A rare thing these days: a passionate public environmentalist, genuinely convinced that humanity is on a suicidal course, who does not denounce in fiery characters capitalist greed, modernity, the hubris of techno-science, an excess of testosterone, speciesism, or any of a dozen other archenemies of the theory class. Still rarer is that passionate environmentalist who really knows—as regards the science of the predicted crash-course—what he is talking about. E. O. Wilson is such a rare bird, or, to use the high-school nickname to which he confesses in an essay on ophidian terrors, a rare snake. Best, though, would be “rarest ant,” for he is the world’s great authority on those astonishing beings and, biophile though he may be, loves them more than snakes or sharks.

Snakes, sharks, ants, and other fauna are well-covered in this small volume, a collection of essays by the world-acclaimed biologist and author. Published originally between 1975 and 1993 in books (including Wilson’s own), scholarly journals, slick magazines, and Sunday supplements, and updated for this presentation, the pieces have disparate topics: the habits of colonial insects; universal dreams, fears, and symbologies of serpents; the present and future status of biological systematics; the real (not the journalistic) relationship between genes and behavior; the necessity of a true socio-biology; the possibility of environmental ethics.

But they have been arranged by a cunning hand: the disparity is only apparent. Taken together—and it is easy to take them all, so pleasant is this reading—these essays are a two-part message from the author. The first is, Here are the main questions and researches to which I have devoted my professional life, and this is how they are all connected. The second is, That connection is a particular view of humankind, of its urgent predicament and its prospects, to which a comprehensive understanding of all life, including its history on this planet, is indispensable.

The history is important. Either life has emerged on Earth over a span of time via processes that have come to be understood in the life sciences of the past 140 years, or it has not. If biological diversity and its myriad ways of life (our own included) are products of evolution, and the mechanisms thereof are at least broadly those that biologists see in the structure and actions of genes, the spontaneous variability of genes, their control of development, and the developmental roots of behavior; and if those behaviors ultimately affect, on the scale of ecosystems, not only the biosphere but the physical Earth as well, then—and only then—are a social biology and a rational, active environmentalism essential to our survival. If the history of life—as science sees it—is wrong, if the scenario has been designed, planned, or managed by agencies external to the Earth’s biosphere, then a biological view of the human condition, especially of our behaviors and our future, is bric-a-brac.

The latter is, needless to say, not Wilson’s position. The core argument of these essays, sometimes explicit and sometimes hidden in bewitching anecdote, is that because we are the byproducts of our becoming, because our ancestors were carnivorous apes and theirs were the numberless vertebrates and invertebrates in their pasts, we are in trouble: our reproductive success and the proliferating cultures that have made it possible are our doom—unless we begin seriously to make changes. I can’t imagine that anti-evolutionists and mystics will be many among readers of this book, but they ought to be. Even if they reject the central argument, they would find in this volume an accessible and logical statement of its broadest implications. Thereby they would understand, as few of them do now, what are the assets (to use a recent military term) of the opposition.

Lest the impression arise that these are pessimistic essays, I hasten to note that they tend toward the opposite. Wilson is, for example, more optimistic than the evidence justifies about the prospects of taxonomy and natural history receiving top billing (again) among biological disciplines. He forsees an early fusion of the biochemical and physiological sciences with the behavioral ones, and the merging, or at least cooperation, of the latter with the social sciences. All those seem to many of us, however, to be drawing fast apart. His treatment of his opposition on environmental questions is civil and rational. Rather than labeling them polluters and oppressors, as is stylish now even in academic journals, he names them, in a closing essay, “exemptionalists”--believers in humanity’s foreordained release, for one or another reason, from the harvest of harm it has done and is doing to the thin skin of life at the planet’s surface. He summarizes their arguments with as much care as he does his own. This is, in short, vintage Wilson: facts, statistics, stories in profusion, but all easily traceable to solidly documented observations; and the whole welded together in prose that is at once plain and lyrical, simple and subtle.