Eminent entomologist Edward Wilson, born in 1929, is one of the elder statesmen of science. Fascinated by natural history as a child, he chose to specialise in ants. During his long, distinguished career, he has produced important syntheses of scientific thought, including the once-controversial study of the genetic basis of social behaviour, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975), and the magisterial Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1988).

Nature Revisited includes important articles and book excerpts seeeeee from Wilson’s oeuvre, each presented in its original format, and individually introduced by Wilson. The first article in the book is, fittingly, Wilson’s first publication in 1949; the subject is the imported fire ants then colonising his native Alabama. The most recent article, from 2006, is about historical ant plagues in the West Indies.

In between, Wilson still wrote about ants, but he also extrapolated from ants and entomology to wider fields of knowledge, including systematics, biogeography, animal communication, sociobiology and environmental science. In one of the articles included here, he introduced and named the taxon cycle; and the book BioDiversity (1986), which he co-edited, coined the word ‘biodiversity’.

The love of nature which made Wilson an entomologist soon made him a committed conservationist. For the general reader, the most accessible parts of Nature Revisited are Wilson’s meticulously researched, yet heart-felt, writings on ecology, conservation, species diversity and the tragedy of loss of habitat.