With so much schism and doubt around the place, how good it is to contemplate a credible optimist.
In the NYT, David Pogue interviews E.O. Wilson, the great biologist and unrivalled ant-man, about his new project , nothing less than a complete online descriptive catalogue of every single one of the 1.8 million species so far discovered and named. (There are probably another 8 million still to discover.) Its working title is the Encyclopaedia of Life.
I liked this bit:
The world is full of amateurs: gifted amateurs, devoted amateurs. You can pick almost any group that has any kind of intrinsic interest in it, from dragonflies to pill bugs to orb-weaving spiders. Anybody can pick up information in interesting places, find new species or rediscover what was thought to be a vanished species, or some new biological fact about a species already known, and can provide that right into The Encyclopedia of Life.
These are the successors to those 18th century clergymen who spent their spare time with newts and daisies.