Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

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Preserving biodiversity, preventing climate

disaster: Childish dreams or audacious strategies?

Liam Heneghan

To cite this article: Liam Heneghan (2017): Preserving biodiversity, preventing climate
disaster: Childish dreams or audacious strategies?, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, DOI:
10.1080/00963402.2017.1338050

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00963402.2017.1338050

Published online: 12 Jun 2017.

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Download by: [University of Florida] Date: 12 June 2017, At: 14:56

BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
Preserving biodiversity, preventing climate disaster: Childish dreams or
audacious strategies?
Half-earth: Our Planets Fight for Life, by Edward
O. Wilson, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2017,
272 pp., US$16.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-63149-
252-5 http://books.wwnorton.com/books/half-earth/
Climate Diplomacy from Rio to Paris: The Effort to
Contain Global Warming, by William Sweet, Yale
University Press, New Haven, 2016, 256 pp., US
$18.00 (paperback), ISBN: 9780300209631 http://yale
books.com/book/9780300209631/climate-diplo
macy-rio-paris
In 1982, as a second-year zoology student, I marched into
the National Museum of Irelands natural history building
the Dead Zoo, as this institution is affectionately known
in Dublin demanding to see the curator of insects, Dr. Jim
OConnor. OConnor is something of a legend. He is a
caddis-fly expert who also compiled innumerable check-
lists of Irish insects from many taxonomic families. In
addition, he maintained an ongoing catalog of insects
imported into Ireland, making him the first invasion biol-
ogist I knew. There was a story knocking around Dublins
entomological circles that Jim had collected Drosophila
(fruit fly) specimens from Guinness taps in every county
in Ireland. (I became avocationally quite interested in
Guinness myself.) I didnt have the temerity to ask him if
the story was true, but I did request that he suggest a group
of poorly known Irish insects that I might start collecting.
OConnor assigned me the Chrysomelidae, commonly
known as leaf beetles, a diverse family distinguished by
often having metallic elytra (outer wings). One tribe of
chrysomelids the Alticini, or flea beetles has greatly
enlarged femora and at the slightest disturbance can leap
away with a single bound. The family contains some
notorious crop pests. Such species for example, the
Colorado potato beetle are well studied. Less attention
is given to tens of thousands of more innocuous species
worldwide. They dont bother us, so we ignore them.
When I started to collect Irish leaf beetles, they had not
been comprehensively reviewed since the late 19th cen-
tury. The chrysomelids were all mine!
I headed off to Killarney National Park that summer to
begin my work. I lived in a tent by the River Flesk, walked
miles every day sweeping vegetation with a net, and
popped the insects into a kill jar which I had charged
the polite entomological term for adding poison with
the crushed leaves of cherry laurel. Crumple one of those
leaves in your hand and inhale. Inhale shallowly though,
for that delicious aroma, reminiscent of toasted almonds,
is hydrogen cyanide. The first night I zipped up my tent,
laid out my haul of bejeweled beetles, and slept the way
people should sleep when they have discovered their lifes
calling.
But I awoke in the middle of the night, aware that
something had collided into me. In my memory, the
moon was high in the sky and it shone so diffusely
through the canvas walls that the tents interior seemed
mildest phosphorescent. As I looked up from my sleeping
bag, I saw beetles orbiting above my head like a constella-
tion of winged and glittering stars. The cherry laurel
leaves had failed to kill my leaf beetles and instead had
induced them into a narcotized sleep.
I have no doubt that every lover of the diverse and tiny
living things with which we share this glorious world can
think of comparable moments that marked the turning of
an inclination into a profession.
A pointed critique of anthropocene
extremism
Edward O. Wilson is an entomologist, taxonomist, con-
servationist, evolutionary biologist, social theorist, and
countless other lofty things besides. Hes even got a
novel under his belt, about ants. In his latest book, Half-
Earth: Our Planets Fight for Life, Wilson notes that there
are two types of scientist. The first type chooses science as
a means of making a living. People in the second group
find a way to make a living in order to go into science.
Id count myself with the second group, as do all the
scientific naturalists of Wilsons acquaintance. By
Wilsons account, this is a charming crowd: passionate,
uncompetitive, and always willing to share discoveries and
breaking news within the profession. Most of them will
have experienced epiphanic moments, like my night with
the beetles, that switched them on to the joys of studying
diverse living things.
Indeed, the most enchanting parts of Half-Earth in
which Wilson advocates setting aside, you guessed it, half
the Earth for the protection of biodiversity are those
2 BOOK REVIEW
containing anecdotes about Wilsons life as a naturalist.
(Unsurprisingly, Wilsons 1994 autobiography was called
Naturalist.) Here in Half-Earth, we have the young
Wilson chasing after a great purple hairstreak butterfly
and, still youthful, Wilson in northern Alabama discover-
ing a colony of army ants roving across his back yard. He
writes: At the tail end of the procession I saw a parasitic
silverfish and other insect followers. It was this little
