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Today we're jumping into a really foundational text of modern environmental philosophy.
It's E .O.
Wilson's Biophilia, and we're focusing on a really central chapter, the conservation ethic.
That's right.
And it's so important because he's trying to build a case for conservation that's more than just,
well, more than just sentiment.
Exactly.
Our mission here is to figure out how we build this lasting relationship with nature that goes, you know, way beyond the superficial reasons.
And Wilson says the movement needs a true advance in moral reasoning.
He ties it to our understanding of biology and this emerging field he calls bioethics.
Bioethics.
So he frames this as a kind of evolution of our thinking, right?
Right.
He sees society's relationship with any ethical problem moving through three phases.
Okay.
Phase one is when we know almost nothing.
So the questions are purely ethical.
They're all gut feeling.
Makes sense.
Then comes phase two, which is where environmentalism has been living for decades.
Knowledge is growing fast.
The focus is all intellectual, all data.
It can even seem, you know, amoral.
We're just collecting facts.
And phase three.
That's when understanding is almost complete.
You connect all those facts and suddenly the questions become profoundly ethical again.
So you're saying we're kind of stuck in phase two.
We're trying to motivate people with facts and figures when the problem actually demands a bigger, more moral synthesis.
That's the heart of it.
Yeah.
The goal is to merge that rational analysis with, well, raw human emotion to create a conservation ethic that actually lasts.
Right.
Let's unpack this because that merger hits a wall almost immediately, doesn't it?
The problem of time.
A massive wall.
You can go all the way back to the ecologist Aldo Leopold.
He said an ethic is basically a set of rules for things that are too new or too complex for our intuition to handle.
Especially when the consequences are way off in the future.
Precisely.
Wilson argues that our values are totally time dependent.
Natural selection wired us to think in.
He calls it physiological time.
So hours, days, my lifetime, a hundred years max.
Exactly.
You feel a pang for a starving child you see on the news.
You get angry about a polluted river nearby.
But ecological time,
evolutionary time.
Centuries, millennia.
It's an intellectual concept.
It has no immediate emotional pull.
Which leads to this really jarring question he poses.
What do we actually owe our remote descendants?
I mean, 500 years from now.
And his answer is it's pretty provocative, he says.
Nothing.
Nothing.
The idea of an obligation just loses its meaning across that many centuries.
Instead, he says the real obligation is to ourselves right now in the act of planning for them.
So it's not about some future person I'll never know.
It's about the integrity of the human story
keeping it going.
Precisely.
It's about ensuring human existence continues unbroken, unsullied, and progressively secure.
Planning for that is the highest form of morality we're capable of.
It preserves the species.
It preserves our genes.
So destroying the natural world, the very place our brains evolved.
That's the ultimate act of self -sabotage.
It's just the riskiest thing we could possibly do.
Like Leopold said, the first rule of tinkering is to keep all the pieces.
You don't know which one you'll need.
And that idea of risk, of losing pieces, brings us to the biggest catastrophe.
I mean, you ask anyone what the worst possible event is.
They'll say nuclear war.
Every time.
Right.
But Wilson argues that if we manage to avoid that, the worst thing is already happening.
It's not running out of oil.
It's not economic collapse.
No, those things are terrible, but they're reparable.
You can fix them in a few generations.
Okay.
And this is where it gets really The folly our descendants will least likely forgive us for is the loss of genetic and species diversity.
Because you can't repair that.
That takes millions of years of evolution to correct.
The numbers he cited are just staggering.
A conservative estimate of a thousand species lost per year.
And that's not just big animals.
It's mosses, insects.
All the little things that run the world.
And he projected it would get much worse,
rising past 10 ,000 species a year in the nineties, which is what one species an hour, one species every hour over 30 years.
That could be a million species erased to put that in perspective.
It's the biggest extinction event in recent geological history.
It's faster than the rate of new species creation.
Wilson compares our impact to the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs, but so much faster, incomparably faster.
We're doing in decades.
What took natural catastrophe is millennia.
We're throwing away the library before we even learned to read the books.
Okay.
So we have this enormous problem of scale and time.
How do we build an ethic strong enough for that?
Well, Wilson says an enduring ethic isn't handed down from on high.
It grows inductively like common law.
It's built from case histories, from feeling, from consensus, which is hard because what's good for us now might be terrible for the future.
And that's the core of the ambiguity.
It's the Taranthro paradox.
Right.
A brutal tyrant impoverishes his people, but preserves the environment.
He unintentionally leaves a rich inheritance for future generations.
But the popular hero who raises everyone's standard of living might promote overuse, leaving nothing but scarcity and poverty for posterity.
In ecological time, good intentions don't always lead to good outcomes.
And if you look at the history of conservation, it didn't start from a place of, you know, high -minded ethics.
Not at all.
It was often a byproduct of pure self -interest.
Royal hunting reserves in Europe, the gardens of the candy kings in Sri Lanka, preserve for the pleasure of the ruling class.
And Wilson had a personal experience with this, right?
In Cuba.
A profound one.
He visited a place called Blanco's Woods in 1953.
It was this tiny, pristine patch of native forest completely surrounded by clear -cut land.
It was only there because...
One wealthy family just didn't bother to develop it.
Their selfish inaction, their neglect, preserved a window into Cuba's geologic past.
It kept the pieces together.
It's amazing how often that's the story.
Just by the fingernails preservation.
Like the kinko tree.
It went extinct in the wild.
It only survived because it was planted in temple gardens in China and Japan.
Or Per David's deer.
Hunted to extinction everywhere, except the emperor's private park in Peking, and then later saved by an English duke.
These are all just happy accidents.
And that reliance on accidents highlights the weakness of what Wilson calls the surface ethic.
Exactly.
We tried to justify conservation using the same logic we use for other things, like promoting literature because it sells books.
