Vanishing Before Our Eyes

The profligacy of the 20th century has led humanity into a bottleneck of overpopulation and shrinking natural resources. Through this bottleneck humanity and the rest of life must now pass. By the end of the new century, if we are both lucky and wise, we will exit in better shape than we entered, with the population peaked around 8 billion or less and a gradual decline begun. People everywhere will have acquired a decent quality of life, with the expectation of more improvement to come. One of the defining goals of the century must also be to settle humanity down before we wreck the planet. To that end it is important to accept the challenge and responsibility of global conservation--and to do so right now, before it is too late. We will be judged by the amount of biodiversity we carry through the bottleneck with us.

There are reasons to be warily optimistic that biodiversity may be salvageable. Whether it happens in time depends fundamentally on the shift to a new ethic, which sees humanity as part of the biosphere and its faithful steward, not just the resident master and economic maximizer. That change of heart has begun in most countries among a few farsighted leaders and a growing part of the general public, albeit very slowly.

Success also depends on attention to sustainable management of the environment, including protection of biodiversity. Conservation experts now give top priority to "hot spots," pockets of wild nature that contain high concentrations of endangered species, which give hope that a great deal can be accomplished in a short span of time. From the coastal sage of California to the rain forests of West Africa, the hottest of the terrestrial hot spots occupy only 1.4% of the world's land surface yet are the exclusive home of more than a third of the terrestrial plant and vertebrate species. Similarly, from the streams of Appalachia to the Philippine coral reefs, aquatic hot spots occupy a tiny fraction of the shallow water surface. This much of the world can be set aside quickly without crippling economic or social consequences. More difficult but equally important are the preservation and long-term nondestructive use of the remaining fragments of the old-growth forests, including the tropical wildernesses of Asia, Central Africa and Latin America.

None of this will be easy, but no great goal ever was. Surely nothing can be more important than to secure the future of the rest of life and thereby to safeguard our own.

Wilson is University Research Professor at Harvard. His most recent book is Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge