The future of life eo wilson pdf download

Wilson is also an abundantly talented writer who has twice won the Pulitzer Prize. In this, his most personal and timely book to date, he assesses the precarious state of our environment, examining the mass extinctions occurring in our time and the natural treasures we are about to lose forever.

Yet, rather than eschewing doomsday prophesies, he spells out a specific plan to save our world while there is still time. His vision is a hopeful one, as economically sound as it is environmentally necessary.

Eloquent, practical and wise, this book should be read and studied by anyone concerned with the fate of the natural world. Toggle navigation. Wilson Release Date: Genre: Environment. Buy on Amazon. I don't know 1. I'm a little pissed because the book doesn't even fully load on my phone The only reason I bought it on here is because I thought it would be more convenient Wilson 4. The effects will be direct and powerful.

As industrialization proceeds, per-capita income rises, and the populace consumes more food. They also migrate up the energy pyramid to meat and dairy products. All the while the available water supply remains static or nearly so. In an open market, the agricultural use of water is outcompeted by industrial use. As China, already short on water and arable land, grows more prosperous through industrialization and trade, water becomes more expensive.

The cost of agriculture rises correspondingly, and, unless the collection of water is subsidized, the price of food also rises. This is in part the rationale for the great dams at Three Gorges and Xiaolangdi, built at enormous public expense. In theory, China can make up its grain shortage by purchasing from the Big Five grain-surplus nations.

Unfortunately, its population is too large and the world surplus too restrictive for it to solve its problem without altering the world market. All by itself, China seems destined to drive up the price of grain and make it harder for the poorer developing countries to meet their own needs.

The problem, resource experts agree, cannot be solved entirely by hydrological engineering. It must include shifts from grain to fruit and vegetables, which are more labor-intensive, giving China a competitive edge. Among the most telling indicators is the pollution of water.

Here is a measure worth pondering. Of these, according to the U. Diseases from bacterial and toxic-waste pollution are epidemic. China can probably feed itself to at least mid-century, but its own data show that it will be skirting the edge of disaster even as it accelerates its life-saving shift to industrialization and megahydrological engineering.

A war, internal political turmoil, extended droughts, or crop disease can kick the economy into a downspin. Its enormous population makes rescue by other countries impracticable. China deserves close attention, not just as the unsteady giant whose missteps can rock the world, but also because it is so far advanced along the path to which the rest of humanity seems inexorably headed.

If China solves its problems, the lessons learned can be applied elsewhere. That includes the United States, whose citizens are working at a furious pace to overpopulate and exhaust their own land and water from sea to shining sea. Environmentalism is still widely viewed, especially in the United States, as a special-interest lobby. Environmentalism is something more central and vastly more important.

Earth, unlike the other solar planets, is not in physical equilibrium. It depends on its living shell to create the special conditions on which life is sustainable. The soil, water, and atmosphere of its surface have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to their present condition by the activity of the biosphere, a stupendously complex layer of living creatures whose activities are locked together in precise but tenuous global cycles of energy and transformed organic matter.

The biosphere creates our special world anew every day, every minute, and holds it in a unique, shimmering physical disequilibrium. On that disequilibrium the human species is in total thrall. When we alter the biosphere in any direction, we move the environment away from the delicate dance of biology.

When we destroy ecosystems and extinguish species, we degrade the greatest heritage this planet has to offer and thereby threaten our own existence. Nor are we aliens who colonized Earth. We evolved here, one among many species, across millions of years, and exist as one organic miracle linked to others. The natural environment we treat with such unnecessary ignorance and recklessness was our cradle and nursery, our school, and remains our one and only home.

That is the essence of environmentalism. It is the guiding principle of those devoted to the health of the planet. But it is not yet a general worldview, evidently not yet compelling enough to distract many people away from the primal diversions of sport, politics, religion, and private wealth. The relative indifference to the environment springs, I believe, from deep within human nature.

The human brain evidently evolved to commit itself emotionally only to a small piece of geography, a limited band of kinsmen, and two or three generations into the future.

