The Future of Life

In Chapter 3, Wilson examines the pressures of overpopulation and environmental destruction through the lens of a place where humans have had a particularly pernicious impact: Hawaii. While Hawaii seems lush and bountiful to many observers, Wilson notes that it is actually “a killing field of biological diversity” (43). Before the arrival of Polynesians in roughly 400 AD, Hawaii was filled with a vast variety of endemic species that had evolved in Hawaii and were found nowhere else, such as long-legged owls and flightless birds with tortoise-like jaws. Wilson notes that at one point there were over 10,000 plant and animal species native to Hawaii.

The destruction of Hawaii’s biodiversity began with the arrival of humans. Early Polynesian settlers hunted the archipelago’s flightless birds to extinction and cleared land for agriculture, wiping out other species. American colonists later expanded agricultural production. Hawaii’s eventual role as a transportation hub created opportunities for the introduction of nonnative species, which supplanted endemic plants and animals; now, about a third of all species found on Hawaii are alien, and some, like the African big-headed ant and the domestic pig, have reshaped the environment significantly.

Hawaii serves as a laboratory for the rest of the world, demonstrating how the decline of a species comes from the confluence of a series of factors, including habitat destruction, invasive species, pollution, and overharvesting, together known by the acronym