The paradox of Biophilia. (Note from a World Watcher).

Edward O. Wilson wasn't the first to use the term "biophilia," but he brought it into popular discussion. His interest, as reflected in Biophilia (Harvard University Press, 1984) and with Stephen R. Kellert in The Biophilia Hypothesis (Island Press, 1993), appears not to be simply a pursuit of dispassionate science. There's also a moral pursuit involved. Wilson sees biophilia--our often obscured but nonetheless hard-wired love of nature--as an important clue to how biodiversity can be saved. If we can get back in touch with just how deep an emotional attachment to nature we really have, we might be more consciously motivated to refrain from destroying it.

But love of nature, like love of people, is fraught with treachery. Just as people who care about each other often hurt each other, those whose culture has been built on developing a relationship with the land often hurt the land. It's irrational, but plainly visible. Whether the Sumerian, Indus, Mayan, and other ancient cultures that destroyed their own land knew that they were doing so is not clear. But subsequent civilizations, which presumably knew what had happened to those earlier ones, continued to inflict the same abuses--allowing deforestation, erosion, soil depletion, salinization, and contamination to gradually degrade and destroy the land that meant so much to them. And that kind of destruction continues. We love the land most when we have conquered it. Why that is so remains one of the key mysteries of sustainability.

Oscar Wilde once wrote, "Each man kills the thing he loves." It was part of a poem he composed while in prison, the "Ballad of Reading Gaol," about his reflections on a fellow prisoner who had murdered his wife. The poem isn't widely remembered, but that line has been often quoted. It resonates widely, and many literary critics, philosophers, and psychologists have speculated about why it does. A common theme is that love too easily transmutes into a desire to possess and to control. And that, in turn, precipitates backlash from the object of the love, who may chafe under such a constricting bond. When the suitor is rebuffed, the desire for possession may be angrily transmuted into a desire for conquest, which may quickly escalate into violence.

Whatever the explanation, Wilde's comment seems all too good a description of our relationship with nature: we love it, and in our zeal for possessing and controlling it we are increasingly suffocating it. I recall a time when I went for a run in an arid area near the Mojave Desert, and came across a large, delicate, white lily-like flower. It was in a place where no rain had fallen in months. Thinking no one would believe I'd found such a flower in such a place, I picked it, put the stem in my water bottle, and ran home. It took me about an hour. When I took the flower out to put it in a vase for my wife, it had already wilted and turned brown.

Our attempts to possess and control are not confined to our love of the wild, however. The agriculture that marked the rise of civilization was the beginning of a long process by which we have reshaped the wild to suit our own economic and emotional needs: domesticating wolves into dogs, turning small, sour fruits into big, sweet ones. One of the most important of these re-shapings was the cultivation of teosinte, a wild grass native to southern Mexico, that was transformed--over many centuries--into maize, or corn.

As Claire Cummings notes in our cover story for this issue, corn as we know it was essentially created by humans. And thereby hangs a tale, because what humans want from this invention is not the same in one place as it is in another. Corn grown by U.S. agribusinesses reflects our demand for high-volume production and economic profit. That which is grown by indigenous Mexicans reflects an intimate relationship between a subsistence farm culture and its variegated landscape. Until recently, it seemed possible for both of these creations to exist. But with the advent of genetically modified organisms, a new kind of killing has begun. On one hand, the U.S. GMOs are invading Mexican crops and, according to Cummings, could wipe out both the indigenous cultures and the genetic diversity of which those cultures have been primary caretakers. On the other hand, the U.S. Midwestern monoculture corn in whose interest the GMOs were developed could then become increasingly vulnerable to being wiped out itself. Our love of corn now threatens to destroy it.