E. O. Wilson, from The Future of Life (2002)

from The Future of Life

E. O. Wilson

In the following excerpt, from The Future of Life (2002), acclaimed scientist Edward O. Wilson composes a “letter” to Henry David Thoreau in which he considers Thoreau’s relevance to our time.

Henry!

May I call you by your Christian name? Your words invite familiarity and make little sense otherwise. How else to interpret your insistent use of the first personal pronoun? I wrote this account, you say, here are my deepest thoughts, and no third person placed between us could ever be so well represented. Although Walden is sometimes oracular in tone, I don’t read it, the way some do, as an oration to the multitude. Rather, it is a work of art, the testament of a citizen of Concord, in New England, from one place, one time, and one writer’s personal circumstance that manages nevertheless to reach across five generations to address accurately the general human condition. Can there be a better definition of art?…

Now, prophet of the conservation movement, mentor of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., accept this tribute tardily given. Keen observer of the human condition, scourge of the philistine culture, Greek stoic adrift in the New World, you are reborn in each generation and vested with new meaning and nuance. Sage of Concord—Saint Henry, they sometimes call you—you’ve fairly earned your place in history.

On the other hand, you were not a great naturalist. (Forgive me!) Even had you kept entirely to natural history during your short life, you would have ranked well below William Bartram, Louis Agassiz, and that prodigious collector of North American plants John Torrey, and be scarcely remembered today. With longer life it would likely have been different, because you were building momentum in natural history rapidly when you left us. And to give you full credit, your ideas on succession and other properties of living communities pointed straight toward the modern science of ecology.

That doesn’t matter now. I understand why you came to Walden Pond; your words are clear enough on that score. Granted, you chose this spot primarily to study nature. But you could have done that as easily and far more comfortably on daily excursions from your mother’s house in Concord Center, half an hour’s walk away, where in fact you did frequently repair for a decent meal. Nor was your little cabin meant to be a wilderness hermitage. No wilderness lay within easy reach anyway, and even the woods around Walden Pond had shrunk to their final thin margins by the 1840s. You called solitude your favorite companion. You were not afraid, you said, to be left to the mercy of your own thoughts. Yet you craved humanity passionately, and your voice is anthropocentric in mood and philosophy. Visitors to the Walden cabin were welcomed. Once a group of twenty-five or more crowded into the solitary room of the tiny house, shoulder to shoulder. You were not appalled by so much human flesh pressed together (but I am). You were lonely at times. The whistle of a passing train on the Fitchburg track and the distant rumble of oxcarts crossing a bridge must have given you comfort on cold, rainy days. Sometimes you went out looking for someone, anyone, in spite of your notorious shyness, just to have a conversation. You fastened on them, as you put it, like a bloodsucker.

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In short, you were far from the hard-eyed frontiersman bearing pemmican and a long rifle. Frontiersmen did not saunter, botanize, and read Greek. So how did it happen that an amateur naturalist perched in a toy house on the edge of a ravaged woodland became the founding saint of the conservation movement? Here is what I believe happened. Your spirit craved an epiphany. You sought enlightenment and fulfillment the Old Testament way, by reduction of material existence to the fundamentals. The cabin was your cave on the mountainside. You used poverty to purchase a margin of free existence. It was the only method you could devise to seek the meaning in a life otherwise smothered by quotidian necessity and haste. You lived at Walden, as you said (I dare not paraphrase),

to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived…to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

You were mistaken, I think, to suppose that there are as many ways of life possible as radii that can be drawn from the center of a circle, and your choice just one of them. On the contrary, the human mind can develop along only a very few pathways imaginable. They are selected by satisfactions we instinctively seek in common. The sturdiness of human nature is the reason people plant flowers, gods live on high mountains, and a lake is the eye of the world through which—your metaphor—we can measure our own souls.

It is exquisitely human to search for wholeness and richness of experience. When these qualities are lost among the distracting schedules of everyday life, we seek them elsewhere. When you stripped your outside obligations to the survivable minimum, you placed your trained and very active mind in an unendurable vacuum. And this is the essence of the matter: in order to fill the vacuum, you discovered the human proclivity to embrace the natural world.

Your childhood experience told you exactly where to go. It could not be a local cornfield or gravel pit. Nor the streets of Boston, which, however vibrant as the hub of a growing nation, might cost a layabout his dignity and even his life. It had to be a world both tolerant of poverty and rich and beautiful enough to be spiritually rewarding. Where around Concord could that possibly be but a woodlot next to a lake?

