Biophilia, The Diversity of Life, Naturalist
By E. O. Wilson
Library of America, 2021

Revered and award-winning biologist E. O. Wilson now joins the very select group of living authors who’ve been inducted into the Library of America; this new volume, with an Introduction by the likewise-revered nature writer David Quammen, includes three of Wilson’s many books, Biophiphila, The Diversity of Life, and Wilson’s memoir Naturalist, and the Library of America has decked the volume out in the vibrant deep greens of the forest floor. 

The many fans and appreciators Wilson has amassed over a career spanning many decades will already know what to expect, and this lovely volume will serve as a reminder to them of a point Quammen also makes: that in addition to being a widely-cited authority on ants and a groundbreaking expositor of natural theory, Wilson is also a remarkably readable writer, a wonderful guide to his sometimes complicated subjects. 

Even when he’s not writing autobiography, he’s a wonderfully empathetic author, a quality that runs through Biophilia, for instance. “The whole book,” writes Quammen, “in a sense, was an argument that we humans need and we want - more deeply than we even know, as deep as our genomes, shaped by millions of years of evolution - to live surrounded by other living creatures of all sorts, wriggling, furry, large, tiny, brown, yellow, green.”

Reading these three books consecutively brings out also Wilson’s gift for clarifying. This is especially true in The Diversity of Life, which is reproduced here along with its many illustrations. At every turn, even when the concepts aren’t central, Wilson just happily sheds light on everything he touches:

Hawks and crows raise fewer young than wrens and sparrows. When struck once by high mortality, they are slower to recover; when struck again, they are more likely to fall all the way to extinction. The disadvantage is reversed when populations of both large and small birds are so small as to be on the verge of extinction, when (to be exact) they comprise seven or fewer breeding pairs. Then the greater longevity of the individual larger birds becomes the deciding factor. Hawks live longer than sparrows and are less likely to die off entirely before any one pair can raise offspring to maturity.

Ten years separate the appearance of the first edition of Biophilia in 1984 from the appearance of Naturalist in 1994, and even in so short an interval, the sub-notes of Wilson’s growing alarm about environmental issues grows steadily stronger. He makes it explicit in Naturalist:

In one lifetime exploding human populations have reduced wildernesses to threatened nature reserves. Ecosystems and species are vanishing at a faster rate than in 65 millions years. Troubled by what we have wrought, we have begun to turn in our role from local conqueror to global steward. Nature in this second sense, our conception of the natural world as something distinct from human existence, has thus also changed fundamentally.

These notes grow stronger in Wilson’s later work, as does the bright sharpness of the prose itself, and this makes Quammen’s mention of a second Library of America Wilson volume positively joyous news.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.