E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation

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E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation Our mission is to reimagine the way we care for our planet. 🌍 The E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation is shaped by the inspiration and guidance of Edward O.

Wilson, who has been named one of the century’s leading environmentalists by both Time and Audubon Magazine. A Professor Emeritus at Harvard, E.O. Wilson is the greatest living scientist of our time. As a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and winner of over 100 awards, Wilson speaks about the urgent need for broader research and understanding of our biodiverse planet in order to protect key species and avoid unintended destruction of the ecosystems that sustain our lives. Wilson warns, “The loss of a keystone species is like a drill accidentally striking a power line. It causes lights to go out all over.” The inadvertent degradation of the natural world can be slowed, or even halted, however, through biodiversity research that expands our understanding of our ‘little known planet’ and that innovates in helping us to learn how to best care for it. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation’s mission is to foster a knowing stewardship of our world through biodiversity research and education initiatives that promote and inform worldwide preservation of our biological heritage. We believe that by enhancing our public understanding of biodiversity, we can foster a culture of stewardship in which people are inspired to conserve and protect the natural world.

10/15/2026

Not a promise. Not a plan. A place where it actually happened.

That is Gorongosa National Park . On Monday, at Half-Earth Day, the Gorongosa Restoration Project received the E.O. Wilson Legacy Award for Transformative Conservation Leadership, and Harrison Ford, last year’s inaugural laureate, honored them in this video message.

E.O. Wilson wrote, “In Gorongosa, you can see the Earth as it looked and felt before the coming of humanity.” A park that lost nearly everything to war has been restored, over more than 20 years, by rangers, scientists, teachers, doctors, and young Mozambicans. They are the living realization of a legacy of hope.

Presenting the award, Paula Ehrlich, President & CEO of the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation, spoke of her visit to Gorongosa last summer: “I finally understood, in my bones, why Ed called this place a window on eternity. Why he kept coming back. What a legacy of hope actually looks like when it takes root in a place and grows.”

Harrison, thank you for lending your voice, and for your friendship and support of this work.

Congratulations to the entire Gorongosa Restoration Project! We were honored to have Aurora Malene, CEO and Chair of the Board; Susana Carvalho, Director of Science; and His Excellency Alfredo Fabião Nuvunga, Mozambican Ambassador to the United States, with us in Sanders Theatre at Harvard University.

Paula Ehrlich and E.O. Wilson — the kind of afternoon that shaped the conversation our President & CEO had on BBC Radio ...
10/15/2026

Paula Ehrlich and E.O. Wilson — the kind of afternoon that shaped the conversation our President & CEO had on BBC Radio 4’s “Great Lives,” out now wherever you listen.

Monday afternoon, at Half-Earth Day, “E.O. Wilson Tribute: In His Own Words” gathered the colleagues who knew him best. Bert Hölldobler, who shared the Pulitzer Prize with Ed for The Ants and was among his closest scientific collaborators, and Naomi Pierce spoke together, with a video reflection from Henry Louis Gates Jr., in a conversation moderated by Jeannine Cavender-Bares. It was a campfire of memory — Ed remembered through his own words, archival footage, and stories told the way old stories are supposed to be told: with love, with humor, with the kind of specific detail that only comes from having actually been there.

It was exactly the kind of moment “Half-Earth at Ten: Honoring a Legacy of Hope” was built for — because that’s what a legacy of hope actually looks like up close: not a monument, but people still laughing at the memory of him, still arguing his ideas forward, still carrying what he gave them.

It feels like the right week, then, for a second tribute: BBC Radio 4’s “Great Lives” episode on Ed, featuring Foundation President & CEO Paula Ehrlich, is now available everywhere. The original link was UK-only, which a number of you ran into; it’s now at https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/m0031nw3, and also on “Great Lives” on Apple and Spotify podcasts.

Two tributes in one week, in two different keys — one in a room full of people who loved him, one over the airwaves to people meeting him for the first time. As Ed liked to tell young scientists: “Persist! The world needs all you can give.”



Photo: Andrea Patiño Contreras

Today is Indigenous Peoples Day, and it is the core of this year’s celebration of Half-Earth Day at Harvard University.Y...
10/12/2026

Today is Indigenous Peoples Day, and it is the core of this year’s celebration of Half-Earth Day at Harvard University.

Years ago, Adrienne Keene gave a tour of Harvard to a prospective student who was deciding where to go. His name was Julian Brave NoiseCat. Today, they will both be on the stage at Sanders Theatre.

Adrienne, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation with a doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is back as our emcee. Adrienne will be holding the circle of the day together, moving between a museum director and a poet, between archival footage of E.O. Wilson and a live conversation about Indigenous sovereignty and the Endangered Species Act, and between the scientific and the intimate.

