Sublime

Then she rolled over, fell asleep, and left me all alone in the dark room, stunned into paralysis myself. I stood over her, eyes wide, arms wrapped around my body. “Oh. My. God. The polllaaarrr bears!! We have to save the mother freaking polar bears! Next it’s gonna be us. What is wrong with us??” Then I looked down at my baby and thought: Ah. You

Seminal biologist Edward O Wilson has written on his “Half Earth” proposal, an “achievable plan” to stave off mass extinction by devoting half the surface of the earth completely to nature.

The anthropologist and nature writer Loren Eiseley writes, “There is nothing more alone in the universe than man.” Surrounded by animals, he says, we humans find ourselves separated from our natural kin by self-awareness, by language, by history.

Tous ceux qui ont vu ces bêtes magnifiques en marche à travers les derniers grands espaces libres du monde savent qu'il y a là une dimension de vie à sauver. La conférence pour la protection de la faune africaine allait se réunir bientôt au Congo et il était prêt à remuer ciel et terre pour obtenir les mesures nécessaires. Il savait bien que les tr

There it is: the ultimate commandment. Take care of your own. Protect your genes. Lay down your life for one child, two siblings, or eight first cousins. How many friends would that translate to? How many strangers who might still be out there, laying down their lives for other species? How many trees? He can’t begin to tell his wife the worst of i

In a world of seven billion people, where every inch of land has been mapped, much of it developed, and too much of it destroyed, the sea remains the final unseen, untouched, and undiscovered wilderness, the planet’s last great frontier. There are no mobile phones down there, no e-mails, no tweeting, no twerking, no car keys to lose, no terrorist

virtually all of these giants vanished. Of the twenty-four Australian animal species weighing 100 pounds or more, twenty-three became extinct.2

Bowheads avoided extinction not because a new space opened in the accounting ledger to tally their worth alive. They survived because, in the world outside the strait, they ceased to have value at all.