Tag Archives: E.O. Wilson

America’s Amazon

I remember traveling as a young boy with my father and grandfather to the earthen dam being built on the Sipsey Fork of the Black Warrior River by Alabama Power Company. It ultimately created Lewis Smith Lake in 1961, a popular recreation spot and the deepest lake in the state, touching Cullman, Walker, and Winston counties. My grandmother, who grew up in the area, could point out places under the lake where farms used to be; she could also point out a spot where a covered bridge was somewhere “down there.” The tiny Winston County town of Fall’s City was entirely submerged, as were cemeteries throughout the area. Some families chose to move their loved ones, while others chose to let them lie in peace at the bottom of the lake.

A few years later, traveling with my dad to a business appointment in Anniston, I was confused when I saw a series of docks and rock jetties jutting out onto dry land off I-20. Dad explained that the area was about to be flooded to create Lake Logan Martin. These soon-to-be “lake homes” were getting a jump on their lakeside property. Another Alabama Power Company project.

I understand the reasons for these mid-century projects, and I have always admired Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” legislation during the Depression and the benefits those initiatives, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, brought to rural areas of north Alabama. But I have also been concerned about what was lost as we grow increasingly aware of costs to the environment from human intervention in the past couple of centuries.

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My reading has taken an environmental turn over the last few years. Some of it was from a commitment to read more of the writing of biologist / environmentalist E.O. Wilson. But the bulk of it is just a growing environmental awareness that has increased as the threats to our well-being from environmental abuse and neglect have become more obvious.

Here is some of the reading I have been doing over the past couple of years, illustrating the wide variety of environmental writing available. A good sampler is The Gulf South: An Anthology of Environmental Writing (2021), edited by Tori Bush and Richard Goodman, with content stretching back into the 1800s. Salleyland (2023), by Whit Gibbons, documents the Gibbons family’s adventures on 100-acres of South Carolina land. The Overstory (2018), by Richard Powers, is a brilliant novel in which the trees become the protagonists.

Occasionally, there are peripheral essays that fit the bill, such as “Homewood’s Salamander Migration and Festival” in James Seay Brown Jr.’s Distracted by Alabama (2022), about a salamander crossing at a creek near me. A friend recently alerted me to “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad” (1946), a lovely essay by George Orwell that fits neatly into modern sensibilities about appreciating the nature around us.

My reading of E. O. Wilson’s 1994 autobiography, Naturalist, led me to move on to read and review Richard Rhodes’s biography, Scientist: E. O. Wilson: A Life in Nature (2021), which was a nice augmentation to the autobiography. That inspired me to seek out another Rhodes biography, John James Audubon: The Making of an American (2004), which, in turn, inspired me to finally acquire John James Audubon: The Birds of America, a collection of prints of the original watercolors from Audubon’s 1827-1838 series.

One novel is nestled among the over thirty books that comprise E. O. Wilson’s oeuvre. Anthill (2010) is a coming-of-age story set in Alabama, partially in an area that calls to mind the wilderness of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta. It’s fitting then, that E. O. Wilson wrote the Foreword to Ben Raines’s Saving America’s Amazon: The Threat to Our Nation’s Most Biodiverse River System (2020) about the Mobile-Tensaw Delta.

Lest that book title seems like hyperbole, consider these facts from the book’s first pages:

There are more species of oaks on a single hillside on the banks of the Alabama River than you can find anywhere else in the world … Thanks to the Mobile River Basin, the state of Alabama is home to more species of freshwater fish, mussels, snails, turtles and crawfish than any other state.

For instance, Alabama is home to ninety-seven crawfish species. Louisiana, famous the world over for boiled crawfish, has just thirty-two species; California, three times the size of Alabama, has but nine. There are four hundred and fifty species of freshwater fish in the state, or about one-third of all species known in the entire nation … When it comes to turtles, … the Mobile-Tensaw Delta has eighteen species … More than the Amazon. More then the Mekong. More than any other river system on Earth.

Here’s one more startling passage:

[T]he Cahaba River is home to one hundred and fifty species of fish, more species than you find in the entire state of California. Imagine, roughly one-sixth of all the freshwater fish species known in the United States live in a single Alabama river that is just one hundred and ninety-four miles long.