Join us at noon for a program of scientists, artists, Indigenous leaders, and stewards, each with a tapestry of insights that underpin care of the living world.

Half-Earth at Ten: Honoring a Legacy of Hope.

Hope is serious work.

Co-hosted by the Harvard University Native American Program (), the Museum of Comparative Zoology (), the Harvard University Herbaria, and the Salata Institute.

📅 Today, October 12, Sanders Theatre, Harvard University, 12–5:30 PM
🎟️ Tickets are still available: https://boxoffice.harvard.edu/Online/default.asp?BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::permalink=half-earth-day



📷E.O. Wilson walking with Tonga Torcida in Gorongosa National Park .

"It is neither too early, nor the topic too remote from day-to-day reality, to envision a different kind of immortality,...
10/08/2026

"It is neither too early, nor the topic too remote from day-to-day reality, to envision a different kind of immortality, and how it might be achieved. It resides in those remnants of the natural world we have not yet destroyed."

E.O. Wilson wrote that in "A Window on Eternity," his book about Gorongosa National Park , where he went again and again, collecting ants in the floodplain and mentoring young Mozambicans in the field. And in the book's final pages, he wrote what the Gorongosa Restoration Project had taught him:

"It may at first seem radical, but only this level of care applied to large sectors of the land and sea throughout the world will save global biodiversity. In order to ensure its permanent acceptance, it must also be designed to improve the quality of human life everywhere."

That level of care has a face. Mozambican scientists and rangers. Teachers and doctors. A maternal health clinic. Schools. The E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Laboratory.

On October 12, at Half-Earth Day, we will present the E.O. Wilson Legacy Award for Transformative Conservation Leadership to the Gorongosa Restoration Project, with Harrison Ford, last year's inaugural laureate, passing it forward by video.

Join us in Sanders Theatre to see what a legacy of hope looks like when it takes root and grows.

🗓️ October 12, Sanders Theatre, Memorial Hall, Harvard University
🎟️ Tickets: https://boxoffice.harvard.edu/Online/default.asp?BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::permalink=half-earth-day
📷 Piotr Naskrecki

In 1849, Henry David Thoreau stood on the Concord River and asked who hears the fishes when they cry. He was talking abo...
10/06/2026

In 1849, Henry David Thoreau stood on the Concord River and asked who hears the fishes when they cry. He was talking about shad, blocked from their spawning grounds by the Billerica dam, and wondered aloud what a crow-bar might avail against it.

The Endangered Species Act offers an answer to that question. For decades, "harm" under the law meant more than killing an animal outright. It meant habitat, too. If you degraded the place a species needs to breed, feed, or shelter badly enough to actually injure it, the law could act on that. That definition was rescinded this year and took effect on September 14.

At Half-Earth Day, a session called "What Holds the World Steady" takes up exactly what a word like that was built to protect. Andrew Mergen, of Harvard Law School, will speak to what the ESA loses when habitat destruction is written out of the definition of harm. Julian Brave NoiseCat follows with a one-man show built from traditional oral history: the trickster Coyote, traveling up the river systems he filled with salmon and populated with people for the first time, articulating the most ancient and important laws of the river. We are all related, and don't catch all the fish.

Biodiversity holds the world steady. A word in a regulation is a small thing to carry that weight, but for decades, it did. This session asks what holds the world steady when a word like that is gone, and what still can.

🗓️ October 12, Sanders Theatre, Memorial Hall, Harvard University
🎟️ Tickets: https://boxoffice.harvard.edu/Online/default.asp?BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::permalink=half-earth-day
📷 Image: Courtesy of Ewers Brothers Productions

"In Wildness is the preservation of the World."Probably Thoreau's most quoted line — carved into plaques, printed on pos...
10/01/2026

"In Wildness is the preservation of the World."

Probably Thoreau's most quoted line — carved into plaques, printed on posters, invoked by environmentalists for more than a century. It means something a little different every time it's heard again: at the edge of a forest, from a scientist describing a fragile ecosystem, in a room honoring a decade of work to protect half the Earth.

At Half-Earth Day this year, Thoreau's own voice moves through the program — read by Jeff Goldblum for the documentary Henry David Thoreau (dir. Chris & Erik Ewers, exec. produced by Ken Burns & Don Henley, music by David Cieri).

But that legacy is bigger than him. It's alive in the Indigenous leaders, scientists, artists, and stewards gathered for the day — each bringing their own kind of attention to the living world.

Half-Earth at Ten: Honoring a Legacy of Hope.
Uplifting a tapestry of insights, and hearing their wisdom anew.

