Books & Boots: Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life

Lace up your hiking boots and join us for a Books & Boots discussion of Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life by Edward O. Wilson. We’ll meet at the South Norfolk Woodland Trail at 220 Bruey Road on Saturday, June 27 at 9:00 am. Hartley Mead of the Norfolk Land Trust and Bina Thomson of the Library will meet people at the trailhead. All hiking abilities are welcome and you don’t have to have read the book to attend. Please dress appropriately for the weather. This program is co-sponsored by the Norfolk Land Trust.

Copies of Half-Earth are available through InterLibrary Loan. Contact the Circ Desk if you need assistance getting a copy: (860) 542-5075, extension 2.

Please register below.

The trail begins at a driveway with parking at 220 Bruey Road, 4.1 miles from Village Green via Route 272 South, Winchester Road and Bruey Road. View the trail map here.

More about the book: Half-Earth provides an enormously moving and naturalistic portrait of just what is being lost when we clip “twigs and eventually whole branches of life’s family tree.” In elegiac prose, Wilson documents the many ongoing extinctions that are imminent, paying tribute to creatures great and small, not the least of them the two Sumatran rhinos whom he encounters in captivity. Uniquely, Half-Earth considers not only the large animals and star species of plants but also the millions of invertebrate animals and microorganisms that, despite being overlooked, form the foundations of Earth’s ecosystems.

In stinging language, he avers that the biosphere does not belong to us and addresses many fallacious notions such as the idea that ongoing extinctions can be balanced out by the introduction of alien species into new ecosystems or that extinct species might be brought back through cloning. This includes a critique of the “anthropocenists,” a fashionable collection of revisionist environmentalists who believe that the human species alone can be saved through engineering and technology.

Despite the Earth’s parlous condition, Wilson is no doomsayer, resigned to fatalism. Defying prevailing conventional wisdom, he suggests that we still have time to put aside half the Earth and identifies actual spots where Earth’s biodiversity can still be reclaimed. Suffused with a profound Darwinian understanding of our planet’s fragility, Half-Earth reverberates with an urgency like few other books, but it offers an attainable goal that we can strive for on behalf of all life.