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Our Planet's Fight for Life
Liveright
March 2016
On Sale: March 7, 2016
272 pages
ISBN: 1631490826
EAN: 9781631490828
Kindle: B00ZAT8VNE
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
Half-Earth proposes an achievable plan to save our imperiled
biosphere: devote half the surface of the Earth to nature. In order to stave off the mass extinction of species,
including our own, we must move swiftly to preserve the
biodiversity of our planet, says Edward O. Wilson in his
most impassioned book to date. Half-Earth argues that the
situation facing us is too large to be solved piecemeal and
proposes a solution commensurate with the magnitude of the
problem: dedicate fully half the surface of the Earth to nature. If we are to undertake such an ambitious endeavor, we first
must understand just what the biosphere is, why it's
essential to our survival, and the manifold threats now
facing it. In doing so, Wilson describes how our species, in
only a mere blink of geological time, became the architects
and rulers of this epoch and outlines the consequences of
this that will affect all of life, both ours and the natural
world, far into the future. Half-Earth provides an enormously moving and naturalistic
portrait of just what is being lost when we clip "twigs and
eventually whole braches of life's family tree." In elegiac
prose, Wilson documents the many ongoing extinctions that
are imminent, paying tribute to creatures great and small,
not the least of them the two Sumatran rhinos whom he
encounters in captivity. Uniquely, Half-Earth considers not
only the large animals and star species of plants but also
the millions of invertebrate animals and microorganisms
that, despite being overlooked, form the foundations of
Earth's ecosystems. In stinging language, he avers that the biosphere does not
belong to us and addresses many fallacious notions such as
the idea that ongoing extinctions can be balanced out by the
introduction of alien species into new ecosystems or that
extinct species might be brought back through cloning. This
includes a critique of the "anthropocenists," a fashionable
collection of revisionist environmentalists who believe that
the human species alone can be saved through engineering and
technology. Despite the Earth's parlous condition, Wilson is no
doomsayer, resigned to fatalism. Defying prevailing
conventional wisdom, he suggests that we still have time to
put aside half the Earth and identifies actual spots where
Earth's biodiversity can still be reclaimed. Suffused with a
profound Darwinian understanding of our planet's fragility,
Half-Earth reverberates with an urgency like few other
books, but it offers an attainable goal that we can strive
for on behalf of all life. 25 illustrations
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