Edward O. Wilson - The Poetic Species: A Conversation with Edward O. Wilson and Robert Hass

The Poetic Species

A Conversation with
Edward O. Wilson and Robert Hass

Also by Edward O. Wilson

A Window on Eternity: A Biologists Walk Through Gorongosa National Park

Letters to a Young Scientist

Why We Are Here: Mobile and the Spirit of a Southern City (with Alex Harris)

The Social Conquest of Earth

Kingdom of Ants: Jos Celestino Mutis and the Dawn of Natural History in the New World (with Jos M. Gmez Durn)

The Leafcutter Ants: Civilization by Instinct (with Bert Hlldobler)

Anthill: A Novel

The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies (with Bert Hlldobler)

The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth

Nature Revealed: Selected Writings, 19492006

From So Simple a Beginning: The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin

Pheidole in the New World: A Dominant, Hyperdiverse Ant Genus

The Future of Life

Biological Diversity: The Oldest Human Heritage

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

In Search of Nature

Naturalist

Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration (with Bert Hlldobler)

The Diversity of Life

Success and Dominance in Ecosystems: The Case of the Social Insects

The Ants (with Bert Hlldobler)

Biophilia

Promethean Fire: Reflections on the Origin of Mind (with Charles J. Lumsden)

Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process (with Charles J. Lumsden)

Caste and Ecology in the Social Insects (with George F. Oster)

On Human Nature

Sociobiology: The New Synthesis

The Insect Societies

A Primer of Population Biology (with William H. Bossert)

The Theory of Island Biogeography (with Robert H. MacArthur)

Also by Robert Hass

Field Guide

Praise

Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry

Human Wishes

The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa

Sun Under Wood

Now and Then: The Poets Choice Columns 19972000

Time and Materials: Poems 19972005

The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems

What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World

First Published in the United States in 2014 by Bellevue Literary Press, New York

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ISBN: 978-1-934137-73-4

The degree to which we are all involved in the control of the earths life is just beginning to dawn on most of us, and it means another revolution for human thought.

Lewis Thomas,

The Lives of a Cell, 1974

The Poetic Species

A Conversation with
Edward O. Wilson and Robert Hass

Contents

O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Inversnaid

E DWARD O. WILSON has called Homo sapiens the poetic species because our cognitive infrastructure is dependent on analogy and associative thinking. As the longtime director of Poets House, a sixty-thousand-volume, open-access poetry library and a place for the poetic species to encounterwell, poetryI was fascinated by Wilsons analysis. So Poets House queried the American Museum of Natural History about convening an evening to explore intersections between poetry and science, hoping to create a public dialogue between scientist Edward O. Wilson and former US poet laureate Robert Hass. The conversation, from which this book originally took shape, occurred on December 6, 2012, at the museum.

Wilson is one of the great field biologists of our time. Besides his international stature as an entomologist and as a thinker about the implications of evolution, his scores of books intended for a general audience have invited the public into a dialogue about the passion and creativity of scientific inquiry. Hass is a poet, scholar, and thinker of suppleness and reach, with a lifelong commitment to environmental issues. Both care deeply about the future of life on earth. One of the possibilities for exchange between these two brilliant writers had to do with the proximity between the language of science and literature. How are both rooted in observation and articulation? What is the promise of consilience?

The conversation took pleasure in various overlapping habitats of imagination and articulation; conservation and evolution. But ultimately it demonstrated a shared sense of urgency. Human behavior is changing the living world. We have come to a moment of environmental crisis with profound implications for our own species and for the planet we share with other forms of life. Extinction rates are exponentially accelerating, and it has been predicted that half the species on earth could be lost within the next century. This would be the worst degradation of biodiversity in millennia. The causes are a noxious mixture of habitat loss and economic exploitation, deforestation, and climate change.

Edward O. Wilson and Robert Hass are both deeply concerned about human impacts on biodiversity. Both seek ways to join emotion with rational analysis to create a deeper and more enduring conservation ethic (Wilson 1985, 119).

Prior to this conversation, Poets House had been engaged in a project entitled the Language of Conservation in six major city zoos, placing poems in prominent juxtaposition with the animals to test whether or not the poetic species might become engaged in deeper affiliations with other living creatures through poetry.