166 The Environmental Debate
powerful kind, to look to the very roots of moti-
vation and understand why, in what circum-
stances and on which occasions, we cherish and
protect life. The elements from which a deep con-
servation ethic might be constructed include the
impulses and biased forms of learning loosely
classified as biophilia. Ranging from awe of the
serpent to the idealization of the savanna and
the hunter’s mystique, and undoubtedly includ-
ing others yet to be explored, they are the poles
toward which the developing mind most com-
fortably moves. And as the mind moves, picking
its way through the vast number of choices made
during a lifetime, it grows into a form true to its
long, unique evolutionary history.B. From Consilience, 1998
[T]he global population is precariously
large, will grow another third by 2020, and
climb still more before peaking sometime after- Humanity is improving per capita pro-
duction, health, and longevity. But it is doing
so by eating up the planet’s capital, including
irreplaceable natural resources. Humankind
is approaching the limit of its food and water
supply. As many as a billion people, moreo-
ver, remain in absolute poverty, with inad-
equate food from one day to the next and lit-
tle or no medical care. Unlike any species that
lived before, Homo sapiens is also changing
the world’s atmosphere and climate, lower-
ing and polluting water tables, shrinking for-
ests, and spreading deserts. It is extinguishing
a large fraction of plant and animal species,
an irreplaceable loss that will be viewed as
A. From Biophilia, 1984
The future of the conservation movement
depends on... an advance in moral reasoning.
Its maturation is linked to that of biology and
a new hybrid field, bioethics, that deals with the
many technological advances recently made pos-
sible by biology. Philosophers and scientists are
applying a more formal analysis to such
complex problems as the allocations of scarce
organ transplants, heroic but extremely expen-
sive efforts to prolong life, and the possible use
of genetic engineering to alter human heredity.
They have only begun to consider the relation-
ships between human beings and organisms
with the same rigor. It is clear that the key to
precision lies in the understanding of motiva-
tion, the ultimate reasons why people care about
one thing but not another—why, say they prefer
a city with a park to a city alone. The goal is to
join emotion with the rational analysis of emo-
tion in order to create a deeper and more endur-
ing conservation ethic.
[A] healthful environment, the warmth of
kinship, right-sounding moral strictures, sure-
bet economic gain, and a stirring of nostalgia
and sentiment are the chief components of the
surface ethic. Together they are enough to make
a compelling case to most people most of the
time for the preservation of organic diversity.
But this is not nearly enough: every pause, every
species allowed to go extinct, is a slide down
the ratchet, an irreversible loss for all. It is time
to invent moral reasoning of a new and more
DOCUMENT 133: Edward O. Wilson on the Need for a
Conservation Ethic (1984, 1998)Edward O. Wilson, one of the world’s leading spokesmen for biodiversity and an emeritus professor of entomology
at Harvard University, decries “the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us”—the devastation of the
earth’s resources. A neo-Malthusian, Wilson believes that the maintenance of the earth’s biological diversity is
essential for human physical and emotional well-being. He has predicted that the twenty-first century will be
“the century of the environment,” when humans will be forced to look at themselves “closely as a biological as
well as a cultural species.”^9