Saving the Sumatran Rhino

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2003 by Flower, Dean

But Microscopes are prudent In an Emergency!

-Emily Dickinson

ENVIRONMENTALISTS AND ARTISTS-both visual and literary-are alike in their desire to alter our vision. To show us what we have failed to notice, or looked at but failed to see, or seen but failed to appreciate. Think of Edward Weston and those muscular red peppers, Ansel Adams and those shivering aspens. Think of Wallace Stevens' bananas, with their "sullen hurricane shapes." Look more carefully at these miraculous creatures, says Audubon in his Bird Biographies, or Thoreau in his Journals, or Fabre in his Vie des Insectes. That puckish lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov used to ask hikers he met on mountain trails if they had seen any butterflies. No, they always said, and he would go on to find hundreds. It is no accident that Annie Dillard's second chapter, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, is called "Seeing." Or that Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire rails against the blindness of park visitors. Or that poems like Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish" and "Seascape" are lessons in the art of seeing. Most of us, it seems, need practice in it.

Fortunately, great art is not always required. Edward 0. Wilson, who is probably this nation's foremost ecologist, makes no claims to artistry, but as a scientist he knows how to pay careful attention, especially to unobtrusive things. No less than an artist he is intent upon showing us what we have failed to see. His specialty is the microscopic world of entomology: he wrote The Insect Societies in 1971 and The Ants (with Bert Holldobler) in 1990. And he has theorized biology more provocatively than anyone else in the last three decades, from Sociobiology (1975) to Biophilia (1984) and Consilience (1998). His most recent work-and his most intensely moral, I think-addresses the question of whether the human race can survive on Earth.1 A daunting question, likely to induce panic and despair in anyone who has been listening to the news lately about global warming, overpopulation, deforestation, species extinction, topsoil erosion, habitat destruction, and the systematic pollution of earth, air, rivers, lakes, and oceans. Is there really any hope for us, or a choice that will make a difference? Wilson offers some surprising answers.

But he begins small. The book opens with a letter to Thoreau-a device E. B. White used almost sixty years ago-in respectful, even affectionate acknowledgement of his predecessor. Yet Wilson makes it clear that Thoreau did not know, could not have known, what he was looking at. Keep in mind that Thoreau nowadays provides a model, or some sort of inspiration, for almost every contemporary nature writer-Berry, Ehrlich, Lopez, Dillard, Brower, Williams, Abbey, Snyder, Bass, Oliver, Sanders, Zwinger. But Wilson is not looking for a model. He wants to tell Thoreau about what he failed to see, what he saw but didn't understand (e.g., the battle of the ants), and what he never imagined seeing, i.e., the modern entomologist's microscopic world, where there are not just hundreds of species-on the familiar scale of bird, bug and quadruped-but thousands, if you focus down by a power of ten, all just barely visible to the naked eye: mites, nematodes, springtails, pauropods, diplurans, symphylans, tardigrades. And if you keep magnifying "you will find ten billion bacteria in a thimbleful of soil and frass." We live, he says, in a "membrane of organisms... so internally complex that most species composing it remain undiscovered." Narrowing the scale of vision, says Wilson, gives access to nature as it was a thousand years ago: "The wilderness of ordinary vision may have vanished-wolf, puma, and wolverine no longer exist in the tamed forests of Massachusetts. But another, even more ancient wilderness lives on."

If that vision seems reassuring, think again. Wilson is determined to stun and stagger us with the knowledge of how little we know, how much we have only just begun to discover. He is like some nineteenth-century painter of sublime and fearsome landscapes, taking us to the planet's most barren wastes (the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica), its hottest geothermal environments (submarine spumes that reach 660 deg), its most light-deprived pressure-locked depths in rock two miles below the Earth's surface-environments utterly hostile to life as we know it-- there to show us "extremophile" microbes, whole ecosystems of them, surviving and even flourishing. At the other extreme are the environments that conservationists talk about most, those with the most year-round solar energy, the most varied and ice-free terrain, and greatest climatic stability, i.e., those that sustain the greatest diversity of species including our own: the equatorial rain forests of the Asian, African, and South American continents. Within these regions Wilson designates some twenty-five as "hotspots"-places most at risk for species extinction. Wilson has much to say about them, but perhaps his most salient observation is that although they occupy only a minuscule proportion (1.4 percent) of the world's land surface, they "are, astonishingly, the exclusive homes of 44 percent of the world's plant species and more than a third of all species of birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians" (italics mine). While it may be a "nightmare" to realize what destruction of these regions means to us all, Wilson argues "the flip side": "by protecting this tiny fraction of the planet's land area, millions of species can be saved for posterity."