Last Chance to See

by Douglas Adams

I suddenly had not the faintest idea what I, a writer of humorous science-fiction adventures, was doing here.

“So I suppose it’s fair to say that as our intelligence has increased, it has given us not only greater power, but also an understanding of the consequences of using that power. It has given us the ability to control our environment, but also the ability to control ourselves.”

We are currently beginning to arrive at a lot of new ideas about the way that shapes emerge in nature, and it is not impossible to imagine that as we discover more about fractal geometry, the “strange attractors” that lie at the heart of newly emerging theories of chaos, and the way in which the mathematics of growth and erosion interact, we may discover that these apparent echoes of shape and texture are not entirely fanciful or coincidental. Maybe.

You can always tell an ex-colony from the inordinate numbers of people who are able to find employment stopping anybody who has anything to do from doing it.

Writers should not be in the business of propping up stereotypes.

It occurred to me that we had spent a day rapt with wonder watching the mountain gorillas, and being particularly moved at how human they seemed, and finding this to be one of their most engaging and fascinating features. To find afterward that a couple of hours spent with actual humans was merely irritating was a bit confusing.

An endemic species of plant or animal is one that is native to an island or region and is found nowhere else at all. An exotic species is one that has been introduced from abroad, and a disaster is usually what results when this occurs.

Island ecologies are fragile time capsules.

It’s easy to think that as a result of the extinction of the dodo, we are now sadder and wiser, but there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that we are merely sadder and better informed.

As zoologists and botanists explore new areas, scrabbling to record the mere existence of species before they become extinct, it is like someone hurrying through a burning library desperately trying to jot down some of the titles of books that will now never be read.