Acta Horticulturae

area by 90%, you reduce the number of
species that can live there indefinitely to half.
So just protecting a reserve doesn’t necessarily
mean that you’re going to save all the
species in it.
Around 1900, the Philippines were covered by
one of the great lush rainforests of the world,
a very rich fauna and flora. Now there is less
than 10% remaining. When habitats are taken
to that level, with approximately 50 percent of
the species at risk, it is easy to eliminate the
rest in one shot. It can be done in a few places
in a matter of days by just a team of bulldozers
and chain saws and their operators. That is
the peril that much of the world biodiversity is
in right now - the source of so much of the
plant materials important to horticulture in the
present and the promise of the future.
How fast are species going extinct? This can
be estimated by several different measures,
including our knowledge of the reduction of
habitat just mentioned. Another is by observing
the rate at which species are dropping
through the International Union for the
Conservation of Nature red-data list that spans
40 years of identifying vulnerable to critically
endangered to extinct species. And there is a
third way using population biology to estimate
the rate of species extinction. These estimates
reveal that the extinction rate is 100X to
1,000X higher than it was before the coming
of humanity and we may be approaching the
10,000X rate because of this final elimination
of so many great strongholds of the world’s
biodiversity.
To conclude, I wish I had more time to tell you
why there is a ray of hope - what can be done,
what is being done, and how much it will cost.
Here is just one estimate of the latter.
At the present time, about six billion (US) dollars
a year is put into conservation all over the
world - this is from all sources. This is absurdly
low. An estimate made two years ago by a
team of biologists and economists is that just
28 billion dollars in a single payment, a single
investment in saving land and building noninvasive
economic programs for the people in
and around the 25 hottest of the ‘hot spots’ in
terms of preserving biodiversity and securing
preserves in the Philippine Islands where the
danger is greatest of ongoing mass extinction,
and in the last remaining wilderness of the
Amazonian, Congolian and New Guinea trop-
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
E.O. Wilson
ical rainforests, would protect the future of
nearly half of the world’s species of plants and
animals found only in these areas.
Twenty-eight billion dollars would be enough
to secure these habitats and thus cover nearly
half of the species of plants and animals of the
world that are found nowhere else!
Half of the plant and animal species could be
put under an umbrella, held for a while anyway
while we get our act together.
Now if 28 billion dollars in a single application
seems like too large an amount, consider that
it is just one part in a thousand of the annual
gross world product - the combined gross
national products of all the countries of the
world combined. Just one thousandth of that
amount in just one payment could turn everything
around. I think we have the science and
we have the methods to do it but the impulse,
the belief in its importance has yet to take
hold. If it had, I’m certain that this money
would have already been available.
The central problem of the new century, in my
opinion, is how to raise the poor in these
countries and regions containing this treasure
of biodiversity, the 80 percent of the people of
the world living in developing countries, to an
endurable quality of life while preserving as
much of the natural world as possible. Both
the poor, and the rich but endangered pools of
biological diversity of which I speak are concentrated
in the developing world. The solution
to the problem has to flow from the
recognition that both depend on the other.
The poor, including the nearly one billion people
that are absolutely destitute, have little
chance to improve their lives in a devastated
environment. Conversely, the natural environments
where most of the biodiversity still
hangs on, many places by a thread, cannot
survive the press of land-hungry people who
have nowhere else to go.
I hope that each of you in this audience, a
Congress of scientists and others who fully
understand and appreciate the important place
that horticultural plants have in human nutrition,
human health, and human culture, will
share my conviction that this great problem
can be solved. The resources to do so exist.
Those who control these resources have many
reasons to achieve that goal; not the least is
their own security.
Biologists of all persuasions, including those
assembled here, should make themselves
heard about this issue. At the end of the day,
the actions we take will be both fact-based
(and science is supplying that) and an ethical
decision. A civilization able to envision God
and an afterlife and to embark on the colonization
of space will surely find a way to save
the integrity of this magnificent planet and the
life it harbors.
E.O. Wilson is the Pellegrino University Research Professor
Emeritus and Honorary Curator in Entomology, Museum of
Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, USA. He has written
over 20 books, won two Pulitzer prizes, and discovered hundreds
of new species. Considered to be one of the world’s most famous
living scientists, Dr. Wilson has been called both The Father of
Sociobiology and The Father of Biodiversity.
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