Half-Earth

Wilson's 2016 book Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life made the case that preserving biodiversity at the scale required would demand setting aside approximately half of Earth's surface as protected habitat. The proposal was dismissed by many as impractical. Wilson's response was characteristic: impracticality does not diminish the reality of the problem. The problem is that the human species is systematically eliminating the biological diversity that constitutes the most complex information system on the planet — an information system produced by four billion years of evolutionary computation, containing solutions to problems that no AI will ever address because the problems belong to organisms vanishing before we learn to ask. Half-Earth is the rough scale of preservation required to maintain the information substrate on which the most powerful computational tools ever built ultimately depend.