spectacle that determined his subsequent lifelong profes-
sional involvement with ants. Less charming, perhaps, but
equally instructive is Wilsons account of an incident
when, as an adult, he stuck his hand into a nest of fire
ants as an experiment. Within seconds, he had received 54
stings from the workers, each of which within [24]
hours turned into an itching pustule. He offers the
following sensible advice: Never put your hand into,
much less sit on, fire ant nests.
Undeniably, Wilsons life as a naturalist has been more
variegated and eccentric than those of many contempor-
aries. (When I first laid eyes on Wilson, at a meeting of
the Ecological Society of America in the late 1990s, he was
on his hands and knees peering under a bush one
supposes he was looking for ants.) But he joins a long
line of field investigators with offbeat sensibilities. To
illustrate: A few years ago I huffed and puffed my way
up Mount Whitney, the highest summit in the contiguous
United States, only to discover that the route I followed
had been assigned by John Muir to the soft and succu-
lent. Muir slept on such Sierra peaks using his jacket as a
pillow. A vigorous inclination toward the wilds and to the
diversity of life can be, of course, an attractive character-
istic. But is it possible that those disposed to the study of
wild places and obscure species might be so far removed
from the mainstream of culture that they (or we, I
should say) advocate for implausible conservation
outcomes?
The central claim of Wilsons book that we must set
aside half the Earth for conservation (admittedly leaving
the other half devoted primarily to the needs of just one
species, us) is an audacious one. So audacious, in fact,
that it sounds like the dream of someone perennially
quirky, or even childlike. Most children go through a bug
phase, but it peters out for most when they take on the
remorseless tasks of adulthood: family, accumulating
power and wealth, answering e-mails, and so forth.
Naturalists retain, almost neotenically, a proclivity for
splashing about in puddles, collecting fruit flies from
Guinness taps, and sticking their hands in fire-ant nests.
Does Half-Earth represent a serious, adult suggestion at all?
Setting aside half the Earth for biodiversity seems an
especially bold suggestion in light of the emerging senti-
ment that we now live on a planet entirely transformed by
human action that is, that we live in the Anthropocene.
Thus, the Earth is under new management, governed not
by the implacable forces of nature alone but also by the
decisive intervention of humans. It is becoming common-
place to remark that we live on a domesticated planet. In
what Wilson considers the most extreme version of such
sentiments, the species that get to stay and those that fall
by the wayside (or, more bluntly, die off) will be deter-
mined by their utility, ultimately, for the flourishing of
humans.
This outlook, which Wilson calls the most dangerous
viewpoint, has about it a sort of gravitas that could not
seem more divergent from the idealistic notion of protect-
ing vulnerable species. Anthropocenic utility sounds like
grown-up talk: sensible, realistic, sober, feasible, and dull.
Moreover, from the perspective of Anthropocene think-
ing, Half-Earths recommendation seems beside the point,
since human beings have already taken over the whole of
the Earth. For example, the ecological footprint of
Chicagoans (calculated by multiplying the population of
the metropolitan statistical area by the per-capita area
needed for resources and waste sinks) is larger than the
state of Illinois. The United States, assessed from the same
perspective, doesnt fit ecologically into its allotment of
North American lands. Finally, because the collective
population of the world has overshot the limits of the
planet, we are living on borrowed time from the perspec-
tive of Global Footprint Analysis. Which half of nothing
are we to leave aside? And yet, Wilson insists that we need
not conflate conservation lands with pristine ones. Vast
areas of Earth indeed, perhaps even half of it might
provide conservation areas even though they have been
lightly trammeled.
In rejecting the mild nihilism of Anthropocene extre-
mism, Wilson advocates for evaluating the benefits of
biodiversity from perspectives other than utilitarian
ones. Not that he eschews such arguments in their
entirety for example, he approvingly quotes the
American biologist Margaret Lowman, known for her
expertise in canopy ecology, who touts the uses of plants
for medicine, fruits and seeds for pigments, and so forth.
And Wilson makes keen observations about the economic
value of healthy biodiversity. But Wilson is unabashed in
reminding us of the moral imperatives involved. (I dont
recall another Wilson book in which the word morality,
in relation to conservation, occurs so often.) Thus, he
writes that we trust that the public and business and
political leaders will join us and come to value the
living world as an independent moral imperative that also
happens to be vital for human welfare.
Since Wilson cautions against taking too utilitarian an
approach to evaluating biodiversity, it would be ungener-
ous to evaluate his book from the perspective of a very
narrowly defined utility that is, by asking if the book
provides a concrete roadmap for setting aside half the
Earth for biodiversity protection. (It doesnt!) However,
one might take the broader view and ask: Is it a good read,
and does one come away feeling more knowledgeable,
emboldened, refreshed, and motivated? (It is; one does.)
Wilson is a masterful and prolific writer. According to
the bibliography he generously provided me, he is respon-
sible for 433 technical papers and 31 books (along with

