The ant man
He's a biologist and environmentalist who has a lifelong consuming passion: ants. In them, Edward O Wilson sees a glimmer of hope for the future of our planet
Edward Helmore, Monday April 22, 2002, The Guardian
To reach Edward O Wilson's office at Harvard, one must pass by a dusty population of whales, great auks and dodos in the university's famous museum of natural history. It's an instructive voyage, through the odours of decay and past spectres of extinction, to meet with one of the world's great environmentalists whose 60-odd years of studying ants has contributed vastly to our understanding of social behavior.

Ants are not the singular subject of Dr Wilson's new book, The Future of Life. He is probably better known now for the grand theories of sociobiology, the importance of biodiversity, biophilia and, three years ago, the introduction of an expansive notion he termed consilience. In it he sought to coalesce the great branches of learning on the basis of a scientific understanding of human nature.

But ants are Wilson's first scholarship and overriding passion, and he is currently engaged in completing a definite compendium of the world's 625 known species. In his laboratory, two plastic Tupperware containers, bridged by a curved strip of cardboard and containing test tubes filled with cotton wool to simulate a nest, is home to a colony of Pheidole Rhea, a species of ant that lives in southern Arizona. Wilson blows on their home, alerting the soldiers to danger. Some have considerably larger heads than others. "Those are the super-soldiers," he says with evident fascination. "Beyond protecting the colony and crushing grain, no one knows what role they play."

The study of ants might seem to be a marginal discipline when it comes to the world's biodiversity. But it is no small debt to Wilson's scholarship that the announcement of the discovery last week of a new insect order - the first since 1915 - was greeted as a major discovery comparable to finding a living mastodon or a sabre-toothed tiger.
Although invertebrates are often overlooked as conservation priorities, their contribution to the Earth cannot be overstated. Insects, with more than 1.2 million known species, represent more than 80% of all living creatures on Earth, and the discovery of the predatory Mantophasmatodea was an opportune moment for Wilson to emphasise the point. "If human beings were to disappear tomorrow, the world would go on, but if invertebrates were to disappear, I doubt that the human species could last more than a few months," he says.
Wilson is only too well aware that the continuous and profoundly bad news about the state and prospects for the Earth has inured us to doomsday scenarios. Despite the apparent evidence that the climate is not just changing but has already changed, and that biodiversity is threatened as never before, Wilson offers qualified hope that we can make the right choices and solve the problem - if we want to. "If you know what to do you can turn it around," he says. "It's only in the last five or 10 years that scientists have got a grip of the magnitude and nature of the problem."

Using science and research, environmental targets are selected, money is sought from wealthy individuals, the World Wildlife Fund, the World Bank and large multi-corporations, and the rights to the exploitation of identified "hotspots" are bought up.
Conservation International, an environmental group based in Washington, DC recently put a price on protecting enough biological diversity to sustain a healthy planet: $31bn (£21.5bn). "Environmental organisations have shown that it's not going to be nearly as expensive as we thought," he says. "In the war against terrorism we are spending enough money to save all the natural environments in the tropics." That one payment - a minute sliver of the globe's economic power and roughly equivalent to the cost of the war on terrorism - we could place an indefinite umbrella over most of the endangered species of the world. "My greatest hope is that when the dust settles on this war, national leaders will take advantage of the sense of urgency. I think it's a logical succession." First, however, a review of the problem: In The Future of Life, Wilson describes what he calls "the bottleneck" - the confluence of population growth that's "more bacterial than primate" and runaway consumption. "When homo sapiens passed the six billion mark, we had already exceeded by as much as 100 times the biomass of any large animal species that ever existed on the land. We and the rest of life cannot afford another 100 years like that."

At the same time, the consumption of energy and resources - the "environmental footprint" - necessary to supply the population with all that is necessary to maintain a western standard of living is fast outstripping the Earth's resources. Continue on the current path, raise energy consumption around the world to western levels, and by 2100, we will need four more planet Earths to sustain life as we know it. Wilson cautiously believes we have begun to awaken from our delirium - our "Paleolithic obstinacy" - that the world has infinite resources. "We have entered the century of the environment," he says. "Science and technology, combined with foresight and moral courage, must see us through the bottleneck and out." With his notably fine hands, and with the ease of a natural writer, Wilson has drawn together the threads of his learning into a three-tiered argument for action. First there is the bottleneck itself. Then there is the science of biodiversity: that we have no idea what we are losing in allowing the destruction of entire ecosystems containing undiscovered medicines and foods. And there is our innate - and often mislaid - connection to nature itself, a hard-wired phenomenon that Wilson terms biophilia. "Every species, right down to nematode worms, has pretty elaborate behaviour that leads them to the right habit at the right time. Shouldn't we find some residue of that instinct in human beings? After all, we are direct
descendants of species that live on the savannah. On some level, it's wired into us to be around nature. We would be foolish to let that instinct disappear."

