E.O. Wilson

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He notes in Diversity that the 1.5 million species named so far by scientists represent only a tiny fraction of the tens of millions that may be out there. Wilson's prediction that 30% to 50% of all species would be extinct by the middle of the 21st century was meant to provoke--and it did. Critics rejected the estimate as another one of his flamboyant speculations. But subsequent research has supported it. From the perspective of the biodiversity scientist, virtually all the signs are bad.

How can human society transform itself? How can we become stewards of the living world? To Wilson, what is required is a new convergence of thought and ethics comparable to the Age of Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries. "The Enlightenment thinkers...got it mostly right the first time," he wrote in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998). "They assumed a lawful, perfectible material world in which knowledge is unified across the sciences and the humanities." Consilience received its customary share of praise and criticism, especially from detractors who found Wilson's conclusions naively optimistic. But he makes a persuasive argument that stranger convergences have already occurred and will occur again.

Now, at 72, E.O. Wilson is a senior doyen of science and, by his own admission, moving irresistibly into what he calls "the literary realm." It's not a bad place for him to be. Wilson has produced a scientific masterpiece in nearly every decade of his life. And in this time of crisis, our planet has never had more need for the observations and intuition of one of the world's great naturalists.

Novacek is provost and curator of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City