A tribute to the American biologist, naturalist and
writer Edward Osborne Wilson.
Originally published June 2022.
On Boxing Day, 2021, the world lost one of its greatest biologists. Boxing Day was apt, for Edward Osborne Wilson’s passions were communicated with verbal pugilism. Complacency and defeatism were his bug bear and not just as a great entomologist. Known as ‘the ant man’, he theorised that there were 7 tons of ant to every human on earth. He was the champion of biodiversity. Emeritus Professor at Harvard, he twice won the Pulitzer Prize, first for his work ‘On Human Nature’, in 1979, then for his magnus opus, ‘The Ants’ in 1991. His spirit sits like a lively owl in my imagination, full of wisdom, but capable of dealing death to rats.
“I look across the landscape of our own farm and feel his gaze, and the powerful raise of the professorial eyebrow. Much left to do. He inspires still”
One of the causes he embraced was the notion of ‘half earth’, a phrase urging global government to set aside half of the land area of our planet for nature. Only a target of this magnitude, as a minimum, he argued, could deliver the space necessary to curtail the sixth extinction. I look across the landscape of our own farm and feel his gaze, and the powerful raise of the professorial eye brow. Much left to do. He inspires still.