You traded most of the richness of social existence for an equivalent richness of the natural world. The choice was entirely logical, for the following reason. Each of us finds a comfortable position somewhere along the continuum that ranges from complete withdrawal and self-absorption at one end to full civic engagement and reciprocity at the other. The position is never fixed. We fret, vacillate, and steer our lives through the riptide of countervailing instincts that press from both ends of the continuum. The uncertainty we feel is not a curse. It is not a confusion on the road out of Eden. It is just the human condition. We are intelligent mammals, fitted by evolution—by God, if you prefer—to pursue personal ends through cooperation. Our priceless selves and family first, society next. In this respect we are the polar opposite of your cabinside ants, bound together as replaceable parts of a superorganism. Our lives are therefore an insoluble problem, a dynamic process in search of an indefinable goal. They are neither a celebration nor a spectacle but rather, as a later philosopher put it, a predicament. Humanity is the species forced by its basic nature to make moral choices and seek fulfillment in a changing world by any means it can devise.

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You searched for essence at Walden and, whether successful in your own mind or not, you hit upon an ethic with a solid feel to it; nature is ours to explore forever; it is our crucible and refuge; it is our natural home; it is all these things. Save it, you said: in wildness is the preservation of the world.

Now, in closing this letter, I am forced to report bad news. (I put it off till the end.) The natural world in the year 2001 is everywhere disappearing before our eyes—cut to pieces, mowed down, slowed under, gobbled up, replaced by human artifacts.

No one in your time could imagine a disaster of this magnitude. Little more than a billion people were alive in the 1840s. They were overwhelmingly agricultural, and few families needed more than two or three acres to survive. The American frontier was still wide open. And far away on continents to the south, up great rivers, beyond unclimbed mountain ranges, stretched unspoiled equatorial forests brimming with the maximum diversity of life. These wildernesses seemed as unattainable and timeless as the planets and stars. That could not last, because the mood of Western civilization is Abrahamic. The explorers and colonists were guided by a biblical prayer: May we take possession of this land that God has provided and let it drip milk and honey into our mouths, forever.

Now, more than six billion people fill the world. The great majority are very poor; nearly one billion exist on the edge of starvation. All are struggling to raise the quality of their lives any way they can. That unfortunately includes the conversion of the surviving remnants of the natural environment. Half of the great tropical forests have been cleared. The last frontiers of the world are effectively gone. Species of plants and animals are disappearing a hundred or more times faster than before the coming of humanity, and as many as half may be gone by the end of this century. An Armageddon is approaching at the beginning of the third millennium. But it is not the cosmic war and fiery collapse of mankind foretold in sacred scripture. It is the wreckage of the planet by an exuberantly plentiful and ingenious humanity.

The race is now on between the technoscientific forces that are destroying the living environment and those that can be harnessed to save it. We are inside a bottleneck of overpopulation and wasteful consumption. If the race is won, humanity can emerge in far better condition than when it entered, and with most of the diversity of life still intact.

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The situation is desperate—but there are encouraging signs that the race can be won. Population growth has slowed, and, if the present trajectory holds, is likely to peak between eight and ten billion people by century’s end. That many people, experts tell us, can be accommodated with a decent standard of living, but just barely: the amount of arable land and water available per person, globally, is already declining. In solving the problem, other experts tell us, it should also be possible to shelter most of the vulnerable plant and animal species.

In order to pass through the bottleneck, a global land ethic is urgently needed. Not just any land ethic that might happen to enjoy agreeable sentiment, but one based on the best understanding of ourselves and the world around us that science and technology can provide. Surely the rest of life matters. Surely our stewardship is its only hope. We will be wise to listen carefully to the heart, then act with rational intention and all the tools we can gather and bring to bear.

Henry, my friend, thank you for putting the first element of that ethic in place. Now it is up to us to summon a more encompassing wisdom. The living world is dying; the natural economy is crumbling beneath our busy feet. We have been too self-absorbed to foresee the long-term consequences of our actions, and we will suffer a terrible loss unless we shake off our delusions and move quickly to a solution. Science and technology led us into this bottleneck. Now science and technology must help us find our way through and out.

You once said that old deeds are for old people, and new deeds are for new. I think that in historical perspective it is the other way around. You were the new and we are the old. Can we now be the wiser? For you, here at Walden Pond, the lamentation of the mourning dove and the green frog’s t-r-r-oonk! across the predawn water were the true reason for saving this place. For us, it is an exact knowledge of what that truth is, all that it implies, and how to employ it to best effect. So, two truths. We will have them both, you and I and all those now and forever to come who accept the stewardship of nature.

Affectionately yours,

Edward

(2002)