(One theory of the ammonites’ demise, popular in the early part of the twentieth century, was that the uncoiled shells of species like Eubaculites carinatus indicated that the group had exhausted its practical possibilities and entered some sort of decadent, Lady Gaga-ish phase.)

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[…] the reigning paradigm is neither Cuvierian nor Darwinian but combines key elements of both—“long periods of boredom interrupted occasionally by panic.”

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Most significantly, Crutzen said, people have altered the composition of the atmosphere. Owing to a combination of fossil fuel combustion and deforestation, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air has risen by forty percent over the last two centuries, while the concentration of methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas, has more than doubled.

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Canada’s boreal forest is huge; it stretches across almost a billion acres and represents roughly a quarter of all the intact forest that remains on earth.

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In 1890, a New York group that took as its mission “the introduction and acclimatization of such foreign varieties of the animal and vegetable kingdom as might prove useful or interesting” imported European starlings to the U.S. (The head of the group supposedly wanted to bring to America all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare.) A hundred starlings let loose in Central Park have by now multiplied to more than two hundred million.

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(Rhino horns, which are made of keratin, like your fingernails, have long been used in traditional Chinese medicine but in recent years have become even more sought-after as a high-end party “drug”; at clubs in southeast Asia, powdered horn is snorted like cocaine.)

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To cite just one of many possible illustrations, by the mid-nineteen-eighties the population of California condors had dwindled to just twenty-two individuals. To rescue the species—the largest land bird in North America—wildlife biologists raised condor chicks using puppets. They created fake power lines to train the birds not to electrocute themselves; to teach them not to eat trash, they wired garbage to deliver a mild shock. They vaccinated every single condor—today there about four hundred—against West Nile virus, a disease, it’s worth noting, for which a human vaccine has yet to be developed. They routinely test the birds for lead poisoning—condors that scavenge deer carcasses often ingest lead shot—and they have treated many of them with chelation therapy.

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Such is the pain the loss of a single species causes that we’re willing to perform ultrasounds on rhinos and handjobs on crows.

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