Biophilia

Biophilia is Edward O. Wilson's most personal book, an account of his own response to the living world and a statement of the conservation ethic that follows from it. Wilson defines biophilia as the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes, and argues that this affinity is not sentiment but part of human nature, shaped over the long period in which the species lived among other organisms and depended on them. Moving between memoir and natural history, he writes of fieldwork in the Amazon and in New Guinea, of ants and snakes and forests, and of the particular quality of attention that naturalists bring to what they observe. From these he builds the claim that our attachment to other species is woven into mental development, that our spirit is formed from it, and that to explore and affiliate with life is a deep and complicated process rather than a pastime. Wilson holds that modern biology converges with this disposition, so that the better other organisms are understood the greater the value placed on them, and he draws from that the argument for preserving the diversity of life.

Written from the publisher description, Harvard University Press.

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• Robert Michael Pyle
• Yi-Fu Tuan