percent of land surface yet harbor 42 percent of vertebrate species. A 2000 conference estimated the cost of protecting these areas at roughly $30 billion, approximately one-thousandth of the annual gross world product. Wilson frames the challenge as a bottleneck: Global population is expected to peak at around nine billion by century's end, and during this period most surviving species can be saved if the commitment is made.

Wilson presents biology as essential to this effort. He identifies two fundamental laws: all properties of life obey the laws of physics and chemistry, and all biological differences have evolved by natural selection. He notes that only 1.5 to 1.8 million species have been discovered out of an estimated 3.6 to 112 million and proposes an Encyclopedia of Life, an electronic database with a continuously updated page for each known species. Drawing on 41 years of teaching at Harvard, Wilson advocates biology education organized around big questions and passionate commitment. He argues that cultivating naturalist intelligence, a capacity identified by cognitive psychologist Howard Gardner for recognizing patterns in living things, is essential in children. He highlights the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory (ATBI), a project to catalog every species in Great Smoky Mountains National Park that by 2004 had discovered 516 species new to science. He also describes bioblitzes, 24-hour species-counting events that spread from Walden Pond in 1998 to 17 countries by 2006.

In his closing, Wilson directly addresses the origin-of-life divide, stating that scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports life's self-assembly through mutation and natural selection, and dismissing Intelligent Design as lacking positive evidence. Yet he argues these metaphysical differences have remarkably little effect on daily conduct. Wilson suggests that he and the pastor are likely about equally ethical and altruistic, both products of a civilization built on religion and the Enlightenment alike. Wilson closes by affirming the transcendental moral obligation both are bound to share: the stewardship of the Creation.