Last Chance to See

by Douglas Adams

The second was actually set up by the monkeys.”

By skipping past the whole couple paragraphs most ecological writing spends trying to convince you to buy into the think-of-yourself-as-part-of-the-system and just going right with it from the start—humans equals monkeys—I felt like Adams bought himself—and us—permission to have some pretty nifty worldviews: Technology from backscratchers to GPUs is just one long linking chain of inventions by animals of steadily increasing ingenuity and ability to patent stuff. Conservation becomes way more interesting than just guilty conscience. As he points out with the Komodo dragon, we’re now maybe the only animal working to increase the population of animals which eat us, and not just by feeding ourselves to them. Staring at the fish climbing trees and wishing them a happy couple million years until they too can sit on a bank and feel bad about themselves was adorable.

fattest, and least-able-to-fly parrot.

big. Very big.

East of this line here it doesn’t work.”

Gotta know the longitude.