Check out David Pogue’s interview with E.O. Wilson.  The interview was conducted in preparation for Pogue’s report on the Encyclopedia of Life this past Sunday on CBS News Sunday Morning.

DP: Is there a larger purpose to The Encyclopedia of Life?

EOW: Oh, yeah. The Encyclopedia of Life is absolutely vital in saving the environment. Because we’re losing the vast percentage of species; we are losing them. Whenever we focus on a particular group, whether it’s birds, frogs, whatever, we can just see them disappearing. So what happens among all these other groups, from beetles to ants to bacteria to fungi and so on? You know full well that they’re disappearing, too. But we don’t even know what’s disappearing. And we don’t know how to save most of them. And we don’t know how this is going to affect the environment.

We need to have this information, this great database, in order to plan strategies that are maximally efficient, cost the least, square kilometer by square kilometer around the world, and save the most. And we can’t do that without a thorough knowledge of what we’re trying to save.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 at 3:36 pm and is filed under TEDPrize Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.