Ants, Angelenos and Urban Angst

The idea was simple. Take a walk in the sprawling metropolis with a world-renowned scientist whose latest book, “The Future of Life,” is an indictment of overpopulation, mindless consumption and environmental ignorance.

In other words, take a walk through Ground Zero.

As Edward O. Wilson and I headed north on Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles, he adjusted his hearing aid to tune me in over the roar of traffic. The Harvard professor, in town for a conservation conference, is Alabama-born and every inch a Southern gentleman, down to a proper coat and tie. I felt like I was stretching my legs with Atticus Finch.

At 1st Street, I made an honest effort to defend our teeming, overdeveloped burg. I told Wilson that although I live just 10 minutes northwest of downtown, I’ve got hummingbirds in my frontyard and coyotes out back.

I don’t think Mr. Wilson was bowled over. He said the point is not what life is still here, hanging on despite our best efforts to drive it into extinction, but how much of the natural state has already been destroyed by humankind.

We made safe passage across 1st Street, through the exhaust fumes and past a roar that had Wilson kicking up the hearing aid again. And now we found ourselves at a remarkably uninspired and unusable patch of municipal garden work with an iron fence around it.

“It looks like an over-cultivated backyard,” Wilson said, arguing that he’d rather see native plants in their natural state. “A wild environment would be so much more interesting.”

We turned west on 1st and angled north on Broadway, and halfway up the hill, Wilson suddenly disappeared. I turned to find him down on the pavement, and feared at first that he’d taken a fall.

“Let’s have a look here,” he said on hands and knees, poking around in a scrubby patch of ivy. “There they are,” he went on, speaking with a child’s enthusiasm. “Those are Argentinian ants.”

I joined Wilson on the pavement, and passersby eyeballed us as if we’d had trouble making it back to the office after a three-martini lunch.

Wilson, who won his second Pulitzer Prize for his 1990 book “The Ants,” pointed out how one ant had peeled off from what he called a trunk trail.

“That’s a forager. He goes out hunting for food and then runs back to the trail, laying down an odor the other ants can follow back to the food.”

This sounded encouraging to me. In the middle of all this sun-blasted pavement and congestion, the animal kingdom was alive and well. Ants by the thousands moved bumper to bumper along the edge of the ivy. It looked like rush hour on the 405.

So this is a healthy sign? I asked.

“No, it isn’t,” Wilson answered sternly.

“It’s not?”

“The Argentinian ant is so dominant, they control what insect life exists by driving other insects out. Soil quality depends on a variety of organisms, and with just one species it’s not as good. L.A. is absolutely owned by Argentinian ants, and they’re not even from here. They’re from Argentina.”

Well, we never could control our borders. The Argentinians eat much larger native ants, and then march through your kitchen and bathroom, where it’s cool and damp. They love L.A., where overdevelopment has helped them drive out other species.

The horned lizard is barely surviving, displaced by coastal development and starved by the elimination of their usual prey--the native ants that are being snacked on by the piggish Argentinians.

“Angelenos have literally driven life forms into a corner,” Wilson said.

What could I say? People love sitting alone in toxic, tank-sized vehicles as they travel to and from far-flung housing developments. You’d have to threaten harm to get them into carpool lanes or buses.

“That’s amazing,” Wilson said. “Most people don’t want to have to worry about how important it is to switch over to another way.”

Now he turned his attention back to the marching Argentines.

“We’re amazingly like these ants,” he said. “They stick to the trail until they find food, and they have no interest in changing their ways. They’re wrecking their own environment and making the world less safe for themselves, and ultimately even for us.”

Wilson and I sat in that spot for maybe half an hour. The more he talked, the more awed I was by his respect for life and his sense of duty.

In a scrubby patch of ivy in downtown L.A., he’d found an appeal to social responsibility and political conscience. He’d even found an explanation for war.

Americans devour resources beyond our borders to feed our habits and our wealth, Wilson said, and this helped fuel the resentment that played a part in the Sept. 11 attacks.

We plunder so many acres of the world’s resources, Wilson said, that “to bring the rest of the world up to our level of consumption would require four more planet Earths.”

“We’d be well advised to tie our foreign policy to the development and protection of flora and fauna the world over. We’d be serving our own interest in security and markets, and leaving something for future generations.”

On the way back, Wilson called himself semi-optimistic. So, too, are the last words of his new book:

“I believe we will choose wisely. A civilization able to envision God and to embark on the colonization of space will surely find the way to save the integrity of this planet and the magnificent life it harbors.”

*

Steve Lopez’s column will resume March 13. He’s on vacation.