In his 1984 book “Biophilia,” Wilson lays out an important concept whose principles have taken hold in many professions including architecture, interior design, and landscaping. It is also the source of his new ethic of conservation. Simply, Wilson defines Biophilia as “the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes.” For example, human children are immediately attracted to living objects (not just moving objects). Further, the human child needs access to nature to grow and develop. For example certain exposures facilitate the immune system which if missed are never developed – some allergies are a result of this missed windows of exposure to the allergen. “[T]o explore and affiliate with life is a deep and complicated process in mental development…. Our existence depends on this propensity, our spirit is woven from it, hope rises on its currents…. Modern biology has produced a genuinely new way of looking at the world that is incidentally congenial to the inner direction of biophilia….instinct is in this rare instance aligned with reason…[therefore] to the degree that we come to understand other organism, we will place a greater value on them, and ourselves.” The value on ourselves includes the future unborn members of our species.
Before and ethics of conservation can be developed a very practical question must be answered: how big must an area for conservation be to be successful. To answer this question Wilson teamed up with Robert H MacArthur (a colleague and friend one year younger) starting in 1962, to essentially develop the science of biogeography “the discipline which studies the distribution of plants and animals around the world”. At the time biogeography was “ideal for theoretical research….replete with poorly organized information, underpopulated, and almost devoid of quantitative models. Its borders with ecology and genetics, specialties in which we also felt well prepared, were blank swaths across the map.” Their conclusion: there is a mathematical relationship between size of parcel of land, its distance to and size of nearby parcels (for example an island in the ocean or a park in a city) and species equilibrium in the parcel. Species equilibrium is a measure of how many species at various scales can survive on a parcel of land. An interesting natural process they discovered is that when nature colonizes new patches of land (such as after a volcano eruption) the first species to colonize are often colonized in turn by other species often this continues for many rounds in a state of species equilibrium. There is also the type of species that can survive on the parcel of land, large animals need larger species-specific parcels of land. They found that the larger the population that can be sustained the more likely for the species to survive but even in small parcels where a shock to the species (through bad luck or genetic maladaptation) a local extinction event rarely meant the species would not come back. Their results also indicate that there are standards and benchmarks for species’ populations in any parcel of land making conservation efforts predictable to the extent of determining if a particular parcel of conservation land is at a healthy level of species equilibrium or not.
The new conservation ethic espoused by Wilson will need a new maturation of biology to ask the right questions. On the one hand, it is important to understand why people care about some ethical subjects but not others and then the wisdom to care about the most important things. “The goal is to join emotion with the rational analysis of emotion in order to create a deeper and more enduring conservation ethic.” First some definitions, an ethic, is “a set of rules invented to meet circumstances so new or intricate, or else encompassing responses so far in the future, that the average person cannot foresee the final outcome.” Ethics generally proport to speak for all time otherwise they are better described as values. “Values are time-dependent, making theme all the more difficult to carve in stone.” The problem for the conservation ethic is that we have not been selected to think long term – we think short term, hours or days - a hundred years ahead at the most. There is no emotional connection with things more than a hundred years in the future and without emotion we are generally not moved. Consider the lack of emotional movement that comes from the following truth: “the whole process of our life is directed towards preserving our species and personal genes, [therefore] preparing for future generations is an expression of the highest morality of which human beings are capable. It follows that the destruction of the natural world in which the brain was assembled over millions of years is a risky step. And the worst gamble of all is to let species slip into extinction wholesale, for even if the natural environment is conceded more ground later, it can never be reconstituted in its original diversity.” This kind of argument is the best in terms of truth and reason but has hardly been successful. It may be a first step in education, but it will not move people to action. Further to this argument, “The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are east likely to forgives us.” Everything else that we can experience, conventional war, famine, economic collapse, totalitarianism, terrorism, and all the other negative -isms can be repaired in a few generations (except nuclear war) – all these are small issues compared to loss of biodiversity from habitat destruction.
Climate change should be a small concern compared to de-diversification. Every single interglacial period in earth’s existence has furthered biodiversity – global warming has been a force for good in terms of speciation and biodiversity – only this time is something different. The massive whole scale destruction of natural spaces is canceling out the good effects of global warming in our current interglacial period. The current fixation with reversing climate change and the warming of the earth is likely a misplaced concern and wasted effort. The fact that we are in the 6th mass extinction in earth’s history is a far bigger problem than climate change. The last mass extinction happened 65 Million years ago. There have been 11 interglacial periods in the last 800 thousand years. The hominid line has survived many many climate changes, the homo-sapien line has existed through about 4 interglacial climate change periods but none in our line has ever experienced or gone through a mass extinction. “The need now is for a great deal more knowledge of the true biological dimensions of our problem, civility in the face of common need and the style of leadership once characterized by Walter Bagehot as agitated moderation…. 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.”
A complete code of ethics is almost never created whole from first principles. More often they evolve like common law, new events and instances change the code. The conservation ethic has also followed this path. When hundreds of years ago some a rich family or king would designate land to be their own private hunting grounds, gardens, or graveyard. Wilson gives many examples of how many of these decisions all around the world have preserved species that died out in the wild. “The modern practice of conservation 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 of moral 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.” When we argue that chimps and humans share 99 percent of our genes and should be afforded some consideration, we are engaging in surface ethics based on kin relationships easily argued and easily dismissed. Given how we treat our own species to genocide, how much easier would it b for us to engage in the extermination of other species no matter how genetically close.
“We need to apply the first law of human altruism…never ask people to do anything they consider contrary to their own best interests. 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.” People will conserve habitat if they can see a benefit to themselves or their kin such as a potential huge lottery payout. “[T]he 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.” Wilson then gives a long list of plants and animals that can provide food, medicine, and companionship but have not been developed. And further with bio-engineering the benefits that a gene discovery in one plant or animal can have for another is nearly unimaginably vast. “Can there be an Ecuadoran biology, a Kenyan biology? Yes, if they focus on the uniqueness of indigenous life. Will such efforts be important to international science? Yes, because evolutionary biology is a discipline of special cases woven into global patterns.” Wilson imagines governments preserving the natural environment within their jurisdictions and local scientists exploring and studying the local indigenous plants and animals looking for traits to patent and use for their nations’ wealth. The patented benefits of a cancer alleviating compound could be immense and there is much more wealth and wellbeing available if countries stop destroying their biodiversity and look upon it as a natural resource more precious than oil or gold.
“Finally, the efforts of generations to come will be frustrated unless they are safeguarded with national reserve systems of the kind recently pioneered by Brazil, Costa Rica, and Sri Lanka, where parcels of land set aside are chosen to achieve a maximum protection of organic diversity. Otherwise hundreds of species will continue to vanish each year… Each takes with it millions of bits of genetic information, a history ages long and potential benefits to humanity left forever unmeasured.”