several edited collections). I calculate that if you settled
down to read Wilsons oeuvre today and assuming that
you read six hours a day, five days a week, and at a typical
speed you would finish in four months, give or take a
few days. Which isnt much compared to the time it must
have taken Wilson to write the nearly 6 million words he
has published. According to my calculations, Wilson will
have spent, dispersed over the many decades of his active
life, about 20 years writing every day. Thus, while we
might like to imagine Wilson out in the world peering
at ants, he is, as often as not, at his desk assiduously
putting pen to paper. And in Half-Earth, Wilson is at
the top of his writerly game.
But will half-earth work?
People in the conservation business might initially feel
that they have heard all this before and since Wilson
is a foundational figure in conservation management and
biodiversity studies, perhaps theyve heard it from Wilson
himself. However, Id urge both grizzled veterans and
neophyte enthusiasts to settle in with this book and soak
it all up there are so many curious facts to learn, so
many sober realities about extinction to absorb, so much
synthesis of what is known. Its gratifying as well that all
this goodness is organized so cogently, with a section on
the problem of the rapid decline of biodiversity (the heart-
breaking chapter on rhinos is a must-read); a section that
summarizes the state of conservation science and the
delights of natural history (Wilsons excursus on the
best places in the biosphere is a thrill, and the very
existence of such places is a tonic for despondency); and
finally, an outline of the most promising contemporary
approaches to preserving biodiversity.
To call the solution-oriented section a failure would be
harsh but the feasibility analysis that Wilson provides
for his half-earth suggestion seems incommensurate with
the majesty of the goal. To an extent, he extrapolates from
current trends in economic efficiency to arrive at a hand-
waving optimism that we humans will live better on less,
thus leaving space for the exuberant diversity of life.
These ideas contain a whisper of truth to use a term
that Wilson applies to Anthropocene extremism but it
defeats the imagination, mine at least, to see how this
transformation can happen at the speed it surely must.
The brace of chapters in which Wilson sketches how his
half-earth idea can be implemented is grandly optimistic
but it is disappointingly vague. Still, when these thinner
chapters are read alongside, for example, the section on
the best places in the biosphere, one can hope that pro-
tecting biodiversity is still possible.
Setting aside 50 percent of the globe for nature is a bold
goal; its scientifically defensible; and its a measurable out-
come. Business as usual in the world of conservation is
slowing biodiversity loss somewhat (and, scattered through-
out the book, Wilson presents a cogent analysis of conserva-
tions best successes). But even if conventional conservation
BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS 3
practices achieve the most favorable possible outcomes,
Wilson writes that there will still be losses [that] should
be considered unacceptable by civilized people.
To understand and appreciate biodiversity, we need nat-
uralists willing to stick their hands in the ants nest, collect
flies in odd places, sleep with beetles, and so on. But to protect
half the Earth, we will need a wide array of disciplinarians
philosophers, poets, novelists, legal scholars, and policy
wonks. We need a better ark; we need a bigger one.
Climate change diplomacy: making sausage
If in Half-Earth we dont see how the sausage is made, so
to speak, William Sweets Climate Diplomacy from Rio to
Paris carefully walks us through the sausage factory of
climate diplomacy and policy-setting. Sweet, a reporter
and a teacher at New York University, provides a cogent
account of the diplomacy that over almost three decades
has helped climate change take a central place among
concerns over the planets environmental future.
To press the sausage metaphor a bit further, consider the
following: According to the Food and Agriculture
Organization, an agency within the United Nations, a sausage
factory is best laid out in a linear fashion (Agriculture and
Consumer Protection Department 1985). Where space per-
mits, product movement should follow a straight line pat-
tern, from the receipt of raw material and its storage through
trimming, mincing, emulsifying, filling, smoking, and cook-
ing operations to the packaging, storage, and distribution of
the finished product. It might seem to do this very fine book
a disservice to suggest that its organization is as linear as that
of a processed-meat factory.The ingredients of climate diplo-
macy are myriad and negotiations have been fraught, and the
history is very complex, and thus not all that linear. And yet
the delight of this book Ill stop short of saying its a page-
turner, for perhaps no thorough account of the curlicues of
policy and diplomacy should be is that its straightforward
structure contains, explains, and assesses climate negotiations
in a readable, compelling, and highly sequential way. From
the 1992 Rio conference that established the UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change to the 2015 UN Climate
Change Conference in Rome, Sweet explains the stakes, intro-
duces the players, and summarizes the diplomatic action.
Readers will benefit from Sweets nuanced account of
whos who in global climate diplomacy. An especially impor-
tant point is that, in Europe, concerns over climate change do
not play out along simple ideological lines, as they seem to do
in the United States. Sweet credits Margaret Thatcher, for
example, as being the first global leader to draw sharp atten-
tion to the urgent problem of global warming.
The book was published in late 2016, just after the
Paris Agreement went into force. The agreement is imper-
fect to be sure, but at least it is guided by an aspiration to
keep global temperature from rising more than 2 degrees
Celsius. Thus, Sweets book concludes on a hopeful note
for those of us concerned about the adverse consequences
of anthropogenic climate change. But what a difference a
4 BOOK REVIEW

