Reprinted from EARTH PORTAL

Thank you Steve Hubbell. And I can say without hyperbole, because I said it with complete sincerity at the time of its pub­lication, his neutral theory of community organ­ization is revolutionary in its own right and is, as one reviewer has called it correctly, an instant classic. He is surely in the foremost rank of our ecologists, a rarity who has made major contributions in theory and also through a lifetime of field research composed empirical studies of diversity as it actually exists. Friends, colleagues, thank you for giving me this opportunity to present the Chafee Memorial Lecture. I take it as a signal honor to present a lecture in memory of John Chafee, a great patriot (what pleasure it gives me to be able to use that word unabashedly), a great senator, and a great environmentalist. I consider it an excep­tional honor to do so here in the Smithsonian, and in Washington — from which emanate so much policy and action that affect the world environment. As we peer forward, well into the 21st century, which is really the business of this conference, it will serve well to ask this question: What might we have overlooked about our place in history? What are we most at risk of forever losing, most likely toward the end of the century? The answer, I think, is this: much of life, the rest of life, or the creation if you will, a lot of our environmental security, and just as important, part of what it means to be human. Our relations with the rest of life can be put in a nutshell: scientists have found the biosphere (and this has been due in good part to work just in the last few decades) to be richer in diversity than ever before conceived. And that biodiversity, which took over three billion years to evolve, is being eroded at an accelerating rate by human activity. The loss, to conclude this synopsis, will inflict a heavy price in wealth and security and spirit.

The bottom line in global economics, I suggest, is different from that widely assumed by our leading economists and public philosophers. They have mostly ignored the numbers that count. Consider the following: the world population has now edged well past six billion and is on its way to nine billion or more by mid century, before mercifully peaking and starting to descend. Per capita fresh water and arable lands are dropping to levels that resource experts consider very risky. The key statistic is the ecological footprint — which is the average amount of productive land and coastal marine environment appropriated by each person (not in a single block, for example, around where you might live in Maryland or Texas, but in bits and pieces from around the world) needed for your food, water, housing, energy, transport, commerce, and waste management. Each person, for example, on average draws down a little bit of Costa Rica for coffee, a little bit of Saudi Arabia for oil, and so on. In the developing world, with five billion of the six billion people, the ecological footprint is about two-­and-a-half acres. In the United States it is ten times as much: about 24 acres. For every person in the world to reach present American levels of consumption with existing technology would require four more planet Earths. The people of the developing countries may never want to attain our level of profligacy, but in just trying to achieve a decent standard of living, they have joined the industrial world in converting the last of the natural environment and reducing a large part of the planet’s fauna and flora to endangered status or final extinction.

At the same time, Homo sapiens have become a geophysical force. We have driven atmospheric carbon dioxide to the highest levels in at least the last 200,000 years, unbalanced the nitrogen cycle, thinned the pro­tective ozone layer of the atmosphere, and initiated global warming that will ultimately be bad news everywhere. Our unbalanced relation to the natural environment began a long time ago as a mistake in capital investment. Humanity, having appropriated the Earth’s natural resources during the Neolithic Revolu­tion (starting 10,000 years or so ago) chose to annuitize the resources with a short term maturity reached by progressively increasing payouts. That’s basically what we have done and are doing. At the time that seemed a wise decision, and viewed in the short term it still does. After all, the result is rising per capita pro­duction and consumption markets awash in oil and grain — and also in opti­mistic economists cheerfully monitoring GDPs and competitive indices.

But there is a problem. The key elements of natural capital, as opposed to market capital (in other words, Earth’s arable land, groundwater, forests, marine fisheries, and petroleum) are finite and not subject to proportionate capital growth. They are furthermore being decapitalized by over-harvesting and habi­tat destruction. Therefore with population and consumption continuing to increase up and up, the per capita amount of resources left to be harvested is falling and destined to be harvested at a faster and faster pace in the future. The long-term prospects are not promising.

Humanity, awakened at last to the realities of the natural economy that underlies the market economy, has begun an earnest search for alter­native sources of materials and energy. Altogether the 21st century is destined, in my opinion and that of many here I suspect, to be the century of the environment. The immediate future is usefully conceived as a bottleneck. Science and technology, combined with a lack of self-understanding and a pale­olithic obstinacy that led to our ruinous environmental practices, have brought us to where we are today. Now science and technology combined with foresight and moral courage and common sense, both drawn from a more enlightened ethic than has hitherto ruled public philosophy, must see us through the bottle­neck and out, one hopes, by the end of the century.

There are two collateral effects of the bottleneck phenomenon worth reminding even this exceptionally well-informed group. The first is: the rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer. The income difference between the fifth of the world’s population in the wealthiest countries and the fifth in the poorest countries was 30 to 1 in 1960, 60 to 1 in 1990, and it’s now 74 to 1. Eight hun­dred million people remain in what the United Nations classifies as absolute poverty: no sanitation, no clean water, rampant disease, and periodic starva­tion. Even if the income differential is dismissed as a humanitarian issue, it should be considered a security issue. It is a setting for resentment and fanati­cism and the arrival of suicide bombers seeking a better world somewhere else.

But the second collateral effect (and the one to which I’ve personally paid a great deal of attention and want to address more fully tonight) is the accelerating destruction of the natural environment leading to the mass extinction of ecosys­tems and species. The damage already done can’t be repaired within any period of time that has meaning for the human mind. The more it is allowed to grow, the more future generations will suffer for it in ways both well understood now and still unimagined. “Why,” future generations will ask, “by needlessly extinguishing the lives of other species, did you diminish our own?” The radical reduction of the world’s biodiversity is the folly our descendants will least likely forgive us.

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The original image featured here and on the Earth Portal homepage are credited to L. Shyamal.

Dr. Edward O Wilson, Pellegrino University Research Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, is one of the most highly respected scientists in the world today. Hailed as “the new Darwin” by Thomas Wolfe and one of “America’s 25 Most Influential People” by Time magazine, he has twice received the Pulitzer Prize.