Edward Wilson is the Pellegrino University Research Professor, Emeritus, at Harvard. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes for
his books and has gained international recognition as one of the most influential scientists of all time.
Professor Wilson discusses the gradual process of large-scale extinction, explaining that we are "trimming many species
back, and, as that happens, we start taking out entire genuses or families." Scientists have only partly discovered the diversity of
life, and though there are currently 1.7 million known species, the estimate range for the number of existing species is anywhere from
10 million to 100 million. Professor Wilson discusses the "radical transformation" that will soon occur due to the new information
available about microscopic and ultramicroscopic organisms. "We are living on an unexplored planet," he says, "but now we have the
technology to make a big leap forward in exploring this from the Eukaria to the micro-organisms."
Human actions are accelerating the ongoing destruction of the environment in which these "marvelous three and a half
billion years of evolutionary products exist." These human actions can be summarized with the acronym HIPPO, signifying habitat
destruction (including the effects of climate change), invasive species (which invade countries, wreaking havoc and displacing native
species), pollution, over-population, and over-harvesting (which drives species to extinction by killing too many individuals). One
illustration of habitat destruction is NASA's estimation that five percent of the earth's surface is burned by humans yearly, the result
of which is the extinction of species such as the golden toad.
Professor Wilson discusses particular locations where species extinction is most rampant, noting national parks and the
rainforest of the Philippine Islands, which was originally one of the most species-rich rainforests in the world. "Now we have to stop
it and maybe reverse it, otherwise we're going to lose a very large part of the Philippine fauna," Professor Wilson says. In North
America, the old-growth forests have been progressively cut back and eliminated during European colonization and they currently cover
only one percent of their original area. Professor Wilson emphasizes that we can "reverse the trend, or at least bring it to a halt if
we bring our best resources... and if we use science productively." In order to do this, we should focus on hot spots, which are
locations containing the largest number of species. 25 discovered hot spots cover only 1.4% of the earth's surface and contain roughly
40% of the known plant and animal species. "If we can save that 1.4 percent," says Professor Wilson, "we will have taken a giant leap
forward in stopping the extinction spasm."
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