few months make. Since Climate Diplomacy was released, Disclosure statement
the new US administration has declared itself less com-
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
mitted to carbon mitigation than the administration that
preceded it. Indeed, the federal administration has
announced that the United States will withdraw from
the Paris climate accord, a loss of commitment in the
Funding
United States will undoubtedly have an impact on the This research received no specific grant from any funding
climate, even if the exact implications arent clear yet. agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
The current global commitment to slowing carbon emis-
sions and capping temperature rises is the result of more
than a quarter-century of negotiations at the highest inter- Notes on contributor
national levels. No matter what course the Trump adminis-
Liam Heneghan is an ecologist working at DePaul University,
tration follows on climate change, it may be the case, where he is a professor in and chair of Environmental Science
ironically, that some level of climate mitigation has already and Studies. He is also codirector of the universitys Institute for
been locked in. In many parts of the world (indeed, in many Nature and Culture. His book Beasts at Bedtime: The
individual US states), efforts to increase energy efficiency Environmental Wisdom in Classic Childrens Literature will be
and switch to cleaner fuels, as well as an ongoing commit- published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018. He tweets
ment to limiting carbon emissions, will forge ahead despite at @Dublinsoil.
the inhospitable political environment in Washington.
Efforts to prevent catastrophic climate change and
simultaneously adapt to an undoubtedly warmer world References
hopefully, only slightly warmer are tied to certain
encouraging changes in energy markets. But though an Agriculture and Consumer Protection Department. 1985. Layout
and Equipment for a Small-Scale Sausage Production Plant.
economically prudent appetite for efficient technology
Agriculture and Consumer Protection Department. http://www.
may endure, these trends are not irreversible. The sus- fao.org/docrep/003/x6556e/X6556E01.htm
tained effort of scientists, policy makers, public servants,
and private individuals is essential. Liam Heneghan
Of course, if humanity manages to sustain or even lhenegha@depaul.edu
amplify the trends in climate mitigation that can be consid-
2017 Liam Heneghan
ered propitious, Wilsons call for devoting half the Earth to
https://doi.org/10.1080/00963402.2017.1338050
biodiversity protection may come to seem less like a childish
dream and more like a plausible way forward.