New Releases by Edward O. Wilson

This account of the effects of pesticides on the environment launched the environmental movement in America.

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

At a time when the survival of our species and the rest of the living world is more than ever linked to our understanding of science, Pulitzer-Prize-winning biologist Edward O. Wilson has distilled sixty years of teaching into a book for students, both young and old alike. Throughout his storied career, Wilson has counseled thousands of talented young people, and as a result has gleaned a deep knowledge, indeed a philosophy, of what one needs to know to have a successful career in science. In Letters to a Young Scientist, he lays out not just his practical advice for how the next generation can succeed, but why it is so vitally important that they do. Wilson threads these twenty letters with richly illustrated autobiographical anecdotes that illuminate his career--both his successes and his failures--and his motivations for becoming a biologist. Beginning with his own coming-of-age in Mobile, Alabama, Wilson reflects on his adolescence as an enthusiastic Boy Scout, resolved to spend as much of his free time as possible outdoors, exploring the swamps and forests of the Gulf Coast and cataloging its many spiders, ants, snakes, and butterflies. Determined at first to reach the rank of Eagle Scout and then later to become an entomologist. Wilson describes an early passion tempered by education as being a guiding force in forging the arc of a career. Letters to a Young Scientist includes advice on choosing a field of study, finding a mentor, and the application of scientific theory in the real world. Yet Wilson insists that success in the sciences does not depend on mathematical skill or even a high IQ, but rather a passion for finding a problem and solving it. He calls more broadly for a synthesis of the sciences and humanities in the twenty-first century that can inspire a generation of young people, encourage their innate creativity, and set them to work solving the problems that previous generations have woefully ignored.

A twenty-first-century philosophical argument against mechanistic views of human life outlines expansive and advanced theories on human behavior to consider how humans are supremely different from all other species.