In 2016 I’m doing a 365 Nature project. Each day of the year I will post something here about nature. It may be any format, a photo, video, audio, sketch or entry from my nature journal. It could be a written piece. Each day I will connect to nature in some way and share it here by the end of that day. You can keep up-to-date by subscribing to the RSS feed or be notified by email. See all the 365 Nature posts.
I recently watched E.O. Wilson – Of Ants and Men, a PBS special. The documentary film is really beautiful, both in the cinematography and the subject matter and it stuck with me after I’d watched it, and continues to do so. I’ve read E.O. Wilson’s Naturalist book in the past and thoroughly enjoyed it and the film represents that book very well. Wilson’s wonder of the natural world is contagious and he’s a wonderfully curious and caring individual. If you have a chance, I highly recommend both the film and the book.
The first part of the film is below, but visit the PBS website to watch the entire thing, or better yet, buy it.
A description of the film from the PBS website:
EO Wilson – Of Ants and Men is a two-hour film about the life and extraordinary scientific odyssey of one of America’s greatest living thinkers, E.O Wilson. It is an exciting journey of ideas, but also an endearing portrait of a remarkable man; often dubbed “a Darwin for the modern day.” Starting with his unusual childhood in Alabama, it chronicles the lifelong love for the natural world that led him to Harvard and the studies that would establish him as the world’s foremost authority on ants.
But that was just the beginning. His discovery of ant pheromones in the 1960’s led him to start thinking about systems of communication in nature on a much grander scale. He was one of the first to start thinking about ecosystems, still a revolutionary concept at the time, and the ways different species fitted together inside them. His book, “Island Biogeography” and the word “biodiversity,” which he coined in the 1980’s, have since become the cornerstones of conservation biology, something he is very proud of.
This would have been enough for most scientific careers, but there was so much more to come.
