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The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth |
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The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth
List Price: $21.95
Our Price: $14.93
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton
Author: Edward O. Wilson
Binding: Hardcover
Publication Date: 2006-09-05
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Label: W. W. Norton
Number Of Pages: 160
Features:
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Editorial Review:
In this daring work, Edward O. Wilson proposes an alliance between science and religion to save Earth's vanishing biodiversity.
Dear Pastor:
We have not met, yet I feel I know you well enough to call you friend. First of all, we grew up in the same faith. Although I no longer belong to that faith, I am confident that if we met and spoke privately of our deepest beliefs, it would be in a spirit of mutual respect and goodwill. I write to you now for your counsel and help. Let us see if we can, and you are willing, to meet on the near side of metaphysics in order to deal with the real world we share. I suggest that we set aside our differences in order to save the Creation. The defense of living Nature is a universal value. It doesn't rise from nor does it promote any religious or ideological dogma. Rather, it serves without discrimination the interests of all humanity.
Pastor, we need your help. The Creation—living Nature—is in deep trouble.
The Creation is E. O. Wilson's most important work since the publications of Sociobiology and Biophilia. Like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, it is a book about the fate of the earth and the survival of our planet. Yet while Carson was specifically concerned with insecticides and the ecological destruction of our natural resources, Wilson, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner, attempts his new social revolution by bridging the seemingly irreconcilable worlds of fundamentalism and science. Like Carson, Wilson passionately concerned about the state of the world, draws on his own personal experiences and expertise as an entomologist, and prophesies that half the species of plants and animals on Earth could either have gone or at least are fated for early extinction by the end of our present century.
Astonishingly, The Creation is not a bitter, predictable rant against fundamentalist Christians or deniers of Darwin. Rather, Wilson, a leading "secular humanist," draws upon his own rich background as a boy in Alabama who "took the waters," and seeks not to condemn this new generations of Christians but to address them on their own terms. Conceiving the book as an extended letter to a southern Baptist minister, Wilson, in stirring language that can evoke Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail," tells this everyman minister how, in fact, the world really came to be. He pleads with these men of the cloth to understand the cataclysmic damage that is destroying our planet and asks for their help in preventing the destruction of our Earth before it is too late. Never a pessimist, Wilson avers that there are solutions that may yet save the planet, and believes that the vision that he presents in The Creation is one that both scientists and pastors can accept, and work on together in spite of their fundamental ideological differences. 25 line drawings.
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Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 
"Meeting on the near side of metaphysics..." *  2008-12-27
Whenever I read Wilson, I'm reminded of those 19th century amateur naturalists (Selkirk, for example) who loved and marveled at the dappled world and were able to communicate their affection in writing that's an admirable literary genre in itself. Wilson, of course, is no amateur biologist. But his writing style is beautiful, and his sense of intimate wonderment at the various forms of life on the planet more accords with an almost gone mindset than with the laboratory, quantitative science of today.
Wilson's concern in The Creation is to cross ideological divides, such as those that might separate a theist and an atheist, long enough to focus on the environmental crisis that affects everyone. Civilization, Wilson opines, was purchased at the betrayal of nature. For centuries, nature has been able to withstand the onslaught. But today, collapse is a real possibility. Harkening to the meteor that destroyed dinosaurs 68 million years ago, Wilson chillingly writes that we--humans--are the meteor today. Habitat destruction, climate warming, the spread of invasive species, pollution, and overharvesting are destroying the biosphere at an alarming rate. Geologically, species vanished at a rate of 1 per million per year. (Since this corresponds to the rate of the emergence of new species, equilibrium was maintained.) Now, however, the ratio is at least 100 to 1, and is expected to rise to 1,000 to 1 (p. 117). By the end of this century, a full half of currently existing species--most of which have never been catalogued--will be gone.
If there's one thing that people of all or no religious beliefs can agree on, it's the splendor of the planet, and the urgent need to steward it better. Wilson's brief for cooperation, filled with wisdom and fascinating facts about life, is as good a manifesto as one is likely to find. Especially inspiring are the chapters in which he encourages citizen science and offers some strategies for advocacy. Also check out the Encyclopedia of Life on the internet, a project Wilson suggested in his book that's now taken off.
_________
* Wilson's invitation (p. 4) to the fictional pastor to whom the book is addressed.
The Evolution: An Appeal to Save Life On Earth  2008-08-30
If the title of the book was like the title of my review, I would give the book 5 stars. I found the Biology and biography part of the book interesting. But the problem is that this book's proclaimed purpose does not match with its contents. It is about what the evolutionary biology and how to educate people about it, not really appealing to anyone to participate in saving the life except calling that someone as a pastor. Why pretending to appeal to someone when you insult them? Protecting the complexity of the ecosystem is something that those who value lives accept without the biological reasoning. I read this book expecting a good scientist arguing it with some valuable insights into other party's position (in this case, pastors) and thereby motivating them to join the force achieving the greater good despite of fundamental differences in opinions(?).
Be honest.
I can't imagine a great pastor writing a book titled as my review and starting the first page with "Dear Biologist", and then forwarding with how the Biology sucks, why the creation makes more spiritual senses, how to educate the general public about the Creation without boring them, and finally how great spiritual leaders the author met in the seminary. And in between the pastor says "By the way, we have to take care of this great evolution and its complexity." If any pastor wrote such a book, I could not call the pastor great in the good conscience.
Read this book if you are interested in the biology, especially the evolutionary biology and its education for the general public. Don't read it if you are looking for a insightful argument for the cooperation between the science and religion for the common great goal.
Hey Mr. Wilson!!  2008-08-20
Thanks for writing this book. It was truly inspiration for me. I don't write many reviews so I'm going to make this short and sweet. I'm about to start my last semester of college and will soon be receiving my B.A. in Psychology. However, I had no idea what I wanted to do with it afterwards.
Typically students try to go to grad school, but I didn't know what field interested me enough to devote two more years too. Then I read this book and heard of Environmental Psychology. I've always been fascinated by our surroundings. How our natural and artificial environments affect who we are as people. In "The Creation", Wilson not only informs the reader that there IS a field of psychology that studies just that, but that many many studies have been done within that field and he mentions plenty.
So thank you Mr. Wilson for writing this book and inspiring me to further my education! This is the only book of yours I have read, but it is certainly not the last. I can't say I will agree with everything you have to say as I learn more about your ideas and theories, but I know for a fact you hold these evidence-supported-ideas and theories with great confidence and passion for your subject and your species, which is DESPERATELY needed today.
Tells it like it is 2008-06-21
Dr Wilson is a master at explaining, in layman's terms, why we need to take care of the whole Earth, not just those organisms that are directly useful to people. This book should be required reading for all high school and college students.
A good, quick read. 2008-06-09
I like Wilson's view that science and faith can and should try to meet on common ground. I didn't get the feeling that Wilson is a racist, misogynist, or eugenicist, as has been alleged by others--just a helluva biologist! I found it fascinating that the total weight of all of the ants is as much as that of all of the humans. Also interesting is the % of undiscovered species, from which so many advances in medicine are waiting to be found.No Time To Kill
Bruce A. Roth
Daisy Alliance
www.daisyalliance.org
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