We are innately inclined to ignore any distant possibility not yet requiring examination. It is, people say, just good common sense. Why do they think in this short-sighted way? The reason is simple: it is a hard-wired part of our Paleolithic heritage. For hundreds of millennia those who worked for short-term gain within a small circle of relatives and friends lived longer and left more offspring—even when their collective striving caused their chiefdoms and empires to crumble around them.

To select values for the distant future of the whole planet also is relatively easy—in theory at least. But combine them we must, because a universal environmental ethic is the only guide by which humanity and the rest of life can be safely conducted through the bottleneck into which our species has foolishly blundered. But if calculated from the condition of the biosphere, it is falling. No leveling trend is yet in sight. Environmental indices are not popular topics at international economic conferences.

By and large, religious leaders also lack a record in environmental stewardship of which they can be proud. Seen from a historical perspective, however, the hesitancy of the majority is understandable. The sacred texts of the Abrahamic religions contain few instructions about the rest of the living world. The Iron Age scribes who wrote them knew war. They knew love and compassion.

They knew purity of spirit. But they did not know ecology. A more realistic view of the human prospect is now in order. Overpopulation and environmentally ignorant development are everywhere shrinking natural habitats and biological diversity. For most residents and visitors, it seems an unspoiled island paradise. Its lush forests and fertile valleys contained no mosquitoes, no ants, no stinging wasps, no venomous snakes or spiders, and few plants with thorns or poisons.

All these infelicities are abundant now, having been introduced by human commerce, both deliberately and accidentally. Prehuman Hawaii was biologically diverse and unique. Native eagles soared above thick forests that were home to strange long-legged owls and a glittering array of painted honeycreepers. Almost all of these endemic forms are now extinct. The majority, however, cling to life in densely forested upland valleys with high rainfall, as far removed from human presence on the islands as possible.

Like the tourists admiring them, they traveled to Hawaii by boat and aircraft from continents far away. The same species can be seen with monotonous frequency elsewhere in the warm temperate and tropical zones of the world.

Even the vegetation investing the most natural-appearing habitats of the coastal lowlands and lower mountain slopes is primarily introduced.

Once there were over ten thousand kinds of plants and animals native to Hawaii. Many ranked among the most distinctive and beautiful in the world. That number has now been drastically whittled down. The colonists erased other plant and animal species when they cleared forests and grasslands for agriculture. The biota of prehistoric Hawaii was relatively small and vulnerable. The invasion of Hawaii can be viewed as an abnormal acceleration of the Darwinian process.

Some of the voyagers traveled on air currents in the upper atmosphere. Standing on a leaf or twig, they spin out silk into a passing breeze, letting the threads grow longer and longer until, like swelling balloons, they tug strongly at the body of the spider.

The spiders then let go and sail upward. If they catch the right updraft and prevailing wind they can travel long distances before settling to the ground or—fatally—into the water. Some descend voluntarily by reeling in and eating the silk lines. Native spiders, it should come as no surprise, are abundant and diverse on Hawaii. The odds against each individual voyager settling prehuman Hawaii were astronomical. Even then the pioneers faced formidable obstacles. Species able to survive and breed were then candidates for evolutionary adaptation to the special conditions of the Hawaiian environment.

In time they became endemics, genetically distinct forms found nowhere else in the world. The Polynesian seafarers, arriving from the Society and Marquesas Islands, broke the crucible of evolution. The alien invasion then skyrocketed when American and other settlers imported legions of additional species not just from the neighboring archipelagoes but from all over the world.

As a result, a majority of resident land birds and nearly half of the plant species are now alien. Insects, spiders, mites, and other arthropods were unintended companions, arriving as stowaways in cargo and ballast.

Moreover, the aliens dominate in numbers of individual organisms, especially in the disturbed environments. As a result, immigrants own the bulk of Hawaii. Most of the invaders are relatively innocuous: only a small fraction build populations large enough to become agricultural pests or harm the natural environment.

But the few that do break out are capable of enormous damage. In their native habitats on distant continents, they are almost always unobtrusive, hemmed in by predators and other enemies that coevolved with them since their evolutionary birth.

