E.O. Wilson "The End of the Anthropocene."

[Gloria]

Go Wilson. I agree with him completely. While urban nature must be pursued, we must also never give up on the magnificent wild places left on this earth. The Cook County Forest Preserves of Chicago will get a great facelift from current plans for its future. Our family will utilize and cherish its nature. But I do not want that to be what our grandchildren think of as the best they can do.
When I read the book Emma Marris worte, Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World I felt angry at her for way she spoke about nature and man.


The modern Darwin

He quotes with particular vehemence an article in Wired by the ecologist Erle Ellis, entitled “Stop Trying to Save the Planet”.
“Nature is gone,” writes Ellis. “You are living on a used planet. If that bothers you, get over it. We now live in the Anthropocene, a geological epoch in which Earth’s atmosphere, lithosphere and biosphere are shaped primarily by human forces.”

Such ideas have been popularised by writers such as Emma Marris, whose high-profile Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World is one of the books that Wilson says he intends to “vivisect publicly” in own new work, which will be titled, not without irony, The End of the Anthropocene.

Ultimately, he says, the “Anthropocene ideology” will lead to “artificial ecosystems, designed for our pleasure – you know, like a good swimming pool. That’s essentially what’s on their mind: we can do almost anything, and we don’t need old-fashioned nature or the pain and expense of trying to retain and restore it.”

[Gloria]

http://www.amazon.com/Meaning-Human-.../dp/0871401002

The Meaning of Human Existence Hardcover – October 6, 2014
Edward O. Wilson

Continuing his groundbreaking examination of our "Anthropocene Epoch," which he began with The Social Conquest of Earth, described by the New York Times as "a sweeping account of the human rise to domination of the biosphere," here Wilson posits that we, as a species, now know enough about the universe and ourselves that we can begin to approach questions about our place in the cosmos and the meaning of intelligent life in a systematic, indeed, in a testable way.

[Rebek56]

I can't seem to get the "thread starter" to come up, but here is an article featuring Wilson's (and others') work in the current Smithsonian: History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places | Smithsonian

Who would have expected a millionaire to open a Center for Biophilia in north Florida?

[Gloria]

Nice article rebek.
If only...(sigh)

And perhaps his most urgent project is a quest to refute conservation skeptics who think there isn’t enough left of the natural world to be worth saving.

“Why, when this thing gets really going,” Wilson said, “you’ll be so surrounded, so enveloped by connected corridors that you’ll almost never not be in a national park, or at any rate in a landscape that leads to a national park.”

Davis, a commodities trader in timber and oil and gas rights, who grew up 65 miles west of his forest, is jovial, folksy, forceful, slightly rumpled-looking, unassuming (“I’m a dirt-road, Panhandle guy”). But for the past decade he has been spending half a million dollars a year planting longleaf pine trees and another half million on other parts of a longleaf forest.

If you were going to save Florida black bears, it was clear from the start, you’d have to save longleaf forests, their preferred habitat. An adult male black bear roams across perhaps a hundred square miles of land. North Florida already had some good-sized clusters of publicly owned longleaf—national forests, state forests, wildlife management areas and, in the western Panhandle, Eglin Air Force Base, a huge facility that back before World War II had itself been a national forest. If you could add in enough territory to put these pieces together, they’d amount to something greater than just a “postage stamp” of the natural world, as conservationists had started calling the national parks. The problem was that 70 miles separated the first two protected longleaf forests—and it was another 95 miles to the third.

Read more: History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places | Smithsonian
Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv
Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter

[Gloria]

It's all too beautiful...

The new challenge, as Wilson sees it, is to link up national parks and wilderness reserves and restored landscapes to “protect in perpetuity entire faunas and floras.” He has high praise for several such projects out West—especially the Yellowstone-to-Yukon initiative to join vast areas of the U.S. and Canada, and the even more
extensive Western Wildway vision, a tri-national arc of land along the length of the Rockies from Mexico to Alaska sponsored by the Wildlands Network, a consortium of biologists and activists headquartered in Seattle.


Read more: History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places | Smithsonian
Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv
Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter

[Gloria]

"Half Earth Quest" a new mantra.

One of the most mind-opening aspects of the Half Earth quest is that it’s a reimagining of the possible, bringing into focus what had been a blur. I found one north-south wildlife corridor, about 200 miles in length, that couldn’t be called forgotten because it was never celebrated, although Thoreau wrote lovingly about one mountaintop, Monadnock, up near its northern end. On a satellite-generated nighttime map of New England, now that such things exist, this corridor pops out unmistakably. These maps show city lights as bright white smears separated by a fascinating absence and emptiness, the almost uninterrupted blackness of the “dark landscapes” in between—that dark is where the wild things are.


Read more: History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places | Smithsonian
Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv
Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter

[Gloria]

Long article but worth reading.

Large carnivores, Phillips says, are an excellent lens for looking at landscapes. Their movements and migrations define broad corridors that already exist physically. The unanswered question is whether we can develop “socially accepted corridors,” as he calls them, along these same routes, so that the people within this now-inhabited habitat can co-exist with the big creatures in their midst. “The GYC folk talk about moving from tolerance to acceptance to appreciation, though I usually substitute ‘admiration.’” It sounds like Wilson’s biophilia, in bite-size, time-released doses.


Read more: History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places | Smithsonian
Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv
Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter

[Gloria]

Words of Wilderness: 1836 - Present on Vimeo

[Rebek56]

I don't have the energy to do much actual rewilding, but my hope is that even our backyard pollinator patches can make a difference for the small critters.

[EllenW]

I think anything we do like planting natives and removing non natives helps Rebek.