viii
Co-Existence in the Anthropocene (2017), The Theoretical Individual: Imagination,
Ethics and the Future of Humanity (2018), The Hypothetical Species: Variables of
Human Evolution (2019), and, most recently, Bhutan: Conservation and Environmental
Protection in the Himalayas (2021, with Dr. Ugyen Tshewang). This atlas of endeavors just scratches the surface of their body of work. A short précis of these myriad and
deeply provocative intellectual odysseys can be gleaned from a book Michael wrote
together with conservation biologist Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich of Stanford University, Hope
On Earth: A Conversation (2014, University of Chicago Press).
It was on one of these innumerable projects, No Vacancy (the feature film and
accompanying edited volume) that I worked with Michael and Jane and our film
crews throughout the US and Mexico, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Nigeria,
Ghana, Iran, India and Indonesia, to try to grasp the extent of the continuing human
population as well as to foster voluntary, humane population stabilization. I have
devoted my career, and as President of the non-profit Population Communication,
1
to helping couples have children only when wanted and space the births of their
children for the health of the mother and child, and to informing governments on
growth curves, and have commissioned reports on population stabilization from
countries with total fertility rates over 3 with populations over 20 million. I have
designed 56 operational research projects in 24 countries.
I have been contemplating ecological paradoxes – in one form or other – for most
of my professional career.
2
Because, as Tobias and Morrison have microscopically
delineated in this massive page-turner, everything we think, feel and touch seems to
be embedded in a paradox – propositions, beliefs, assumptions, theories which,
when thoroughly explored, may often prove to be self-contradictory, or something
other than expected or perceived. In other words, our belief systems, born out of
centuries, millennia of common practice, community standards, scientific paradigm, observation, endless statistics, fixed ideas and presumptions – even the cumulative phenotypic evidence of individual and population behavioral patterns – when
enshrined within eco-system dynamics and feedback loops are constantly revealing
new truths, nuances more complex than we ever imagined, and which are critical to
the health and robustness of biodiversity. Such paradox is the core ambiguity shading our future as a species, a topic central to Tobias and Morrison’s engrossing
study. What a gift we have in this book that brings forth a story so beautifully written that is unlike anything written before.
On the Nature of Ecological Paradox, divided into three major sections totaling
100 essays – Part I, Tractatus Ecologia Paradoxi, Part II, Ecological Memories and
Fractions, and Part III, A Natural History of Existentialism – each lavishly illustrated with over 325 images from every artistic and intellectual domain (1943 citations), traces every dominant divining rod in the history of ecology, but does so in a
continually unexpected context. This book structures within many dimensions the
paradox of the Green Revolution pioneered by Norman Borlaug. My burgeoning
1 www.populationcommunication.org
2 https://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/prh/transcripts/gillespie-trans.pdf
Foreword
Co-Existence in the Anthropocene (2017), The Theoretical Individual: Imagination,
Ethics and the Future of Humanity (2018), The Hypothetical Species: Variables of
Human Evolution (2019), and, most recently, Bhutan: Conservation and Environmental
Protection in the Himalayas (2021, with Dr. Ugyen Tshewang). This atlas of endeavors just scratches the surface of their body of work. A short précis of these myriad and
deeply provocative intellectual odysseys can be gleaned from a book Michael wrote
together with conservation biologist Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich of Stanford University, Hope
On Earth: A Conversation (2014, University of Chicago Press).
It was on one of these innumerable projects, No Vacancy (the feature film and
accompanying edited volume) that I worked with Michael and Jane and our film
crews throughout the US and Mexico, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Nigeria,
Ghana, Iran, India and Indonesia, to try to grasp the extent of the continuing human
population as well as to foster voluntary, humane population stabilization. I have
devoted my career, and as President of the non-profit Population Communication,
1
to helping couples have children only when wanted and space the births of their
children for the health of the mother and child, and to informing governments on
growth curves, and have commissioned reports on population stabilization from
countries with total fertility rates over 3 with populations over 20 million. I have
designed 56 operational research projects in 24 countries.
I have been contemplating ecological paradoxes – in one form or other – for most
of my professional career.
2
Because, as Tobias and Morrison have microscopically
delineated in this massive page-turner, everything we think, feel and touch seems to
be embedded in a paradox – propositions, beliefs, assumptions, theories which,
when thoroughly explored, may often prove to be self-contradictory, or something
other than expected or perceived. In other words, our belief systems, born out of
centuries, millennia of common practice, community standards, scientific paradigm, observation, endless statistics, fixed ideas and presumptions – even the cumulative phenotypic evidence of individual and population behavioral patterns – when
enshrined within eco-system dynamics and feedback loops are constantly revealing
new truths, nuances more complex than we ever imagined, and which are critical to
the health and robustness of biodiversity. Such paradox is the core ambiguity shading our future as a species, a topic central to Tobias and Morrison’s engrossing
study. What a gift we have in this book that brings forth a story so beautifully written that is unlike anything written before.
On the Nature of Ecological Paradox, divided into three major sections totaling
100 essays – Part I, Tractatus Ecologia Paradoxi, Part II, Ecological Memories and
Fractions, and Part III, A Natural History of Existentialism – each lavishly illustrated with over 325 images from every artistic and intellectual domain (1943 citations), traces every dominant divining rod in the history of ecology, but does so in a
continually unexpected context. This book structures within many dimensions the
paradox of the Green Revolution pioneered by Norman Borlaug. My burgeoning
1 www.populationcommunication.org
2 https://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/prh/transcripts/gillespie-trans.pdf
Foreword