Now freed from these constraints in the long-sequestered and gentle environment of Hawaii and enjoying extraordinary reproductive success, they variously choke, consume, pauperize, and crowd out native species too weak to resist. The arch-destroyers of the Hawaiian biota among the nonhuman immigrants are the African big-headed ant Pheidole megacephala and feral strains of the common pig Sus scrofera.

The ant lives in borderless supercolonies of up to millions of workers and breeding queens. Spreading out as a living sheet from the point of entry, the supercolonies eat or drive out a large part of the other insects in their path. The impact has rippled up the food chain. By reducing the food source of some of the smaller insect-eating native birds, it has likely contributed to their disappearance.

In scattered localities not occupied by African big-headed ants, supercolonies of another alien species, the Argentine ant Linepithema humile , dominate the ground in a similar way, employing mass attacks and glandular poisons to overcome opponents. The ants of Hawaii, like the humans of Hawaii, are aliens ruling over an impoverished dominion of fellow aliens. The vulnerability of the Hawaiian fauna to the invasive ants conforms to a familiar principle of evolution. Almost everywhere in the world, and for tens of millions of years, ants have been the leading predators of insects and other small animals.

They are also among the preeminent scavengers of dead bodies, and as turners of the soil they equal or surpass the earthworms. Prehuman Hawaii, because of its extreme isolation, never had them. They were unprepared for the shock of occupation by social predators of such high caliber. As a result, a large and still imprecisely measured part of the native Hawaiian species succumbed to their invading swarms. The Hawaiian environment was also evolutionarily unprepared for the coming of ground-dwelling mammals.

Especially destructive has been the domestic pig, carried to the islands by the early Polynesians. Today their feral descendants are more like the wild boars of Europe than the gentle domestic stocks from which they evolved.

As they forage, the pigs sow the seeds of alien plants in their droppings, and the resulting growth crowds the native species. The pigs also dig wallows that collect pools of water. And, as always, there is a trade-off to even that small advantage. The pools are also the breeding grounds of mosquitoes, which transmit avian malaria to the genetically unprotected native birds. People brought pigs to Hawaii deliberately, and only people can halt the destruction they cause. Teams of pig hunters, working with specially trained dogs, have cut the populations in nature reserves considerably but are nowhere near to eliminating them.

Other introduced mammals escalate the damage. Rats, mongooses, and feral house cats hunt the Hawaiian forest birds. The last individuals of some plant species survive only on inaccessible cliff faces, yet even there they are endangered by falling soil and rocks loosened by animals feeding along the cliff edges above. Among the lessons learned is that the decline of any particular species rarely has a single cause. Typically, multiple forces entrained by human activity reinforce one another and either simultaneously or in sequence force the species down.

Invasive species. Ants, pigs, and other aliens displace the native Hawaiian species. Fresh water, marine coastal water, and the soil of the islands are contaminated, weakening and erasing more species. Some species, especially birds, were hunted to rarity and extinction during the early Polynesian occupation.

The prime mover of the incursive forces around the world is the second P in HIPPO—too many people consuming too much of the land and sea space and the resources they contain.

With the spread of Neolithic cultures and agriculture, the sequence reversed. Each case is a result of the unique characteristics of the threatened species and the particular corner into which human activity has pushed it. Only by focused study are the researchers able to diagnose the cause of endangerment and devise the best means to nurse the species back to health. No species better illustrates how peculiar, even bizarre, the causes of decline can be than the Vancouver Island marmot Marmota vancouverensis.

This beautiful ground squirrel was never abundant. In the late twentieth century it began a dangerous decline. No obvious change could be found in the immediate environment that sets the species at risk. Because of the remoteness of the habitat, humans rarely disturb the marmots.

Nor do they hunt them. No disease appears to have recently swept the population, although it cannot be ruled out entirely as a contributing factor. The problem, it turns out, is the clearcutting of forest to harvest timber below the subalpine habitat.