Raines complements his writing about the Mobile-Tensaw Delta with his stunning photography of the natural vistas throughout the region, parts of which can only be reached by wading long distances through swamps and wetlands. Raines knows the area well; his team found the remains of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to illegally enter the country, its charred remnants buried in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta. Raines’s 2022 book, The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning, explores that important find.

Much of what Raines writes about the Mobile-Tensaw Delta was gathered through his many years as an environmental reporter, documentary filmmaker, and executive director of the Weeks Bay Foundation. He speaks truth to the negligence of Alabama political leaders to rigorously enforce environmental guidelines and writes about the environmental damage caused by the dams that utility companies have built along waterways statewide. As Raines celebrates the Mobile-Tensaw Delta and the vast river system that feeds into it, he also addresses the impediments to annual fish migrations that the networks of dams imposed – something I naively wondered about as a kid watching those lakes emerge.

With its lead in environmental riches and diversity, the state of Alabama spends less on environmental protection than any other state. Raines examines the state’s dilemma: Will Alabama continue to be the most ecologically diverse place on the continent, or will it lead the nation with the most species’ extinctions? It cannot continue to be both.

Raines exposes some ludicrous things: When an organization he headed won the Alabama Wildlife Foundation’s annual “Governor’s Conservation Award,” the award featured an image of a mountain goat that has never been found in Alabama and is primarily native to the Canadian Rockies. An award-winning documentary by an Alabama public radio station about Alabama’s beleaguered prison system was entitled “Deliberate Indifference.” That title could just as easily be applied to the state’s handling of our vast natural resources. Unfortunately, it’s normal for Alabamians who love the place to be constantly ashamed and embarrassed by our public officials.

Raines clearly loves the place, especially its abundance of natural, untouched resources. Saving America’s Amazon is his clarion call for us to work harder to preserve them.

Just Steps Away

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I have been staying with a sick parent 24/7 for a couple of weeks now. My dad put a small raised flowerbed in the backyard right after they moved to this house on a mountain slope. The bed is anchored by four rosebushes; lantana and other perennials pop up as Spring turns to Summer.

When they first moved here, Mother started planting the inevitable Spring Easter lilies in a small corner by the fence in the back of the yard when they began to fade. Dad said they wouldn’t come back the following year, but they did. Eventually, that tiny patch was crowded and the annual Easter lilies in pots began to be transplanted to the raised bed, along with the occasional Calla lily.

This year’s crop of lilies was slow to bloom, but they are finally splendid and, on this rainy morning, I count about three dozen blooms either fully open or about to pop.

Finding time to look out a back window is a welcome respite from sick-bed duties. Two days ago, two chickadees worked hard to build a nest on top of a post on the back porch. A front came through and the next morning the small birds’ handiwork was scattered on the ground. I noticed later that the scatterings had been gathered into a neat pile on the porch floor. I hope it was the chickadees and that they plan to make another effort when the weather calms down.

Last night, when I let Lulu the chihuahua out, she and I stood and watched our first fireflies of the season as they floated across the backyard and in the woods below. Back in the house, I related the mating rituals of fireflies to Mother. I learned the ritual, which consumes the fireflies’ two week adult life-span, from my readings of scientist E.O. Wilson.

Once again, I remember that one can find real peace and pleasure by pondering the world just outside the door.

Edward O. Wilson Biography

Dr. Wilson and the Ants

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The University of Alabama, my alma mater, brands itself as “Where Legends Are Made.” I think it’s a good brand, although I am wary of the fact that all institutions of higher education nowadays seem to be more about the branding than about their academic distinction. Even so, I think that one of our university’s truest legends is author / biologist / ecologist / naturalist Edward O. Wilson.

Wilson, a native of Birmingham, grew up around Washington, D.C., and Alabama’s Gulf Coast, has the distinction of being considered the world’s foremost expert in myrmecology – the study of ants, and is frequently called the primary Darwinist of our time. Retired now, but still active, he received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in biology at the University of Alabama and his Ph.D. at Harvard, where he spent most of his professional teaching career. He has been regularly ranked as one of the most important scientists in history.

So, Roll Tide.

