Through a United States Department of Agriculture grant, the center works with Alabama A&M, a historically black college in Huntsville, to introduce underrepresented students to ecology and train them in the field. Finch hopes to develop a program that introduces high-school juniors and seniors onto a track toward undergraduate science programs.

“We want to create a training center for this new generation to understand diversity in all of its aspects,” he says. “And we also realized we didn’t think we could understand diversity if we weren’t looking at it with diverse eyes.”

This comment reminds me of a poignant moment in Wilson’s Naturalist. It is 1944 and Wilson, an Eagle Scout, has been invited to speak about scouting to a group of young black men near Brewton, Alabama. For the first time in his life, he is forced to confront his white privilege. Wilson writes, “When we left I did not feel pride in the example I was supposed to have set; I felt shame. I was depressed for days. I knew in my heart that those boys, mostly two or three years younger than I, would have few real advantages no matter how gifted or how hard they tried. The doors open to me were shut to them.” Wilson tells me that the older he gets the more he regrets he wasn’t able to know his black peers in Mobile and other places he lived throughout his childhood.

Besides working with in-state universities, including Wilson’s alma mater, the University of Alabama, Finch also works with out-of-staters such as Stephen Hubbell, a prominent ecologist based at UCLA. The idea is to attract an array of brilliant minds to rural Alabama and train them in conservation work that can then be applied globally. This work involves identifying every plant and animal species on the land to understand the role each plays in the ecosystem. Finch and others are working to establish a 50-year research plot inside which they will identify and catalog any woody stem over 1 centimeter tall. Researchers will collect data that will tell them, in part, how the forest survived and adapted to previous changes in climate — and help them make good conservation decisions for the future. Right now, about 15 acres of the 150-acre plot have been tagged, and about 200,000 stems are being monitored.

I ask Finch how he speaks to local people about climate change. He brings up a group of hunters who are members of a club established on the land before the research center existed and who still hunt there.

“I can say, ‘You know, we haven’t seen rain like this.’ And they say, ‘You know, you’re right.’ And I say, ‘You know, it’s funny because we’re getting these warm spells interrupted by cold spells. It didn’t used to be this way.’ And they say, ‘You know, you’re right.’” Finch laughs. “They see these effects. They want to know about them. They want to understand them.”

So much of our common way forward relies on how we communicate our ideas for the planet we share. As usual, Wilson understood this before many others. He speaks and writes plainly yet exquisitely. When I ask how we convince our fellow Southerners that climate change will continue to have an outsized impact on the region due, in part, to its geography and economy, Wilson says, “It’s a contradiction of the kind that begets literature, begets serious deep reasoning about the history of a place and what is best for its own self-image.” He pauses. “Let’s use a different language to talk about what Alabama has.”

He relies on biblical terms to explain, saying, “If we can hold to what we’ve been given, so to speak, by the rest of life in our own emergence as a species, then humanity can live forever. And Earth can be a paradise. There’s no reason we can’t think of ourselves as immortal as a species. And the planet, this biosphere, as immortal with us.”

Those words — paradise, immortality — make my ears prick up. Like myself, Wilson was raised Southern Baptist. Neither of us regularly attend church anymore. But such a formative part of one’s past isn’t easily left behind. In our conversations, Wilson compares himself to a preacher with a message to spread. At times he dismisses Christianity altogether, calling it a tribal endeavor. At one point he compares it to another of our shared cultural touchstones.

“When the Crimson Tide pours onto the field, you can see [tribalism] illustrated in raw, naked form,” he says.

I mention how he and I have been identifying ourselves by tribes since I arrived.

“Yes, we have,” he says with a knowing grin.

Now he calls his faith profoundly humanistic. “It’s faith in humanity,” he says. “An absolute faith because we don’t have anything else to fall back on.” He believes if he sits down with, say, a Southern evangelical, they can agree on certain things. He will not change their minds on the origin of humanity; nor they change his. But they can find ways to channel their fervor toward a shared future. “If you want to be deeply religious in the Baptist manner, which I was raised, well, fine, believe,” he says. “Because in believing you’re reinforced toward the kind of behavior that would make the most out of your and my existence on the planet.”

Before we leave the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Wilson shows me one of his private spaces. To get there, we pass through a room filled with bound dissertations written by former students, a quiver of large arrows given to him by Papuan natives, and more figurines, photographs, and drawings of ants than can be counted at a glance. Wilson stops, opens a file cabinet and runs his fingers across the tops of many curled papers. His ongoing personal collection of every published text on ants he can find. A physical manifestation of his brain.

He jams a key into a door, next to which hangs a poster for the Monroeville (Alabama) Literary Festival, and we enter a rectangular office. A cream-colored phone and a lamp sit atop his desk. Otherwise, the only piece of technology I notice there is a magnifying glass. On one wall is a world map so old it still shows the Soviet Union. On another, a sign that reads “Alabama: We’re Kind of a Big Deal.”

“I am not a Harvard professor born and raised in Alabama,” Wilson says. “I’m an Alabamian who came up North to have work.”

I ask if he enjoys saying that line in front of his Harvard colleagues, maybe ruffling their feathers just a little bit.

“You can put it somewhere that the subject of your article is indeed a bitter Southerner,” he says, laughing at himself.

On the way out, Wilson wants to show me one last thing. We turn right from his office and on the other side of a door enter a public exhibition space. The enormous bones of a right whale hang from the ceiling, stuffed gorillas and zebras and rhinos stand frozen in glass cases below us. Wilson tells me this collection was started by Louis Agassiz, a Swiss biologist who wanted to educate the public about creation by allowing them to witness it up close. At this moment in history, it was more common to listen to lectures than visit museums filled with specimens. It’s fitting, I think, for Wilson’s office to be on the other side of a thin wall since he’s spent much of his life bringing big ideas to the general public through his books.

As we leave, Lubertazzi, the researcher, shares a bit of trivia. Despite founding the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Agassiz was one of the last major scientists to disagree with the theory of evolution. In fact, he was a staunch critic of Darwin.

Wilson jumps in, reminding us, “But Darwin didn’t build a museum.” Another example of Wilson’s generosity even toward those with whom he doesn’t see eye-to-eye.