Wilson Edward O. - Naturalist 25th Anniversary Edition

Praise for NATURALIST

A wise personal memoir A mixture of loneliness, amusement, curiosity and intellectual rigor makes the voice of this thoughtful man unforgettable.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

Vividly, often beautifully written. Wilson emerges not only as a gifted scientist, but also as a likable, passionate, eloquent person.

JARED DIAMOND in The New York Review of Books

What distinguishes Wilsons story is its handsome prose, honed by years of practice into a concise and sly discourse. Among literary scientists, no one since Rachel Carson has more effectively joined humble detail to a grand vision of life processes and structures.

WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD

In this exquisitely written memoir, the famed Harvard scientist looks back at his childhood in the South as well as his career as a groundbreaking thinker in the field of evolutionary biology. Truly, here is the irrefutable proof that scientists have souls.

USA TODAY

Naturalist reads like a classic heros tale.

BLOOMSBURY REVIEW

[Naturalist] is a sunlit story of the warm south: Mark Twain rather than Tennessee Williams, complete with drive, wit, love, pride, hope and so on beautifully written a profound and increasingly thoughtful love affair with life itself: all life.

THE GUARDIAN

A Shearwater Book

Published by Island Press

Copyright 1994 Island Press

Illustrations copyright 1994 Laura Simonds Southworth

Afterword copyright 2006 Edward O. Wilson

First Island Press cloth edition: August, 1994

First Island Press paperback edition: April, 2006

The excerpt from Daybreak in Alabama is from Selected Poems by Langston Hughes, copyright 1948 by Alfred A. Knopf Inc., and renewed 1976 by The Executors of the Estate of Langston Hughes.

Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 1718 Connecticut Ave., NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20009.

SHEARWATER BOOKS is a trademark of The Center for Resource Economics.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Wilson, Edward Osborne, 1929

Naturalist /Edward O. Wilson

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 1-55963-288-7 (cloth) 1-59726-088-6 (pbk)

1. Wilson, Edward Osborne, 1929 2. Naturalists

United StatesBiography. I. Title.

QH31.W64A3 1994

508.092dc2094-12111

British Cataloguing-in-Publication data available.

Printed on recycled, acid-free paper

Design by Dave Bullen Design.

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

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FOR R ENEE AND C ATHY

I HAVE BEEN, AS THE PHYSICIST VICTOR WEISSKOPF ONCE said of himself, a happy man in a terrible century. My preoccupation was not, however, with nuclear swords and breathtaking technological advances, but of a wholly different kind: I have served as a close witness to fundamental changes in Nature.

Nature, with a capital N, the concept: for me it holds two meanings. When the century began, people could still easily think of themselves as transcendent beings, dark angels confined to Earth awaiting redemption by either soul or intellect. Now most or all of the relevant evidence from science points in the opposite direction: that, having been born into the natural world and evolved there step by step across millions of years, we are bound to the rest of life in our ecology, our physiology, and even our spirit. In this sense, the way in which we view the natural world, Nature has changed fundamentally.

When the century began, people still thought of the planet as infinite in its bounty. The highest mountains were still unclimbed, the ocean depths never visited, and vast wildernesses stretched across the equatorial continents. Now we have all but finished mapping the physical world, and we have taken the measure of our dwindling resources. In one lifetime exploding human populations have reduced wildernesses to threatened nature reserves. Ecosystems and species are vanishing at the fastest rate in 65 million years. Troubled by what we have wrought, we have begun to turn in our role from local conquerer to global steward. Nature in this second sense, our perception of the natural world as something distinct from human existence, has thus also changed fundamentally.

Because my temperament and profession predispose me, I have followed these changes closely. As a younger scientist and naturalist, my own worldview shifted in concert with the advances of evolutionary biology and the decline that practitioners of this science perceived to be occurring in the natural environment. From childhood into middle age, my ontogeny repeated the larger phylogeny. Nature metamorphosed into something new.

My childhood was blessed. I grew up in the Old South, in a beautiful environment, mostly insulated from its social problems. I became determined at an early age to be a scientist so that I might stay close to the natural world. That boyhood enchantment remains undiminished, but it exists in a Heraclitean stream in which everything else has changed, all that I first thought about how the world works and all that I believed of humanitys place in the world. I have written this account to learn more fully why I now think the way I do, to clarify the elements at the core of my beliefs to you and to myself, and perhaps to persuade.

When I get to be a composer

Im gonna write me some music about

Daybreak in Alabama

And Im gonna put the purtiest songs in it

Rising out of the ground like swamp mist

And falling out of heaven like soft dew.

LANGSTON HUGHES

WHAT HAPPENED, WHAT WE THINK HAPPENED IN DISTANT memory, is built around a small collection of dominating images. In one of my own from the age of seven, I stand in the shallows off Paradise Beach, staring down at a huge jellyfish in water so still and clear that its every detail is revealed as though it were trapped in glass. The creature is astonishing. It existed outside my previous imagination. I study it from every angle I can manage from above the waters surface. Its opalescent pink bell is divided by thin red lines that radiate from center to circular edge. A wall of tentacles falls from the rim to surround and partially veil a feeding tube and other organs, which fold in and out like the fabric of a drawn curtain. I can see only a little way into this lower tissue mass. I want to know more but am afraid to wade in deeper and look more closely into the heart of the creature.