E. O. Wilson's (most recent) big idea

aidoh

Came across this piece on the indo website this morning.

http://www.independent.ie/world-news/set-aside-half-of-the-planet-for-animals-scientist-30536186.html

One of my personal heroes and ant-lord, Ed Wilson proposes that roughly half of Earth should be set aside by governments as nature reserves.
It's obviously a very nice idea. Preserving biodiversity and allowing threatened populations of ecologically important organisms to recover should certainly help to slow the effects of climate change, along with reductions in global energy consumption. The future would seem non-apocalyptic for a change!

While it is a very very nice idea, can you see it ever happening? Do you think non-biologists and 'normal' people with little or no interest in wildlife beyond a trip to the zoo every few years would ever get on board with this or similar plans?

Any time we hear calls for more robust conservation plans, stories such as this are almost always met with a rabbling chorus of "yeah well why not sort out human problems first, blah blah disease, wars, blah blah the economy, blah blah hippies etc. etc."
Even in somewhere as small as our own patch of this little island we have widespread ignorance as to the true value of nature conservation (lots of protected bogs were opened back up for turf-cutting a few months ago, we have almost no indigenous forest cover left and our seas are open to exploitation by most of Europe).

I like E. O. Wilsons thinking and I'm glad he's still forcing us to think big (especially at his age) but is he preaching to a deaf audience?

OpenYourEyes

I think scientists and those with an appreciation for nature can see that he is right in saying that that is what we would need to do to ensure the majority of species are protected and it would have plenty of additional benefits in terms of climate change, tourism and general usage of resources....

....that being said, it's totally unrealistic!

I think, to be more practical about it, you could take the general idea of large 'strips' the length and breadth of the country and target stuff like targeted agri-environment schemes and payments along that corridor, while ensuring it connects as many reserves, SPA's, SAC's etc would be similarly effective but still allow for living and working in the countryside - best of both worlds and still getting most of the benefits from the idea.

That being said, the Natura 2000 Network is meant to be something resembling that, and as you quite rightly said it isn't taken seriously. And protecting raised bogs has huge benefits of water purification and helping to reduce/control rural flooding amongst other things - if politicians and people not interested in nature still can't see the benefits of that kind of habitat protection, then we're really fighting an uphill battle and Wilson's comments are at best being preached to a deaf audience, at worst this kind of thing will be used as an argument against protection by an ignorant and outspoken few - "sure they want to turn the whole country into a nature reserve" etc.