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