With this change, an instinct that once kept the Vancouver Island marmot alive is now its undoing. Under natural conditions the small local populations composing the species frequently decline to extinction. But the empty habitats they leave behind are soon replenished, because young marmots in other populations instinctively emigrate from their homes upon reaching maturity.

They move down the mountains and travel through the conifer forests that clothe the lower elevations. As they proceed they zigzag up and down the wooded slopes until they encounter another subalpine meadow. There they halt and dig burrows. The rigidity of this instinct puts the young marmots at risk in disturbed environments. When they encounter the open spaces of clearcut conifer forests, they automatically accept them as natural meadows and settle down.

And there they perish, either from the more dangerous predators that prowl the lower slopes or, more slowly, from the failure of their hibernation cycle to adapt to the new temperature and snowfall regimes. Enough of the false meadows have been created by humans to bleed the more remote populations of the Vancouver Island marmot to near extinction.

The concentration of emigrants in the clearings is also likely to have unbalanced the population cycles of the source populations hard by. The only way to save the species, it now appears, is to capture a few of the survivors and breed them in captivity. That rescue operation has, in fact, begun and at this writing is proving effective. At a later date the species, it is hoped, can be resettled in natural subalpine pockets surrounded by protected conifer forest.

The exercise was supposed to be a model case of biological control, in which a harmless species is introduced to whittle down a harmful one. Instead, it triggered an extinction avalanche. Unexpectedly, they attacked and proceeded to eat their way through the native snails, which are much smaller and more vulnerable than the giant snails. On Moorea in French Polynesia, the rosy wolfsnails were the main cause of extinction of all of the seven free-living endemic Partulina snails, whose multicolored, acorn-sized shells were once used by the native people to string leis.

In a last-minute rescue operation, two biologists, James Murray and Bryan Clarke, transferred living samples of the species to several universities and zoological parks in the United States and England. Fortunately the little snails adapted well to captivity, where they can be easily housed in plastic containers and bred on lettuce.

By the mid-nineties the captive populations of three species were strong enough for individuals to be reintroduced to small compounds in the rainforests of Moorea.

Electric wires and moats of repellent along the boundaries protect them from the prowling rosy wolfsnails. However, one of the seven species, Partulina turgida, failed even in captivity.

Simultaneously, other local Australian frog populations disappeared, following precipitous declines as short as four months. On the other side of the world, the golden toad of Costa Rica Bufo periglenes population also plummeted. Its color was spectacular: males in the breeding season looked as though they had been dipped whole in orange Day-Glo paint. No golden toad has been seen since, and the species is presumed extinct.

Meanwhile, reports poured in of the decline of amphibians elsewhere. Especially troubling was the local extinction of many species from widely scattered locations in Central and South America. The losses are not geographically even. Within particular regions they occur in some species and not others.

In California, all of the frog species of Yosemite National Park have declined. The mountain yellow-legged frog Rana muscosa has vanished from the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada but continues strong on the eastern slopes. Frogs and salamanders of the southeastern United States, one of the world centers of amphibian biodiversity, have so far held up relatively well. As researchers focused on what they named the Declining Amphibian Phenomenon, they came to agree that the prime mover is the destruction of habitat, the H in the aforementioned HIPPO.

But a medley of other malign forces are at play, sometimes stemming directly from habitat loss, sometimes independent of it. These forces press down in permutations that differ from one locality to the next and according to circumstance.

In the Sierra Nevada, atmospheric pollution from the coast evidently plays a role. To the north, in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon, a leading culprit is the increase of ultraviolet-B radiation, the celldamaging component of sunlight. Elsewhere in the western United States, trout and bullfrogs introduced into streams feed voraciously on smaller frog species and account for some of their extirpations.

The growth abnormalities are believed to be caused by chemical pollutants; among the prime suspects is methoprene, sprayed in the water to prevent growth of mosquito larvae. Because frogs must breathe through their skins, they suffocate. The fungus has been spread, at least in part, in water carried in aquaria from one country to another. The adults of most species are unusually sensitive to small changes in the environment because they live in the water, permanently or part-time, or in moist hideaways in forests.

