Do you envision Half-Earth including all the different categories of protected areas, such as indigenous lands – that are recognized by governments – or sustainable-use reserves? Or should Half-Earth really just be areas where people are only allowed to visit and not live?

E.O. Wilson: Of course, if governments and private individuals and the population say, ‘let’s make this a park,’ with no disturbance, that’s best. And that’s happening around the world. Most of the countries in the world have something like that, at least on paper. The [Democratic Republic of Congo] just recently, even with their autocratic ruler, put aside a very large area as a reserve. You might call it a park.

And, on the other hand, if you can get the area designated a reserve, you know, to be part of this [Half-Earth] plan to just get up toward that 50 percent…you don’t need to abrogate property rights and you don’t need to move anybody out, or anywhere around. And furthermore, you will protect indigenous people who otherwise would find their way of life destroyed as more agriculture and human settlement come in.

The parallel here has already been worked out pretty well by the National Park system of [the U.S.] in two ways. They’re not very well known, but the practice is there and they’ve actually both been used. And the first is the National Natural Area Designation.

For example, the Mobile-Tensaw Delta in Alabama, which I’ve been very much engaged in, tried to start the first national park on the Gulf Coast. [It] was in the 1970s designated a national natural area. There was no attempt to keep people out, or at least to ask anybody to move or throw up barriers for trespassing. And this area is still good enough to be a national park.

And another method has been used [in] the Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado. We’re now talking about a national park – complete protection – except that an area within it, along the side, is set up in what is called a preserve, meaning that this is an area in which people can hunt and fish – even are encouraged to do so, to enjoy the natural environment that way, if that’s the way they prefer to do it.

So, this kind of method can be made quite consistent with acquiring large new areas of land. And you might say, well, it might still go under, because [of the] growing hordes of people, because the population is still growing worldwide. Yes, except that population is not going to be growing at the rate that it used to, for very long.

And governments – unless, you know, they’re a pretty awful autocratic, government that doesn’t care about anything like this – tend to like to be able to point with pride [at parks]. Private landowners, who have agreed to having their land put into an area like this can have a lot of pride. And the whole value of the area goes up, because now you have a natural area that otherwise was on its way to being degraded – now you have a natural area that people will want to settle around – even if they feel a little guilty about buying land and then building a house or a ranch or something in the middle of it. It can work.

Mongabay: When you were born there were just over two billion people on the planet, and now we have over seven billion. I’m curious, do you see this as sort of the fundamental problem, or do you see this as something that we’re sort of evolutionarily just fated to be? Or is there a way to change this?

E.O. Wilson: Actually, the latter. We lucked out on this one, and we’ve done it because of a quality of human nature, which has proved just about universal. Yeah, we’re at something like 7.4 billion right now. How high are we going? Around the world– even in very poor countries, like Bangladesh – whenever women are given any kind of economic independence, so that they can earn money on their own, and they can make decisions on their own, then one of the first things they make a decision on, to their own benefit and that of actually the children they’re producing, is to reduce the number of children [they have]. And the number of children, the so-called fertility rate, has been plummeting wherever that has occurred.

[The fertility rate] is commonly right now around three to four children and dropping. It needs to reach 2.1 children to equilibrate. And some countries are already – particularly European countries – below 2.1 children. They’re going into zero population growth.

And if that trend continues and the economic growth continues around the world – that is, that we don’t return to a savage world, where most countries are just full of illiterate, hungry people – and particularly if Africa can go through the demographic transition… and produce a middle class that people are working their way into, then Africa will join…everybody else…in seeing a drop.

Therefore, this is an unintended consequence that is superordinate to most considerations of economics and human greed, and the desire to reproduce.

People want to reproduce. But particularly women want to produce a small number [of] children that they can give a good, long life to. As opposed to playing a kind of lottery – the way a lot of men want it – which is lots and lots of children, and hope that at least one or two will reach maturity and look after you in your old age.

Mongabay: Half-Earth is a really ambitious idea. It’s big. And I think there are probably a lot of people who would be pretty skeptical when they first hear this. So, what do you say to convince skeptics about whether or not it’s even feasible?

E.O. Wilson: Let me first of all tell you why I was astonished from the start. My book [had] just come out a few months before when I attended two of the big international conferences on conservation in Honolulu. It was East-West Sustainability Summit, run by Japanese and American leaders mainly in finance and philanthropy. And then immediately following, the four year, quadrennial meeting of the, International Union for the Conservation of Nature, IUCN. And some 8,000 to 10,000 people attended [the IUCN event], mostly conservation professionals.

And I found the book to be the main topic of conversation. I was greeted by the heads of many of the international conservation organizations including IUCN [to] say how much they liked this; they thought it was something to believe in, to try for. And, I’ve heard no, or virtually no, direct face-to-face disagreement.

Probably, I will be hearing some grumbling, but I rather doubt I’m going to hear anything with a scientific basis against it. But [who I had to hear from at the conference are] what’s called the Anthropocene enthusiasts.

Well, the Anthropocene is real. There’s no question about that. The geologists, I think, have agreed that all the changes we’ve created in the earth’s surface and the climate and everything is enough to be regarded by geologists many years from now as [a] pretty big change in the environment of the Earth. And it’s worth calling [this] the age of humans: the Anthropocene.