One of the few benefits of Pandemic isolation was the opportunity to read more widely, including a more in-depth exploration of Wilson’s award-winning writing. My most recent reading of Wilson was motivated by The Library of America’s Spring 2021 publication of three of his most acclaimed books in a single volume. Included are Biophilia (1984), The Diversity of Life (1992), and Wilson’s autobiography, Naturalist (1994).

In The Library of America compilation, Biophilia is a brief and user-friendly examination of the interdependence and connectedness of human beings and nature. Wilson, a dyed-in-the-wool scientist, has the vision of a poet and his ability to translate his scientific passion to accessible terms for those, like me, who are essentially non-scientific, is an impressive one. After reading Wilson, you will never look at an ant bed the same again. For that matter, you shouldn’t be able to take nature for granted again.

The text of The Diversity of Life is a little more textbook-y at times. The first part of that carefully researched book details the history of evolution. Wilson addresses the five previous periods of extinction on the planet and the millions of years it took for the Earth to repair itself after each. He convincingly asserts that we are now in the midst of the sixth great extinction, caused by human activity, and that there may be no recovery from this one unless we act quickly and with purpose. Wilson is pragmatic in his approach, presenting options for human progress while working with nature rather than against it. The fact that The Diversity of Life was written almost thirty years ago makes it even more compelling, given Wilson’s prescient observations.

I’ll admit that parts of The Diversity of Life were a slog for me and I found myself putting the book down to take a breather for a few days on a few occasions. I was not bored – just overwhelmed by the amount of information. So, it was a pleasure when I moved on to Naturalist, Wilson’s very entertaining autobiography. It is a compulsively readable book that explains the passion the scientist brings to his more scholarly texts. His writing is candid and his detailed description of the flora and fauna of the everyday as well as the exotic are breathtaking.

Finishing Naturalist, I was eager to move on to Wilson’s one novel, Anthill (2010). It is clear, having read the autobiography, that Anthill has many autobiographical elements as it tells the story of Raphael Semmes (Raff) Cody, who grows up in south Alabama and becomes obsessed with a parcel of wild forest near his fictional hometown, Clayville, in Nokobee County. We follow Raff’s childhood explorations and his growing fascination with the ant colonies of the Nokobee forest.

As enticing as the coming-of-age story of Raff may be, the novel becomes singular in its appeal and uniquely E.O. Wilson in its mastery and finesse with “The Anthill Chronicles,” the novel’s centerpiece. The “Chronicles” comprises nine chapters and seventy-one pages. It is a memorable and impactful rendition of the life and death of woodland ant colonies from the perspective of the ants. Margaret Atwood calls it the “Iliad of the ants.” “The Anthill Chronicles” cunningly provides keen science-based parallels into the challenges and evolution of the human species. The action of the battle scenes, when rival ant colonies vie for dominance, are as action-packed and suspenseful as any war story you might have read. It’s hard not to be moved by the death of a colony’s queen and the methodically efficient way in which the duty-bound ants handle the aftermath of that colonial tragedy. I am still surprised at how invested I became in dozens of pages of the lifestyles of the ants. Wilson doesn’t give his ants the human traits that a Disney version might; his ants view the humans who come into their territory as “moving trees.” Wilson’s ants are guided by instinct and genetics.

As the “Chronicles” conclude, the reader is back into Raff’s story as he finishes an undergraduate degree at Florida State and heads to Harvard law school. By this time, Raff has a clear path in mind for his goals to use his law degree to advocate for conservation causes. He makes the conscious but unexpected decision to go into practice with a Mobile development company which does not have a good record on environmental issues. We find a direct correlation between the fate of the ant colonies of the “Chronicles” and the story of the developers.

Wilson masterfully uses his fiction to illuminate his naturalist concerns; the book is rife with twists and turns, colorful and disturbing characters. Raff’s environmental activism attracts the attention of a fundamentalist, violent, and anti-conservation religious sect, leading to an unexpected, violent, and thrilling climax. Wilson’s choice of narrative style, shifting effortlessly from an omniscient narrator to the first-person observations of one of Raff’s ecology professors at Florida State, raises intriguing questions about Raff’s destiny at the book’s closing.

E.O. Wilson is a writer who should appeal to the casual reader as well as the environmentally-committed. He’s a “good read,” as we say.

Professional Southerner

Edward Journey's stream of consciousness