Monday, May 02, 2016

HALF-EARTH - How to Save Life on Earth

"How to save life on Earth, according to E.O. Wilson" PBS NewsHour 4/28/2016

Sorry Prof, but extinction is natures methodology, and you "can't fool with Mother Nature."

IF doable, the first step is mandatory human population control.  Cut our population 50% (cut Trump and friends loose with AK47s).  Or we could use the method used in the movie "Logan's Run," no one lives past 30.

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Biologist and Pulitzer winner E.O. Wilson has spent his life studying animals and fighting for their conservation.  As species go extinct at 1,000 times the normal rate thanks to human interference, Wilson’s new book “Half Earth” holds a bold plan to preserve the world’s biodiversity: set aside half of the entire planet for natural habitats.  Jeffrey Brown talks to Wilson for more.

HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour):  Scientist and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward O. Wilson first gained fame for his study of ants.  Through the years, he’s moved from small insects to big ideas, and now a very big one, one made more urgent by the problems of climate change.

Jeffrey Brown has our profile in his second report from Southern Alabama.

E.O. WILSON, Author, “Half Earth”:  I was just a 12-, 13-year-old boy, and it was just a wonderland to me.

JEFFREY BROWN:  Edward O. Wilson spent his formative years in Mobile, Alabama, looking for snakes and insects in the surrounding delta.

E.O. WILSON:  If I could, I would just do the same thing today that I did then, but it would look funny.

(LAUGHTER)

JEFFREY BROWN:  The experience would shape him, as biologist, evolutionary theorist, naturalist, and at age 86 perhaps most important to him now conservationist.

E.O. WILSON:  What is man?  Storyteller, mythmaker, and destroyer of the living world.

JEFFREY BROWN:  His new book, “Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight For Life,” takes on nothing less than the survival of plant and animal life on earth.

E.O. WILSON:  Yearning to be more master than steward of the declining planet.

JEFFREY BROWN:  Wilson’s solution is in the title, setting aside half the Earth as natural habitat.

We spoke beneath the old live oak trees at Fort Blakeley Historic Park, where Wilson’s great-grandfather fought in one of the last battles of the Civil War.

Half Earth.  Are you serious?

E.O. WILSON:  I’m serious.  I know it sounds radical, but we must have it if we’re going to save most of the species remaining on Earth.  And it’s easier to do than most people might think.

JEFFREY BROWN:  It sounds impossible.  It sounds for some people crazy.

E.O. WILSON:  I was just going to use the word insane.

JEFFREY BROWN:  Yes.

E.O. WILSON:  Yes, it sounds that way, because they envision cutting the Earth into two hemispheres, one for us and one for the other 10 million species.  But, no, we mean giving 50 percent or setting it aside, patches, some large wilderness areas, others far, far smaller, in order to make that amount of reserve area.

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