The central conflict in this - and indeed the central irony in Wilson's pioneering fieldwork as both a sociobiologist and environmentalist - is that our destructive behaviour is also hard-wired into us. "The trouble is we are wired to make the wrong choices," he says. We are not forest-dwellers by nature and so when we encounter a forest, we have an almost instinctive desire to clear it; when we come across an animal, it is our first instinct to kill it. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, humans have done extremely well living with a limited ability to make long-range decisions, especially if the consequences lie outside immediate sight. The four-year political cycle, the annual report - we are geared for the near-term, perhaps instinctually destructive, and not wired to consider the wider implication of our actions.
"Human beings are adapted by Darwinian natural selection to short-term decisions and focus on local concerns," he notes ruefully. "Hence we fall into tribes of people, put the interests of that social grouping first, and plan the activities of that unit over a short period of time." That tendency is exacerbated by time and distance. When it comes to saving the world's biodiversity, Wilson concedes that it is a hard sell to get people in Pennsylvania or Sussex to really care about a forest in Gabon or Peru. "The human species is not an altruistic species. There never has been an altruistic species, and that is the point. Darwin was profoundly correct. We deal with other by reciprocity."

So altruism is reciprocal? "That's why we find it natural to reward heroes with medals, pensions and public appreciations." If that goes some way to explaining why the kind of global environmental measures we so clearly need to take still seems a remote prospect, Wilson concedes that he is still puzzled by our comparative lack of concern. Unlike ozone loss or climate changes, extinction [potentially the loss of half the world's species by the end of the century] cannot be reversed.

Now in his early 70s and in good enough health to continue his fieldwork[recently studying amberhead ants in the Dominican Republic], he sustains fierce criticism for the purveyors of conservative economic ideology. "They tend to reject the whole thing out of a kind of denial," he says with contempt. Unable to see beyond the laws of supply and demand, Wilson believes they have perpetuated the massive self-deception that we have the wealth to buffer our economies and our environment. But in order to sustain that denial, we are encouraging the destruction of the habitats in developing countries, often most biologically the richest of all. "These conservative economists say it may not be true and even if it is, the problems may not be soluble. So why should we lose sleep?" Well, for the reasons Wilson outlines in The Future of Life: "For those who believe that it's not as bad as it seems, it is. The loss of the Sumatran rhinoceros may not be enough to get you out of bed in the morning, but the loss of a million species should," he says. "Taken together it represents an impoverishment of the whole world. The consequences - some of hard-nosed practicality, others aesthetic and ethical - make a compelling argument."

He is fully aware that western governments, largely working on antique ideas of social economics, are going to take the long view and spearhead the revolution. The reasons are obvious: domestic politics and leaders who are content to place national interest and openly short-term thinking first. "When we talk of globalisation, we talk about the globalisation of trade and cultural exchange. That is fair enough. But when it comes to the globalisation of environmental protocols, that is another matter." In his view, environmental policy should be harnessed to economic development funds in the same way that the Clinton administration tried to harness the promotion of human rights to trade agreements. But he acknowledges that our governments aren't going to do that. "You can't imagine the current administration taking the long-term view and start to help to build third-world economies and salvage their natural resources. They can't do that because the American people would not understand it. They would not understand the importance of a major forest preserve in Liberia. Not yet anyway."

As frustrating as that is, Wilson still sees some reason for optimism. He is convinced our destructive, short-sighted instincts can be overcome and that science can show us the path to salvation. In the decade since he published “The Diversity of Life” he has grown more certain that well-funded non-governmental organisations can play a principle role by outbidding developers in purchasing key "hotspots" of biodiversity. By marshalling some of the world's wealthiest people, along with conservation charities into emergency response organisations, he has already helped saved swathes of Madagascar, the Western Ghats, parts of Surinam and the tropical Andes, with only minor expenditure. And that, he says carefully, "gives me a little bit of hope."

For someone naturally inclined to seek synthesis - finding order in disorder - Wilson started with the studying the behaviour of ants but he has arrived at an extraordinarily expansive destination. You couldn't, after all, get much grander in scope than mapping out the future of life. Still, it is to ants that Wilson always returns: "It's a true passion," he confirms. "I love the field work, and I love working on behaviour in fine detail. And you don't get much more fine detail than doing the full accounting and distribution ecology of 625 species of ant." With that, he blows on the captive colony of Pheidole Rhea. Again the super-soldiers appear, ready for battle, their role still a
compelling mystery.
· The Future of Life by Edward O Wilson is published by Little, Brown

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