3 stars and a halfThis book has two parts, how to hate the humans and how to try to clean their messSome chapters were really interesting and some really boring.What humans are doing to mother earth and all its living creatures is simply despicable! Conclusion: humans are stupid and heartless

Species are going extinct about 1000 times as fast as the “normal” rate of extinction. The solution, argues the author, is to give over half of the earth to the wild animals. I am a nonspecialist, and in addition to Wilson’s book and miscellaneous other articles, I’ve already read Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History as well as Anthony Barnosky’s Dodging Extinction: Power, Food, Money, and the Future of Life on Earth. The strong point of Wilson’s book is that he underst...

Half-Earth is Edward O. Wilson’s visionary conclusion to the trilogy he began in The Social Conquest of Earth and continued in The Meaning of Human Existence. In the first book, Wilson described his theory of human evolution (based on group rather than kin selection) and how it led to our domination of the biosphere. The Meaning of Human Existence presented a series of essays exploring more philosophically the question of why humans exist at all and whether we have a special destiny. In Half-Ear...

This book contained an immense amount of ecological knowledge, perfect for any aspiring naturalist to know. It is an excellent read, that presented both local and global perspectives on ecological issues. However, I did find that his grand statements about conservation didn’t actually provide a comprehensive plan. This book mostly offered interesting scientific facts, which isn’t a bad thing, but a bit more specificity towards his conservation strategy would’ve been nice.

E.O. Wilson is a great scientist and writer but this is not a very good book. He doesn't even get to his proposal (if you can call it that) for setting aside wildlife areas until 3/4 of the way through the book and it's so vague, it's hard to call it a plan, more of a plea. It's important stuff, no doubt, the more written about the 6th extinction, the better. It's as big a deal as climate change.

Half-Earth is half distressing biology news, half Edward O. Wilson's love letter to species that are largely ignored by popular conservation because they aren't cute enough. Wilson is a natural biologist who studies ants, and his passion - especially for ants, particularly for bugs, and generally for any living creature - shines through every page of this book. I am a typical city dwelling nerd who hates little crawly things with too many legs, so it's completely foreign for me to imagine a teen...

Wilson is a scientist and a long-time ardent proponent of saving our planet. He has deep concerns for our biosphere and advocates setting aside half the earth for the natural world. Wilson lays down solid evidence for his worries, and I came away from the book nodding my head in agreement.My takeaways from Half-Earth:Many scientists believe man has had such a profound impact on the planet that we should acknowledge the end of the Holocene Epoch and replace it with the Anthropocene, the Epoch of

An interesting if distopian view of the world. While the idea is right, the way the book rolls it out could have been handled better.Still, we as humans are walking, if not running, towards our ultimate destiny and it is not pretty for us or the planet

38th book for 2016. The idea behind this book, that 50% of the World should be put aside as a wildness (half for us, half for the rest), is a big idea very well worth exploring. Unfortunately, this book does no justice to the idea. It rambles along. Talks a lot about the beauty of the natural world, of the joys of being a naturalist, rants against the stupidity of people who somehow see value in half-wild places, and finally in this short book pays a scant few pages to vaguely outlining the idea...

If you're reading this, you're probably concerned about our unfolding ecological catastrophe, which has only gotten worse since this book came out. Wilson's comically unfeasible plan is to give over half the planet to wildlife. Given the inability of the world's governments to agree on even the mildest steps to protect the environment, you can safely ignore this pompous, rambling book, whose Pulitzer seems a perfect example of futile virtue signalling.

I hate to give E.O. Wilson anything less than 5 stars. However, his writing has really gone downhill, which makes me truly sad. The first book in this trilogy, Social Conquest of Earth, was great until the last chapter. He kept politics out of the whole book and then went on a rant about his political views. I actually agreed with those views but it was off-putting even to me. The rant came out of nowhere. If he had sprinkled his views throughout the book, as if they were not something he was tr...

This book is a mess. The first part of the title, Half-Earth, refers to the supposed main argument that humankind must preserve the Earth's biodiversity by leaving half of the Earth as untouched wilderness (or maybe managed wilderness) in order to ensure humankind's survival. Amazingly, the author spends only a few pages unconvincingly discussing this idea. Instead of discussing the central argument, the book spends a surprising number of pages discussing things like artificial intelligence, the...

Good, though I still feel like Kolbert's The 6th Extinction does the best job of conveying the severity and anomaly of what is happening to the climate in ways that people can grasp that doesn't come across as stilted or preachy xx

This book is a terrific journey through the incredible biodiversity of our planet. Or at least what remains of our biodiversity. In this Anthropocene Age we live in, humans have sacrificed the earth's species on the altar of "economic development" and "freedom" and "the accumulation of material wealth." The result is a blind trip toward oblivion. But for a few brief hours, I could enjoy the world's species and wild areas vicariously through the writing of Edward O. Wilson. There are solutions pr...

An Impassioned Plea to Preserve Earth's Biodiversity from the Greatest Evolutionary Ecologist of Our TimeNoted evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson has written a polemic, but a polemic based on his life-long work in ant systematics and evolutionary ecology, that offers some glimmer of hope. This is a surprisingly terse book from Wilson, but one of sufficient length that it may serve as a rallying call to anyone who has some interest in conservation biology - which he should be viewed as its "...

This book is half terrifying and half tedious. Raising the alarm over the coming crash of biodiversity is all well and good, but when you sound like Ben Stein from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (“Something-dee-oh-oh economics. Voodoo economics.” https://youtu.be/AyyAh2lQXF8), it kind of undercuts the urgency. It doesn’t help that the text is completely unfocused and he wanders far off topic, even to the point of giving lists of various things repeatedly.Worst of all, he never really explicitly states...

Wilson argues that humanity's only chance for survival as a species is to cooperate with other life forms that make up the biodiversity of the earth. At the rate we're going, our destruction of the environment, in terms of global-warming, is having a disastrous effect on the millions of other life forms on this planet, most of them as yet undiscovered by humans. The long term effects of such destruction means the extinction of humanity. Many species have appeared and disappeared in the history o...

“…[O]nly by committing half of the planet’s surface to nature can we hope to save the immensity of life-forms that compose it.”In Half-Earth, American biologist and Pulitzer prize winner E.O. Wilson gives a well-researched, well-documented, eloquent, but above all, impassioned plea on behalf of our planet and all of those who call it home, human and non-human alike. Species are dying out at an alarming rate and it is Wilson’s contention that “only by setting aside half the planet in reserve, or

This important and impassioned book by one of the great botanist-naturalist writers of our time is a stirring account of humanity’s impact on planet Earth. If we view humans as simply one of the millions of species that call Earth home, then mankind has negatively impacted earthly environments more than any other living species. Two important words the reader will learn from this book are biosphere (all the organisms alive in the world at any moment, which together form a thin spherical layer ar...

There's a really interesting idea behind this book, but the book doesn't really explore it that well. If anyone's interested I can direct you to more compelling writing on the subject (including some by the author himself). If you want to know why I found the book frustrating, read my full review here!:http://inthesetimes.com/rural-america...