[The Anthropocenists] are a whole group of enthusiasts for giving it up – running up the white flag, is the way I put it…. These are people who run the gamut from saying, ‘well, we’ve damaged the earth so badly up to this point– and the way people are breeding and so on – there’s no point in even trying, so why don’t we just go ahead and let history run its course, and maybe just think of this as the destiny of earth, to see the rest of life mostly disappear. And we’ll fill it up with our domestic animals.’

And that gives me a chill just repeating it.

But that’s what one group among what I call the Anthropocenists say. And another one says, ‘don’t worry, because it’s true we’re wiping out the natural species, but everywhere around the world, the places, the niches that the natural species had are getting filled by invasive species.’ You know, species introduced by humans and ones that go wild.

Well now, that is the height of foolishness. It’s just foolishness. Because everybody who knows anything at all about invasive species [knows they] pretty frequently [go wild]. There’s a rule of ten, for example, in plants – that is one out of ten species that makes it to the shores can go wild and grow in the spots open to it by cutting off the natural environment. And one out of ten becomes a burden, what is formerly called the invasive species. That means a species that’s established itself and has now become a pest.

And, of course, we can together go down a long list of invasive species from the brown tree snake of Guam – which got introduced from New Caledonia or the Solomon Islands right after the Second World War – and bred so fast as a [predator] specialist on young birds that it wiped out virtually every songbird on the Island of Guam.

And then we can move to all of the threats that occur to the Mississippi, with billions of dollars of damage to electrical and other systems – anything connected with a conductor – by the zebra mussel. [Or] the damage to the fisheries by the invading lamprey. Like you could go on and on and on.

The actual damage to the United States alone of these ‘new ecosystems’ building up, which is what the enthusiasts call [it], is over $100 billion a year. We’re trying to keep these darn things out.

If we just open the gates and let them in, with no controls, and say, ‘well, they’re forming a new ecosystem,’ we’d be damaging ourselves badly.

Now, another class of the Anthropocenists – I’m going into this in some detail because there’s going to be murmuring about ‘well, extinction is not the problem we think it is, and we’ll be okay’ – this is, of all of the three, to me the most foolish of all, if that’s possible, and that’s the ones called the de-extinction people.

They say, ‘well, hey, listen, just give us a sample of tissue or preserved creature, and the science will permit the restoration of that species by creating a clone.’

So if we do that with a species as they’re going extinct – put them in liquid nitrogen and then pull them out, and then, in the great biology of the future, we can clone them back. Well, maybe we can clone a few, but they forget that these species that are going extinct – especially the ones that are going extinct or are in danger of extinctions – are the ones that are highly specialized [in] a rich natural environment.

And how are you going to get them back? You know, even if you cloned a bunch of them, how are you going to get them back if their natural environment doesn’t exist? If the niche they occupied is long gone?

An example of this is the passenger pigeon and the American chestnut. These are part of a tremendously rich system. I think the average tree, and this is probably true of the chestnut, for example, carries [or supports] on it something like 20 species of moths alone, and who knows how many other creatures?

I’m all behind bringing the American chestnut back. I think that’s ongoing. And I think it’s heroic, and I think it’s a great thing to do. But, it remains to be seen whether the chestnut could then be grown back in forests where it once dominated, and, furthermore, if we then cloned the passenger pigeon, even a flock of them, if that could be done, [that] the passenger pigeon, which was a swarm migrator and feeder, could ever be gotten to back into the American environment.

And on-and-on, for thousands of species that are going extinct. And if you say, well, in America, that’s not so bad, is it? Then I’ll give you a figure. Forty-six species of freshwater fish have been extinguished in the United States since 1895. That’s almost 1,000 times the extinction rate that was occurring in freshwater fish species before the coming of humans, and we know that because we have a good fossil record.

Mongabay: So when you talk about the Anthropocenists and the different groups you’ve been discussing, is this sort of a new version of the ‘new conservation‘ philosophy that you’ve been critical of in the past?

E.O. Wilson: No, I think it’s somewhat different. I was critical of the Nature Conservancy.

I’m an enormous admirer of the Nature Conservancy. I served on the board. And I think that in many ways it’s the most effective conservation organization in America, maybe even in the world, because it’s in the business of creating reserves.

I don’t want to [criticize] the Nature Conservancy now. [But] it did have a period in which it decided to emphasize gaining new reserves – that’s wonderful – but [by] dubious means, in my mind, which was to emphasize in all of its efforts to gain new reserves what it could do for humans [what] it could give to human health; [and] the benefits [for] mental health; the income that it would generate around the park, and so on. And that was put in such heavy emphasis that I felt they were losing ground….

[They] were losing the main moral and human reason for reserves, which is to allow the rest of life, that created us, that we evolved to live in, that we innately cherish, and should be feeling responsible for… You’re passing that over to give preeminence to human profit and health rationales.

Of course, [these rationales] exist. But, I think it was taking away the main argument which the Nature Conservancy had that this is the right thing to do – is morally the right thing to do. And that’s why people flocked to the Nature Conservancy, including countless wealthy people who had substantial property – and they just wanted to leave it [as a protected area].

Why, they said? Because, you know, it’ll bring money to the people who are living around it? No. Because they left it in most cases, and are leaving it, for future generations. They knew what they were talking about.