Edward O. Wilson has been called the father of biodiversity. If that’s true, then Scouting founder Robert Baden-Powell might be called its grandfather; it was through Scouting that Wilson was first exposed to outdoor living and natural history. In his memoir Naturalist, Wilson fondly remembered his Boy Scout handbook, which featured “page after page of animals and plants wonderfully well illustrated, explaining where to find them, how to identify them. The public schools and church had offered nothing like this. The Boy Scouts legitimated Nature as the center of my life.”
In the summer of 1943,
Scouting also exposed the future Harvard University professor to the
thrill of teaching. As a 14-year-old nature counselor at Camp
Pushmataha near Mobile, Alabama, Wilson taught younger Scouts how to
catch different kinds of snakes—including poisonous varieties. He did
fine until he got bitten by a pygmy rattler and had to seek emergency
medical treatment. “When I returned to resume my duties, I found that
the camp supervisor had wisely disposed of the pygmy rattlesnakes,”
Wilson recalled in Naturalist. “I was forbidden to touch any more
poisonous species, and nothing more was said to me about the matter.”
More
than 60 years later, Wilson remains bold and at times provocative,
venturing into the public-policy arena to alert lawmakers to an
impending crisis of biodiversity. He argues that the planet is
experiencing a mass extinction of species, and he has made it his
mission to spur action to preserve biodiversity.
Born
in Birmingham, Alabama, Wilson earned two degrees from the University
of Alabama before enrolling at Harvard, where he earned his Ph.D. in
1955. He has held numerous academic positions and is currently a
professor of biology and zoology at Harvard. He is also active with the
World Wildlife Foundation and numerous other organizations that focus
on conservation and environmental responsibility.
Dr.
Wilson has received many honorary degrees for his contributions,
including ones from the University of Madrid, Duke University, the
University of Massachusetts, Oxford University, Yale University, and
the University of Connecticut. He has twice won the Pulitzer Prize—in
1979 for his book On Human Nature and in 1991 for Ants. His many other
awards include the National Medal of Science, the William Procter Prize
for Scientific Achievement, and the International Prize for Biology
from the Japanese government. In 1996, Time magazine named him one of
America’s 25 most influential people.
An Eagle Scout from the class of 1944, Dr. Wilson was named a Distinguished Eagle Scout in 2004.