The opposite is true – frogs – as we all know - are not a species, nor are they classified by environmentalists. Frog is a family – in that two hundred year old system of classification which goes from kingdom to phylum, class, order, family, genus and species. There are errors in our system of classification – but not the kind of trivial error Sowell imagines, which would equate humans to say, the wooly spider monkeys of Bolivia. The errors in classifying only hints at how detailed our system of classification is. There are 4,740 known frog species in the world. Hundreds more are being discovered each decade, and hundreds more have already been lost forever.

The problem with Sowell’s logic – the idea that no development should ever be subsided, ever, for the sake of saving species, goes against the same logic that his ilk used to denounce Malthus. Humanity, they say, is always able to produce more crops, with more yield, and we can keep fitting more people on Earth, fixing the small environmental consequences as we go along. Under this logic – isn’t man ingenious enough to not need that particular forest, this particular stretch of desert of coastline? He writes, “Species could not have survived the evolutionary changes of the earth if they didn't have some adaptability…” This is why, he says, spotted owls will be able to adapt to skyscrapers.

Pupfish male and female in mating season at Salt Creek, Death Valley

Malthus, although maligned by time for his formula for how many people can fit on Earth, grew more wary of his formula with time. Regardless of our ingenuity – the constraints of Earth’s ecosystem are not open to interpretation. There is a finite amount of resources. Eerily, the common definition of economics – the tool that we will ultimately use to justify tackling HIPPO, is this:

The scientific study of the choices made by individuals and societies in regard to the alternative uses of scarce resources.

Reading Sowell is scary, because we know that before tackling HIPPO, we’ve gotta tackle the people who believe people like him. The consequence of a world he may imagine – one with cows and corn, and green grass, lots of concrete and ten billion people, but not much else – that is not a world worth living in. That’s a world committed to trillions in dollars towards hydrological engineering, mass starvation, disease, uncontrollable climates, and empty wilderness.

Still, the pupfish remains. The last of what were the inhabitants of the Northern Cortez. Trickling, fighting for life, swimming downriver to who knows where. Too bad they don’t know that the struggle of the twenty-first century started here, a tiny creek in Death Valley.