Half-earth : our planet's fight for life / Edward O. Wilson.

Summary:

"In order to stave off the mass extinction of species, including our own, we must move swiftly to preserve the biodiversity of our planet, says Edward O. Wilson in his most impassioned book to date. Half-Earth argues that the situation facing us is too large to be solved piecemeal and proposes a solution commensurate with the magnitude of the problem: dedicate fully half the surface of the Earth to nature."--Amazon.

Refusing to accept the mass extinction of species as inevitability, one of the world's greatest naturalist proposes a plan to save Earth's imperiled biosphere. Edward O. Wilson demonstrates that we blindly ignore the histories of millions of other species, Wilson warns of a point of no return that is imminent. Angrily challenging the fashionable theories of Anthropocenes, who contend that humans can survive alone in an Edenic bubble engineered for their own survival, Wilson documents that the biosphere does not belong to us. Wilson has written "Half-Earth"as a cri de coeur, proposing that the only solution to our impending Sixth Extinction is to increase the area of natural reserves to half the surface of the earth. Suffused with a profound Darwinian understanding of our planet's fragility, this is a transformative work that reverberates with urgency like few other books.

Record details

ISBN: 9781631490828
Physical Description: 259 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
Edition: First edition.
Publisher: New York : Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company, 2016.
Copyright: ©2016.

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Formatted Contents Note:

The problem. The world ends, twice ; Humanity needs a biosphere ; How much biodiversity survives today? ; An elegy for the rhinos ; Apocalypses now ; Are we as gods? ; Why extinction is accelerating ; The impact of climate change : land, sea, and air ; The most dangerous worldview -- The real living world. Conservation science ; The Lord God species ; The unknown webs of life ; The wholly different aqueous world ; The invisible empire ; The best places in a biosphere ; History redefined -- The solution. The awakening ; Restoration ; Half-earth : how to save the biosphere ; Threading the bottleneck ; What must be done.