Earth Emotions by Glenn A. Albrecht

Author:Glenn A. Albrecht
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2019-02-19T00:00:00+00:00

The gardens growing within human beings and other animals are typical of complex ecosystems everywhere, inside and out. The overall number of kinds of microbiomes dwelling in animals and plants worldwide remains entirely unknown, but it must be enormous… . It is obvious that symbiotic microbiology, which encompasses these systems, has emerged as an exciting frontier of science, and will remain so for decades to come.84

Despite his awareness of symbiosis, Wilson does not take his conservation ethic beyond saving half the world’s surface area for nature. Such an effort would be useless if, for example, climate warming causes breaks in the vital symbiotic linkages between Earth-building symbionts. He diagnoses the world as in “desperate condition,” yet still clings to biophilia as “the key to doing no further harm to the biosphere.”85 Wilson can see the advance of science in the domain of symbiosis but does not go far enough in extending and strengthening biophilia as a moral or educative precept.86 As if to acknowledge this depressing outcome, Wilson names the next possible era in human history the “Eremocene,” or the “Age of Loneliness,” where there is nothing on Earth except people, agriculture, and domesticated animals.87 We need to go beyond biophilia and even ecophilia in order to capture the essence of the symbiotic revolution in the biosciences.

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