The Centre for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy [CASSE] issued a blog by Brian Czech on January 8th that featured the latest project from EO Wilson: Nature Needs Half. The blog starts:
WE NEED NATURE. NATURE NEEDS HALF. ERGO, WE NEED NATURE TO GET HALF.
Half of what? The planet. That’s the essence of E.O. Wilson’s latest – and greatest – project.
Why does nature need half the planet? To maintain a highly functional system of plants, animals, and their habitats. And we need such a functional ecosystem to support our own species. Nature is our habitat. No nature means no economy, no national security, and no international stability. When E.O. Wilson says nature needs half the planet, we better listen, because Wilson is still the planet’s top conservation biologist. A wise elder at a spry 88, he cut his academic teeth on species-area relationships in the 1960s. To this day, no one makes a more compelling argument for the need to conserve biodiversity, as well as how much we need to conserve. Nature Needs Half follows from Wilson’s recent book, Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life.
Environmental educators know all this in their bones: from the rising of the moon to the setting of the sun, but it’s good to have EO Wilson remind us.
The Nature Needs Half website is here and it’s best to go here for details of the Wilson initiative to ensure that “50% of the planet is protected by 2050”. The CASSE blog, meanwhile, has interesting detail on how the Earth has been let down by nearly all US Presidents and not just the current one (or his defeated rival). “Only Franklin Roosevelt and Jimmy Carter came close, and only in long-forgotten moments”, it says.