A review by atticmoth
Biophilia by Edward O. Wilson

3.0

To those outside the formal world of academia, E. O. Wilson may not be a familiar name, but it’s hard to make it through any ecology course without his being mentioned. E. O. Wilson was a renowned entomologist, particularly from an evolutionary perspective, but most notably an early advocate of conservation biology, one of the scientists who coined the term “biodiversity”. Most of Wilson’s work probably wouldn’t be interesting to anyone outside academia, save for Biophilia, which was written later in life in the 1980s. Biophilia is defined as “the innate tendency to focus on life and lifeline processes,” and the goal of this book was to position biophilia as the driving force behind the conservation ethic. In Biophilia, Wilson synthesizes evolutionary biology, traditional indigenous knowledge, personal experience and Jungian archetypes to defend his perspective that humans are innately drawn to nature because we are a part of it. This is a true statement, but I would perhaps find it more powerful if Biophilia had remained a purely philosophical argument, instead of trying to force a scientific one. For example, Wilson attempts to explain the human conception of beauty (landscape gardens, Bonsai trees) as imitating the “original environment” — the savannas of Africa, claiming “some unconscious force has been at work to turn Asiatic pines and other northern species into African acacias.” A lot of Biophilia seems scattered from Wilson’s original thesis, until “The Conservation Ethic” chapter, when he turns his biophilia theory towards advocating for environmental protection. I wish more of the book had been about this, instead of rudimentary ecological concepts for the layman interspersed with personal anecdotes about discovering a millionth ant species in Suriname. I often had to remind myself what Wilson was arguing in the first place, which is why I am not sure I would recommend this book as a cohesive whole, but perhaps as individual essays that could serve as a primer to a study of conservation biology.