It's just not deep enough.
A great example he uses is kinship.
We like animals that act like us.
Like surrogate kin.
For sure.
Dogs are popular because they fit right into our social structure.
They treat us like the alpha dog.
But Wilson experienced this on a much deeper level.
Almost an unnerving one.
With Kanzi, a young pygmy chimpanzee.
And pygmy chimps, bonobos, they're our closest living relatives.
99 % identical genes.
Their skeletons even look a lot like our early ancestor Lucy.
Genetically, they are the most human -like of all animals.
And the first encounter with Kanzi didn't go well.
Not at all.
Kanzi went into a frenzy.
Wilson tried to be friendly, extended his hand, and Kanzi just slapped it away.
The human approach failed.
Totally.
It was only when he was coached to imitate the chimps' own conciliatory call, this soft woo woo woo sound, and offered some juice.
And Kanzi calmed down.
Climbed right into his lap.
And Wilson had this powerful realization.
He'd responded to Kanzi just like he would to a two -year -old child.
The same anxiety.
The same desire to please.
And he felt pleased with himself.
That he'd proven adequately human.
Wow.
So that feeling of shared ancestry, that phylogenetic continuity, it's powerful.
But you said earlier that kinship isn't enough to build an ethic on.
Why not?
Because it's still part of that flimsy surface ethic.
When push comes to shove, when resources get scarce, history shows we are very good at discriminating against even our closest human relatives.
A species is even easier to discard.
Kinship is just too unreliable.
So we need something stronger.
We need a stiffer dose of biological realism.
Wilson follows Garrett Hardin's principle here.
Never ask people to act against their own best interests.
The ethic has to be grounded in ultimately selfish reasoning.
But a new and more potent kind of selfish reasoning.
And that potent reason is simple.
Economic self -interest.
People will fight to conserve something if they see a clear material gain for themselves, their family, their tribe.
We have to start seeing biodiversity as one of our most important and least utilized resources.
The potential is just astonishing.
We use less than 1 % of living species for our food and medicine.
We've used maybe 7 ,000 plants for food.
But there are at least 75 ,000 edible ones out there.
Many of them far superior to our current crops.
And the examples are incredible.
The winged bean from New Guinea.
A one -species supermarket.
It has more protein than a potato, grows 15 feet and a few racks, and you can eat the whole thing.
The tubers, seeds, leaves, everything.
Or the baboosa palm in the Amazon.
The vegetable cow.
It produces these huge bunches of coconuts, 200 pounds worth.
The oil is used for margarine and soap.
And the seed cake is amazing animal fodder.
And then there's the pharmaceutical potential, which is just explosive.
About 1 in 10 plant species contain some kind of anti -cancer compound.
He talks about the rosy periwinkle, just a common roadside plant.
Minor species from the West Indies.
But it produces two alkaloids, vincristine and vinblastine.
And by the 80s, these were achieving incredible remission rates.
80 % for Hodgkin's disease, 99 % for acute lymphocytic leukemia.
We're talking about a $100 million a year industry from a plant that could have easily been wiped out to make way for a sugar cane field.
The logic is just.
It's inescapable.
Nature has already done all the research and development.
Which brings us to that powerful analogy from Thomas Eisner.
Biodiversity is a genetic library.
Each species is a book.
But not just a book, a loose -leaf notebook.
The genes are detachable pages.
And with genetic engineering, we can take a page from one notebook and put it in another.
The prime example of this is that primitive maze, Zia diploporenis.
Found in just three tiny patches in Mexico, 10 acres in total.
It could have been wiped out by a single bulldozer.
And yet it has the gene for perennial growth.
A hereditary trait.
Imagine transferring that to modern corn.
No more replanting every year.
It would revolutionize agriculture, especially in marginal lands.
An irreplaceable resource.
Just hanging on by a thread.
And despite all this potential, the neglect is just.
It's criminal.
Wilson says global spending on tropical research back in 1980 was about $30 million.
Less than the cost of two F -15 fighter jets.
We spend so much more on destroying things than on discovering them.
And taxonomy, the basic science of identifying species, is a dying field.
But there's a little bit of optimism here.
This kind of research is labor -intensive.
It's something developing countries, where most of these species are, can actually afford to do.
It could be a source of national pride and global recognition.
So what does this all mean?
We have all these parts of the surface ethic.
A healthy environment, kinship, economic gain, even just nostalgia.
They all make a good case for preservation.
They're compelling.
They're enough to convince most people most of the time.
But because extinction is forever, they're still not enough.
We have to go deeper.
And we circle right back to the beginning.
The deep conservation ethic has to be built from those innate impulses.
From what Wilson calls biophilia.
It's subconscious attraction to life.
The awe we feel for a serpent.
The comfort we find in a savanna -like landscape.
That's the foundation.
And when people argue, people come first.
Wilson's answer is that solving practical problems is the means, not the end goal.
The real purpose is human fulfillment.
And we can't be fulfilled if we destroy the stage on which our story is playing out.
We only think we control the world.
So we're left with this final profound paradox.
The human spirit needs to expand.
It needs freedom.
But to sustain that very spirit, we need the most delicate, careful stewardship of the living world.
The depth of our conservation ethic.
It's going to be measured by how well we make those two things.
Expansion and stewardship reinforce each other.
That is the key to ultimate survival.
And by that, he means the protection of the human spirit itself.
You know, mysterious and little -known organisms live within walking distance of where you sit right now.
Splendor awaits in minute proportions.
What's stopping you from becoming a naturalist and just regaining that excitement of the untrammeled world?
A truly profound set of insights.
Thank you for joining us for this deep dive into Wilson's conservation ethic.
We really hope this has given you some rich material to mull over, to connect the dots, and to explore on your own.
Until next time.