🗓️ October 12 · Sanders Theatre, Harvard University
🎟️ Tickets on sale now at the Harvard Box Office
📷 Courtesy of Ewers Brothers Productions

He opens Half-Earth Day. He closes it too.Larry Spotted Crow Mann, an enrolled citizen of the Hassanamisco Nipmuc Band o...
09/30/2026

He opens Half-Earth Day. He closes it too.

Larry Spotted Crow Mann, an enrolled citizen of the Hassanamisco Nipmuc Band of Massachusetts, founded the Ohketeau Cultural Center on one idea: culture isn't something to preserve behind glass. It's something people are still doing.

He describes his own work simply:

"I'm somebody who is dedicated to my culture and tradition, and through that I hope to bring forth the intrinsic connection we all have as human beings."

That's close to a word E.O. Wilson used for the same idea — consilience, the unity underlying all knowledge and all life. Ed traced it through science. Larry traces it through story, drum, and dance, handed down person to person.

At Half-Earth Day, Larry gives the Land Acknowledgement that opens our day, returns for "Beyond Measure" — his own poetry and music — and closes it by handing the stage to two young performers from Ohketeau Cultural Center, Adeline Spears and Byron Gonsalves.

Swipe for a few lines from his poem "Moccasins."

What Adeline and Byron carry forward is exactly that: knowledge that survives by staying in contact with the ground it comes from.

📍 October 12 · Sanders Theatre, Memorial Hall, Harvard University
🎟️ Tickets on sale now at the Harvard Box Office — link in bio

Walk far enough into almost any New England forest and you'll find a stone wall running through the trees — a boundary b...
09/25/2026

Walk far enough into almost any New England forest and you'll find a stone wall running through the trees — a boundary between fields that are no longer there. 🌲

These woods were once someone's pasture. Before that, they were shaped by Indigenous peoples for thousands of years.

In July 2019, I stood beside one of those walls at Walden with E.O. Wilson. At the foot of an old tree was an ant mound, and Ed was thrilled to find it, eager to see what was inside. Fields had gone back to forest. Life had moved back in.

Ed once said people "haven't been thinking big enough — even conservationists." New England, cleared and then regrown, is one of the best places to ask: how big can we think?

That question is at the heart of "Roots of Resilience: Forests, Biodiversity & the Long View" — a Half-Earth Day conversation moderated by Harvard's Jeannine Cavender-Bares.

🌿 Sherri Mitchell, Penobscot lawyer and author of "Sacred Instructions," opens with the long history of disruption to Indigenous relationships with the land — and how those relationships might be renewed through rematriation.

🌲 Jonathan Thompson, Director of Harvard Forest, traces how these forests were cleared, how they came back, and what threatens them next.

The forests came back once. What we do next is the question this session takes up.

📍 October 12 · Sanders Theatre · 12:45 pm
🎟️ Link in bio for tickets



📸 Photos: Paula J. Ehrlich

E.O. Wilson once picked up the phone in the middle of a mentoring meeting to call a dairy farmer.A graduate student had ...
09/23/2026

E.O. Wilson once picked up the phone in the middle of a mentoring meeting to call a dairy farmer.

A graduate student had mentioned that her brother-in-law was trying to bring more biodiversity to his land. Ed asked for the farmer's number and dialed him right then and there to offer suggestions.

Jeannine Cavender-Bares remembered that moment in a tribute she wrote after his death. It echoes through the remembrances sent to us from all over the world. One colleague of forty years recalls Ed appearing in his office doorway, waving a rejected manuscript with a grin: "I had a paper rejected — it was bound to happen eventually!" Ever the optimist, he forgot the sting each time.

At Half-Earth Day, Jeannine will moderate a conversation with the scientists who knew him that way:

🐜 Bert Hölldobler shared the Pulitzer Prize with Ed for "The Ants." Their collaboration spanned five decades of field data and landmark discoveries.
🦋 Naomi Pierce arrived at Harvard as a graduate student in 1977, and Ed backed her ambitious butterfly-and-ant research in the wilds of Australia.
🎥 Henry Louis Gates Jr. will reflect by video on being Ed's colleague at Harvard.

Ed's own words and archival footage will join them.

Ed told young scientists: "You are capable of more than you know... Aim high. Behave honorably. Persist! The world needs all you can give." Those who worked beside him watched him live by it.

📅 "E.O. Wilson Tribute: In His Own Words"
Half-Earth Day · October 12 · 1:45 pm
🎟️ Tickets through the Harvard Box Office, link in bio

📷 E.O. Wilson and Bert Hölldobler in the field in Germany, 1993, examining an ant species new to Ed that doesn't occur in the New World. Photo by Friederike Hölldobler, courtesy of Bert Hölldobler.

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