Edward O. Wilson - The Future of Life

THE FUTURE OF LIFE

Edward O. Wilson

ALFRED A. KNOPF
NEW YORK
2002

CONTENTS

In the end, our society will be defined
not only by what we create, but by what
we refuse to destroy.

John C. Sawhill (19362000), president,
The Nature Conservancy, 19902000

PROLOGUE

A LETTER TO THOREAU

Henry!

May I call you by your Christian name? Your words invite familiarity and make little sense otherwise. How else to interpret your insistent use of the first personal pronoun? I wrote this account, you say, here are my deepest thoughts, and no third person placed between us could ever be so well represented. Although Walden is sometimes oracular in tone, I dont read it, the way some do, as an oration to the multitude. Rather, it is a work of art, the testament of a citizen of Concord, in New England, from one place, one time, and one writers personal circumstance that manages nevertheless to reach across five generations to address accurately the general human condition. Can there be a better definition of art?

You brought me here. Our meeting could have just as well been a woodlot in Delaware, but here I am at the site of your cabin on the edge of Walden Pond. I came because of your stature in literature and the conservation movement, but alsoless nobly, I confessbecause my home is in Lexington, two towns over. My pilgrimage is a pleasant afternoons excursion to a nature reserve. But mostly I came because of all your contemporaries you are the one I most need to understand. As a biologist with a modern scientific library, I know more than Darwin knew. I can imagine the measured responses of that country gentleman to a voice a century and a half beyond his own. It is not a satisfying fantasy: the Victorians have for the most part settled into a comfortable corner of our remembrance. But I cannot imagine your responses, at least not all of them. Too many shadowed residues there in your text, too many emotional trip wires. You left too soon, and your restless spirit haunts us still.

Is it so odd to speak apostrophically across 150 years? I think not. Certainly not if the subject is natural history. The wheels of organic evolution turn at a millennial pace, too slowly for evolution to have transformed species from your time to mine. The natural habitats they compose also remain mostly unchanged. Walden Woods around the pond, having been only partly cut and never plowed, looks much the same in my time as in yours, although now more fully wooded. Its ambience can be expressed in similar language.

Anyway, the older I become, the more it makes sense to measure history in units of life span. That pulls us closer together in real time. Had you lived to eighty instead of just forty-four, we might today have a film clip of you walking on Walden Pond beach through a straw-hatted and parasoled crowd on holiday. We could listen to your recorded voice from one of Mr. Edisons wax cylinders. Did you speak with a slight burr, as generally believed? I am seventy-two now, old enough to have had tea with Darwins last surviving granddaughter at the University of Cambridge. While a Harvard graduate student I discussed my first articles on evolution with Julian Huxley, who as a little boy sat on the knee of his grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwins bulldog disciple and personal friend. You will know what I am talking about. You still had three years to live when in 1859 The Origin of Species was published. It was the talk of Harvard and salons along the Atlantic seaboard. You purchased one of the first copies available in America and annotated it briskly. And here is one more circumstance on which I often reflect: as a child I could in theory have spoken to old men who visited you at Walden Pond when they were children of the same age. Thus only one living memory separates us. At the cabin site even that seems to vanish.

Forgive me, I digress. I am here for a purpose: to become more a Thoreauvian, and with that perspective better to explain to you, and in reality to others and not least to myself, what has happened to the world we both have loved.

The landscape away from Walden Pond, to start, has changed drastically. In your time the forest was almost gone. The tallest white pines had been cut long before and hauled away to Boston to be trimmed into ship masts. Other timber was harvested for houses, railroad ties, and fuel. Most of the swamp cedars had become roof shingles. America, still a wood-powered nation, was approaching its first energy crisis as charcoal and cordwood ran short. Soon everything would change. Then coal would fill the breach and catapult the industrial revolution forward at an even more furious pace.

When you built your little house from the dismantled planks of James Collinss shanty in 1845, Walden Woods was a threatened oasis in a mostly treeless terrain. Today it is pretty much the same, although forest has grown up to fill the farmland around it. The trees are still scraggly second-growth descendants of the primeval giants that clothed the lake banks until the mid-1700s. Around the cabin site, beech, hickory, red maple, and scarlet and white oak push up among half-grown white pines in a bid to reestablish the rightful hardwood domination of southern New England forests. Along the path from your cabin on down to the nearest inletnow called Thoreaus Covethese trees give way to an open stand of larger white pines, whose trunks are straight and whose branches are evenly spread and high off the ground. The undergrowth consists of a sparse scattering of saplings and huckleberry. The American chestnut, I regret to report, is gone, done in by an overzealous European fungus. Only a few sprouts still struggle up from old stumps here and there, soon to be discovered by the fungus and killed back. Sprouting their serrate leaves, the doomed saplings are faint reminders of the mighty species that once composed a full quarter of the eastern virgin forest. But all the other trees and shrubs you knew so well still flourish. The red maple is more abundant than in your day. It is more than ever both the jack-of-all-trades in forest regeneration and the crimson glory of the New England autumn.

I can picture you clearly as your sister Sophia sketched you, sitting here on the slightly raised doorstep. It is a cool morning in June, by my tastes the best month of the year in New England. In my imagination I have settled beside you. We gaze idly across this spring-fed lake of considerable size that New Englanders perversely call a pond. Today in this place we speak a common idiom, breathe the same clean air, listen to the whisper of the pines. We scuff the familiar leaf litter with our shoes, pause, look up to watch a circling red-tailed hawk pass overhead. Our talk drifts from here to there but never so far from natural history as to break the ghostly spell and never so intimate as to betray the childish sources of our common pleasure. A thousand years will pass and Walden Woods will stay the same, I think, a flickering equilibrium that works its magic on human emotion in variations with each experience.

We stand up to go a-sauntering. We descend the cordwood path to the lake shore, little changed in contour from the sketch you made in 1846, follow it around, and coming to a rise climb to the Lincoln Road, then circle back to the Wyman Meadow and on down to Thoreaus Cove, completing a round-trip of two miles. We search along the way for the woods least savaged by axe and crosscut saw. It is our intention to work not around but through these remnants. We stay within a quarter-mile or so of the lake, remembering that in your time almost all the land outside the perimeter woods was cultivated.