Pizzas galore!

Wilson, again like Lovelock, is a practical man. If there is a problem, he wants to fix it. The key problem he sees is that people don’t understand their own biophilia. And so he deploys his wonderful prose to win people over.

With his latest book — The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth — he has chosen to target one particular group, the religious. The whole book is a letter to a fictional “Pastor”. It attempts to show that the atheist Wilson’s love of life is not so different from the believer’s sense of God’s creation. It is, first, an appeal to the powerful lobby of American evangelists.

“The number of members of the main secular humanist organisations in the United States,” he says, “is 5,000. The number of members of the evangelical bodies, scattered among 45,000 churches, is 30m . . . Many of them have paid very little attention to the matter of creation, the living part of the environment, that’s the reason why I thought it would work. I grew up in that culture in the Deep South and I sense there is a desire, even on the part of the religious right, to move into environmental matters . . . I think I am the first scientist to offer the hand of friendship.”

He chose to target the evangelicals, he says, because of the “New York effect” — if he can make it there, he can make it anywhere. The evangelicals include the most right-wing Christians and they, for the past 40 years, have tended to reject environmentalism as an anti-capitalist plot. “In my country at least, there has come to be an association in the minds of most between environmentalism and liberalism.” ()

Some will remain impervious to his message. The most extreme religious group in the US, the End-Timers or Dispensationalists, believe that the events described in the book of Revelation are at hand and, by wrecking the planet, we are, in fact, bringing on the Rapture, the moment when the true believers will be taken bodily to heaven. But, Wilson says, they are a minority and, among mainstream evangelicals, there is an acceptance that the stewardship of creation should be a religious as well as a secular obligation.

Wilson is the man to do this. Belief, he says, was hard-wired into him in his boyhood; it just transformed itself into belief in nature rather than God, though, in his case, I am not sure there is a clear distinction. As a result, unlike more narrow-minded science popularisers, he is happy to use the word “sacred” about life.

He is also comfortable with the word “mystery”. After all, as he points out, we have identified fewer than 2m living species. Many now think there are more than 100m. To scientists, the biosphere remains as mysterious as is the mind of God to the religious. Wilson comments wryly in his book that we spend billions seeking life on Mars when we haven’t yet found it on Earth.

But, of course, this is not just an American matter. Religion is rapidly becoming the great fault-line of geopolitics. Wilson is cautious, feeling he does not know enough about other countries. But he does applaud the present Pope.

“I was gratified by Benedict’s statement several weeks ago. He made a very strong statement about the environment, saying we must move to restore the harmony of nature.”

I ask him how he feels about the Muslim response to the Pope’s recent lecture. “He cited somebody from centuries ago, it was like the Danish cartoon reaction, something much stronger than anything to which we’re accustomed. It was an immunological response. You inject a milligram of this stuff and you get this massive immunological response.”

But, benign and inveterate optimist that he is, Wilson believes that even this divide can be crossed by the bridge of the environment. The “dark alleys” of Islamic extremism contain an energy and a passion that can be turned to the cause of the Earth.

“My motto — do you want to hear it?” he asks. “It comes from the former Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban. When all else fails, men turn to reason.”

As a result, he thinks, on the whole, we’ll make it. The science of global warming is now too solid to ignore and, across the world, there are clear signs that the message is sinking in. “I am guardedly optimistic.”

His own bottom-up approach is to press for a programme that would cost about $30 billion to protect the species-intensive hotspots of the world — places such as the Congolese, Amazonian and New Guinea rainforests. The money would be used to isolate these places from all human activity and, as a result, ensure the survival of up to 70% of all species. At a private level, the programme is under way, with rich Americans contributing to schemes to outbid loggers in the Amazon to prevent further rainforest devastation.

Resistance, of course, continues, even among those who should know better. I ask him about the technophiles and transhumanists who think that it is our “nature” to transcend our biology.

“They think we’re moving to a whole new species and the planet should be reworked with levers and controls for this new species. That is insanity, it is an insane degree of imprudence. This is not only our only home. We’ve been evolving to fit this world precisely in our minds and our bodies for millions of years. We are beautifully adapted to the world, to the natural world.”

Read this book. After all, what are you doing if you aren’t reading Wilson? He even tells you in detail how to bring up your children. For Christmas don’t buy them an Xboy or a Game Box, buy them a microscope and tell them to do what Wilson did — look at a drop of pond water and watch them gasp in wonder at the spectacle of the teeming non-human. At, in fact, their home.

The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth by EO Wilson is published on October 3 by WW Norton at £13.99