There is much talk of giving ever bigger bits of the human landscape back to nature: tear down fences, block roads, reintroduce top predators, stir vigorously and stand clear. Called rewilding, it is all the rage among conservationists.
But none of them go as far as E. O. Wilson. In his 87th year and imagining a global endgame in the battle between nature and humanity, he will set out his ambitious stall in new book (Liveright, 7 March).
It fleshes out his argument for handing over 50 per cent of the planet to nature to stave off runaway extinctions and irreparable damage to the biosphere. Most environmentalists of course will love this kind of gambit from the doyen of conservation science.
Advertisement
But love may yet turn to loathing, because of his answer to the obvious question of how to achieve it. Humanity鈥檚 ecological footprint is open to debate, but it is often said that if we all devoured resources at the rate of the average US citizen, we would require 4 times the current land area of Earth.
Rather than culling our population or donning hair shirts, Wilson鈥檚 solution is to use technology. It would require high-tech agriculture and high-density living. And that means giving full rein to genetic engineering, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, robotics and more.
The full works
This sounds a lot like the published by a group of campaigners last year to howls of protest from many environmentalists. That called for nature-lovers to give up Luddite tendencies and embrace high-tech solutions such as nuclear power that could 鈥渄ecouple human well-being from environmental destruction鈥�.
All of this has a whiff of the spirit of another big thinker blessed with longevity, the 96-year-old inventor of Gaia theory, James Lovelock. He famously called our collective brains 鈥渁 Gaian nervous system鈥� that could save the planet. Wilson too believes we are the mind of the living world.
And yet, having advocated ecological salvation through advancing technologies, Wilson steps back. The ecomodernist manifesto declares its goal as creating a 鈥済ood Anthropocene鈥�, based on sound management of a planet indelibly changed by people rather than trying to revert it to an earlier natural state.
Wilson doesn鈥檛 believe we are up to the task of taking charge of the planet in this way, rather that we must stick with one half and give nature the rest to do as she will.
But he is hopeful that new technologies will transform our knowledge of how nature works, allowing us to one day create a predictive science of ecology that would allow for management of the entire biosphere.
Wilson, like most, is unclear how this story is going to play out. But perhaps, with the right tools at hand, we could trust ourselves to run the whole planet. Gaia鈥檚 brain, after all.
