Over the weekend, two of the country’s leading naturalists, E. O. Wilson and Tom Lovejoy, died a day apart. They first met in the mid-1970s, and, together, coined the term “biological diversity,” which was later shortened to “biodiversity.”
In the seventies, Wilson and Lovejoy were both already deeply concerned about what was happening to the tropics. Increasingly, rain forests were being felled to make room for roads, farms, and logging operations. A decade earlier, Wilson, together with a Princeton professor named Robert H. MacArthur, had published a slim volume called “
.” Though the book concerned actual islands, surrounded by water, its implications seemed to extend to isolated habitats, surrounded by human development. According to Wilson and MacArthur’s theory, the smaller these “islands,” the fewer species they would retain.Photograph by Lev Radin / Shutterstock. Around the time that he and Wilson first met, he came up with an idea about how to test the theory. The Brazilian government was encouraging people to settle north of Manaus.
Lovejoy spent most of the past forty years trying to preserve the Amazon. He took anyone he thought could help with this effort to visit the B.D.F.F.P., including several American politicians and also. In his writings, Wilson, too, campaigned for the preservation of the Amazon, and of tropical forests in general. In one of his last books, “,” he called for setting aside half of the world’s surface as untouchable.
By most objective measures, it is discouraging to work in conservation biology these days. Human impacts on the planet, and, as they do, the space available for other species continues to shrink. In the Amazon, deforestation rates started to slow around 2010, but in recent years they have been ticking up again. In 2019, Lovejoy and a Brazilian scientist, Carlos Nobre, warned that the region was nearing a critical threshold.
,” published in 2002. The only way to really honor his and Lovejoy’s legacy would be to prove him right.
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