Their larvae—tadpoles—are aquatic bottom feeders. In both adult and larval stages the typical amphibian skin functions as a moist and porous apparatus for the exchange of air, making it an absorbent pad ideal for collecting poisons and parasites.

We ourselves could not have devised a better early-warning device for general environmental deterioration than a frog. The amphibians illustrate another principle pertaining to the health of biodiversity: species stressed by HIPPO forces become more vulnerable to natural death.

The most insidious of such lethal agents is inbreeding depression. The higher the level of inbreeding, the larger the percentage of offspring in the population with double doses of defective genes that cause sterility and early death. It is undoubtedly a common phenomenon in rare plant and animal species everywhere. Inbreeding depression is not, however, an inevitable consequence of small population size. Such a genetic purge evidently occurred in the cheetah.

But they did not perish from genetic defects, as might be immediately suspected. The principal causes instead were predation by lions and spotted hyenas, along with abandonment by the mothers during periods of food scarcity. Rarity hurts in other ways. Once common on the mainland of South Florida and the northern Florida Keys, this large lepidopteran with the chestnut-and-amber wings became increasingly restricted by the clearing of its forest habitat.

It was diminished further by insecticide sprays used to control mosquitoes. A small captive breeding population is now maintained by the entomologist Thomas Emmel at the University of Florida in Gainesville, a slender buffer against total extinction of the race. The clearcutting of a remnant patch of mountain rainforest can eliminate scores of species in one stroke. Aquatic equivalents of the Centinela massacre are especially common.

Of all forms of ongoing habitat destruction, the most consequential is the clearing of forests. Today, due to the universal spread of agriculture, only about half of the original forest cover remains, and that is being cut at an accelerating rate.

Half of that surviving has already been degraded, much of it severely. The loss of forest during the past half-century is one of the most profound and rapid environmental changes in the history of the planet.

Its impact on biodiversity is automatic and severe. To reduce the area of a habitat is to lower the number of species that can live sustainably within it. More precisely, as the area shrinks, the sustainable number of species falls by the sixth to third root of the area.

A common intermediate value found in nature is the fourth root. The same rule applies to the national parks of the western United States and Canada. During the hundred years of their existence, the number of mammal species has declined in accordance with the mathematical deductions of island biogeography. Also as predicted by theory, the smaller the park, the steeper the drop. In fact, the number of natural habitats reduced to fragments this size or smaller is increasing rapidly all around the world.

The headquarters of global biodiversity are the tropical rainforests. They are also the leading abattoir of extinction, shattered into fragments that are then being severely adulterated or erased one by one.

Of all ecosystems, they are rivaled in rate of decline only by the temperate rainforests and tropical dry forests. Where all tropical rainforests together occupy an area approximately equal to the lower forty-eight United States, they are being removed at the rate of half the state of Florida annually.

On the other hand, recent satellite data support a lower rate that, for South America at least, indicates that the FAO estimates are too high by a factor of as much as two. Almost all are also under heavy assault. Large numbers of species have already been lost forever from the forest hotspots.

Many more are endangered. Also in balance are the remaining wildernesses, or frontier forests, as they are often called: the vast rainforests of Amazonia, central Africa including especially the Congo Basin , and New Guinea, and the needleleaf forests of Canada and the Russian Federation.

Once the legendary strongholds of Malaysia, Sumatra, and Borneo were in this group, but they have been damaged so extensively in the past several decades as to compose forests of less than wilderness quality. Vast it is, but the Amazon rainforest is not safe. Given that the trees are anchored only by shallow root systems and can be easily bulldozed over, then sawn into lumber, chipped, or burned, the Amazonian wilderness could be easily destroyed within decades.

Ten percent is not enough to save the Amazon as we know it. It would not protect the vast assemblage of plants and animals that make Brazil the biodiversity capital of the world.

But tropical forests, in spite of their fabled exuberance, are more vulnerable and less resilient than most other ecosystems. Their weakness lies in the nutrient-poor soil, which surrenders easily to the erosive power of heavy rain. The hardwood and needleleaf woodlands of the north temperate zone are grounded in deep layers of humus, where seeds lie dormant for years.

