We've got the whole world in our hands

Biologist E.O. Wilson — the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for books on nature, winner of numerous conservation awards, one of the country's most well-known environmental activists — comes to Salt Lake City next week. He will bring three simple messages:

• We live on a little-known planet.

• Vital ecosystems are disappearing because of overuse by humans.

• It will not be terribly expensive to fix this problem.

Wilson speaks Wednesday evening to a sold-out house at Kingsbury Hall. He spoke to the Deseret Morning News earlier this week by telephone from his home in Massachusetts. When he comes to Utah, Wilson said, he'll be talking about what he talks about everywhere he goes. "We are faced with historically unique environmental problems — and great opportunities. Opportunities not just for the saving of our base, our survival base, but also in terms of our economic security."

When we stop the extinction currently going on in the natural world, then we secure our own futures, he said. It is a point he made in his 2005 book, "The Future of Life" (Alfred A. Knopf, $27.50) — nature has provided us with clean water and air and a complex and perfect biosphere and, in the long term, our economies will not be strong enough to replace what we are destroying.

Even as he spoke about the perils, Wilson sounded guardedly optimistic. He just returned from a board meeting of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York City, where he met with scientists and economists who are working on the twin problems of world poverty and degradation of natural resources.

Wilson, 77, retired from teaching at Harvard about 10 years ago, he said. He now spends half his time doing research and writing and the other half traveling to speaking engagements and board meetings. He works seven days a week.

Wilson was born in Alabama. He spend a good portion of his boyhood wandering through fields, looking at stuff. He became a professor at Harvard and first found fame with his study of ants, during which he discovered pheromones. In the 1960s, he was the first to talk about wildlife corridors. In the 1980s, he coined the term "biophilia" to describe what he believes is the innate human attraction to living things. Wilson is also credited with starting the "bioblizt," a 24-hour inventory of all the plants and animals in a certain area.

He's written 20 books. "On Human Nature" and "The Ants" won Pulitzers. Others have also been best sellers.