Sept. 20, 2006
 
COMMENTARY: Letter to a Professor
 
By Jay Ambrose
Scripps Howard News Service
 
Dear Edward O. Wilson,
I recently read your open letter in The New Republic to a fictitious Southern Baptist pastor, and while I found your words polished with politeness, I worry that your adored environmentalists -- and your own dogmatism -- can be at least as dangerous to human beings as the supposed inattention of evangelicals to the cause you espoused.
 
That cause is the protection of Earth's many species, which you say are dying out at the highest rate in the planet's history. You tell us that "half the species of plants and animals ... could be either gone or at least fated for early extinction by the end of the century," and you then describe the biosphere as a "fragile membrane" on which we all depend for our very lives.
 
Your plea as a renowned Harvard biologist is that Christians join in the fight to preserve "creation," including as many of these species as possible, even though you don't yourself view this universe as a creation.
 
You call yourself a "secular humanist" whose faith is in a science that finds no "agenda" in the universe and indicates that "we are alone."
 
Significance, you say, is "therefore of our own making," but you assume that Christians who think differently would agree on the moral centrality of human welfare, which is inseparable from the welfare of the ecosystem.
 
In your assessment, the "mostly evangelical religious right" is a major force in the Republican Party, and consequently in deciding issues of environmental protection. While you say there have been some "positive signs" lately of evangelical concern for the environment, you also "remain puzzled" that many religious leaders are hesitant about joining this crusade. You are not so puzzled, though, that you don't venture some guesses for the failure -- perhaps a belief that nothing counts but the afterlife, or maybe a notion that the Second Coming is not far away and the planet can go hang. These, you tell us, "are gospels of cruelty and despair."
 
It might surprise you, professor, to learn that there are those of us who have enormous respect for science while simultaneously believing that your supposition of science's exclusive and unbounded competence in all arenas of knowledge is itself intellectually unjustified.
 
As the Kentucky novelist Wendell Berry has written about your science-is-everything book "Consilience," the truth is that science has limits; we live more in ignorance than knowledge and always will and should see that science as a human enterprise is vulnerable to error. Himself a conservationist, Berry sees it as important to reject your confused disallowance of free will in beings you call "complicated machines." If our decisions are pre-determined as you suppose, why argue as you do that we should "choose wisely"? There is no choice in your creed.
 
Berry's argument includes the thoughts that religion in its recognition of mystery is a way of knowing, that the love required for rescuing nature begins in particulars, the concrete, the local, not the abstractions of science, and that not everything that matters in this life can be decided by empirical evidence.
 
Even on the basis of evidence, however, your New Republic piece falls flat, professor. Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistician, has shown that there is no data to support your predictions on species destruction, especially when we haven't even much of an idea of how many species there are. The best documented cases of extinctions -- those of birds and mammals -- indicate a very slow rate that would give us lots of time to address an issue that, to be sure, is a vital one.
 
I know you've challenged Lomborg, but more out of an authoritarian certitude than a dispassionate examination of his points. Here's part of what I mean when I accuse you of dogmatism, and this environmentalist dogmatism scares me. It can kill, as it has been doing in Africa now for years, largely because environmentalists have been far more a political force in politics than evangelicals in their wildest dreams.
 
Relying on bogus claims about dangers to wildlife species and human health, the environmentalists were successful in opposing widespread use of DDT to combat malaria, even though it could have been highly effective in combating a disease that kills 2 million Africans a year, mainly children. Only lately have disease experts convinced, first, the United States and, most recently, the World Health Organization, to loosen deadly DDT restrictions.
 
I am not opposed to your cause, professor, but I am opposed to the sense that there is some one, certain answer that all should abide by every time an environmentalist says "boo," and to a human reductionism that would make us all less responsible, not more so.
 
Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay@aol.com.