When the trees are clearcut, and if the soil stays mostly intact, the original woody vegetation quickly grows back. Even soil that has been plowed for generations can often support a nearly full and early regeneration. Not so in most of the Amazon. In one cut you are through the litter and humus; the organic material has mostly petered out at an inch or two beneath the surface. Here and there are patches completely bare of litter and humus, as though swept clean by a broom.

Now look at the trees and their dense canopy. This is an ecosystem where the biomass is locked up in aboveground organisms. Dead vegetation falling to the ground has no time to pile up. It is quickly broken into shapeless frass by legions of arthropods, annelid worms, fungi, and bacteria. The last-stage nutrients released by these ministrations are quickly absorbed by the shallow rootlet masses of the trees and understory shrubs.

When small sections of forest are opened by natural treefall or small-scale swidden agriculture, the thin humus holds in place and the gap is closed by regeneration from the nearby surrounding forest. But when large swaths of forest are clearcut and burned, the usual practice, most of the humus cover is too far away to be reseeded quickly, and the pounding rains soon wash it away.

The tearing down of a tropical rainforest follows a typical sequence. First, a road is cut deep into the interior for logging and settlement. The land, depleted of the best timber and in declining condition, is next sold in lots to ranchers and small farmers. The settlers topple most of the rest of the trees, use some for lumber, and let the rest dry out.

A year later they burn the debris. The ash that settles on the barren soil is enough for several years of good harvest. As the ground nutrients wash away, the settlers either make the best of a worsening situation or else move on to occupy new land closer to the frontier. Repeating the ruinous cycle endlessly, the human wave is rolling up the Amazon forest like a gigantic carpet.

As the settlers press outward they leave bits and pieces of forest here and there, little refuges along riverbanks, on steep slopes, and in watery sloughs. But these fragments are far from secure refuges for the bulk of Amazonian life.

The larger mammals and palatable birds are quickly hunted out, creating what conservation biologists call the silent forest syndrome. Such fragments, even if left untouched, do not carry on as microcosms of the pristine larger forest. Cut out from the deeper reaches as though by a giant cookie cutter, with no protective marginal vegetation left in place, they suffer the edge effect, a kind of forest sickness.

Winds blow in from the side, drying out the interior to distances of a hundred meters or more. In the peripheral zone, ground plants adapted to deep forest decline and die out.

The towering trees above them are weakened. During the violent storms common in the region, gusts of wind snap off branches or even full crowns.

Some of the trees fall entire, knocking down other trees in their paths, and decapitating others by the hawserlike vines that grow from one crown to the next. Treefalls occur in undisturbed forest too; you can occasionally hear them on a quiet day from a mile away.

They create tree gaps that are part of the normal cycle of growth, small enough to receive seeds from the surrounding forest. The saplings and herbaceous ground vegetation that spring up in the gaps add to the diversity of primary forest.

In the edge zone of a forest isolated by extensive clearcutting, however, this process is dangerously accelerated. It opens wider spaces, exposing the tree bases to more sunlight, killing the shade-loving epiphytes, drying the soil and litter, and admitting a swarm of weedy plants and animals. In the damaged portions of the still-standing forest the stage is set for the arrival of an even more potent menace. Fires, ignited by lightning strikes or set by farmers to remove brush, sweep through the desiccated outer zones.

Building momentum, they work on into the deep interior. Roads and small settlements that penetrate a pristine forest fragment it and commence its conversion before the clearcutting that follows. It is best assessed on the ground. In time the transformation reaches a critical point and becomes self-sustaining.

As the early damage spreads, new intrusions add to the impact and reinforce one another, a process environmental scientists call synergism. When such smoke becomes thick enough, it kills seedlings.

An equally harmful synergism is the reduction of atmospheric water over the Amazon that comes from the trees themselves. The potential exists for a climatic downward spiral: cut down trees, reduce rainfall, lose still more trees. About half of the rain falling in the Amazon Basin arises from the forest itself, as opposed to clouds that blow in from rivers and the Atlantic.

