A fascinating book, which describes the miracle of life: how the world came to be as diverse as it is. Wilson has succeeded in giving an entertaining "ecology 101" course by writing such an accessible book. I could not put the book down--and this is coming from someone who managed to get a bachelor's degree from a liberal arts college without taking a single biology course! Had I picked up this book 15 years ago, when it first came out, I may even have become an ecologist! But alas, the two books that changed the course of my life were Eric Wolf's "Europe and the People Without History" and Karl Marx's "Das Kapital", and that is why I am an anthropologist today.
But I digress. The highlight of this book, which begins by demonstration of the resilience of ecosystems, is Wilson's account of how species are born and how, in 3 billion years, came to be as diverse as it is now. He then moves on to describe extinction of species--over 98 % of all species that ever lived are now extinct, but the world is currently at the peak of biodiversity. Wilson's depiction of the "unmined riches" of nature is also fascinating. In the last chapters of the book, Wilson tells us, in a rather preaching tone, that we must save the world's biodiversity from going extinct, and provides some concrete (but rather ambitious) actions that can be taken do so.
The only problem I had with the book is the species-centric view of the world; as is typical for books written by ecologists, people are described only as destroyers of nature, and a description of the rich interactions between humans and nature is only given two pages in the 400-page book.
This book should be compulsory reading for all those politicians and CEOs of multinational corporations, who are not convinced that we need to take immediate actions to conserve the environment. After all, as a Sengalese conservationist is quoted in the book, "In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, we will understand only what we are taught".
But I digress. The highlight of this book, which begins by demonstration of the resilience of ecosystems, is Wilson's account of how species are born and how, in 3 billion years, came to be as diverse as it is now. He then moves on to describe extinction of species--over 98 % of all species that ever lived are now extinct, but the world is currently at the peak of biodiversity. Wilson's depiction of the "unmined riches" of nature is also fascinating. In the last chapters of the book, Wilson tells us, in a rather preaching tone, that we must save the world's biodiversity from going extinct, and provides some concrete (but rather ambitious) actions that can be taken do so.
The only problem I had with the book is the species-centric view of the world; as is typical for books written by ecologists, people are described only as destroyers of nature, and a description of the rich interactions between humans and nature is only given two pages in the 400-page book.
This book should be compulsory reading for all those politicians and CEOs of multinational corporations, who are not convinced that we need to take immediate actions to conserve the environment. After all, as a Sengalese conservationist is quoted in the book, "In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, we will understand only what we are taught".
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