The water is carried in conducting vessels of the plants and evaporated from their leaves and branches. To the extent that the Amazon is diminished by cutting and burning, annual rainfall also declines, and the wilderness remnants are stressed still more. The same principles apply to moist tropical forests elsewhere. Those of Indonesia may be closely approaching the critical damage levels predicted by theory.

Eighty percent of the forest cover has been committed to logging and replacement by oil palm and other plantations, and rapid clearing is under way. Even parts of the interior previously too wet to burn were lost.

The heaps of seeds that fall to the ground are a bounty for deer, tapirs, porcupines, orangutans, birds, insects, and other animals of diverse kinds. After gorging themselves, these creatures still leave enough seeds to sprout the next generation of dipterocarp seedlings. The cost of ENSOs to natural environments already weakened by human activity can be devastating.

It is tempting to link the trend to global warming, as some experts have done. Meanwhile, there can no longer be any reasonable doubt of global warming itself and its generally malign consequences for the environment and human economy. The most authoritative studies of this trend are those conducted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC , the more than one thousand experts worldwide who specialize in different aspects of the phenomenon. The same is true of methane and nitrous oxide.

It is further reasonably certain that the thickening of the greenhouse gases is due in good measure to industrial activity and the cutting and burning of forests. Could these predictions be wrong? We prayerfully hope so, but with each passing year they are more solidly grounded, to the extent that it would be criminally negligent to ignore them. In ecology, as in medicine, a wrong diagnosis can cause far more harm if it is negative than if it is positive.

Sea levels, if the trend continues, will rise by four to thirty-six inches. Shallow coastlines around the world will shrink. Real-estate investment in New Orleans and the Florida Keys, not to mention the Bahamas and New York City, will seem an increasingly poor long-term risk. As the thermoclines of global climate ease poleward, plant and animal species will be hard-pressed to keep up.

Many native species are already trapped in natural reserves that have become islands in a sea of cropland and suburban sprawl. Others, as in Florida, face a different risk: they are limited by their genetic adaptation to coastal strips likely to be submerged by the rising sea.

Some of the North American species threatened by climate change can be transplanted northward or inland. But elsewhere in the world there are ecosystems with no place at all to go.

Among the most extensive are the tundras and seas of the high latitudes. With even a modest amount of global warming they will be pushed toward the poles and then oblivion. Thousands of species, from lichens and mosses to penguins, polar bears, and reindeer, could be lost.

The same fate awaits arctic-alpine biotas of the high mountain ranges and the upper montane tropical rainforests in other parts of the world.

They include the cool temperate reaches of southern South America, southernmost Africa, Madagascar, Antarctica, the subantarctic shelf islands, the Indian subcontinent with Sri Lanka, Australia, and the archipelagoes of New Zealand and New Caledonia.

The paleosols of South Africa have yielded what appear to be the chemical signatures of land-dwelling bacteria two billion years before the present.

The living Gondwanan life forms, some with histories dating back to the time of the supercontinent, are treasures worth saving.

The situation is especially threatening to southern Africa below the Cunene and Zambesi Rivers. Within this domain, even the arid habitats rank among the richest on Earth. Adding to worldwide stress on the natural world from habitat destruction and climate change is the rising tide of alien species, the Hawaiian problem writ large.

Most settle in urban and agricultural environments, snuggling close to the human populations that transported them. A very few are able to penetrate the heart of the natural environment itself, with sometimes devastating results. Some of the immigrants gone wrong were brought to the New World with the best of intentions.

Today they are a plague across America. Most other invasives arrived unnoticed as stowaways. The answer from experience is almost entirely negative. The reason has been clearly documented in case histories from around the world. In their own native land the immigrant species are held in check by natural enemies and other population controls. Released from these restraints in the new, host environment, a few explode in number and spread. Home the pdf book free pdf for pdf books for edition pdf book pdf free download and pdf and book best books book pdf how book the book pdf download online novel pdf.

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