Travel Photography > Desert Southwest > Death Valley

We have counted about 1.5 million species and categorized them. The real number of species on Earth is probably between four million to a hundred million. If you are invited on a deepwater submarine and descend into the darkness, at the right place, you'll see species that have never been named. Take a sample of the water, and things get even more complicated.

But the more complicated species - the flowering plants, the fish, the reptiles, the amphibians, the birds and the mammals - they are complex, and countable. If we decelerate their extinctions one unit at a time, we can lay the groundwork for a healthy planet.

The world has undergone amazing progress since 1900 - literacy rates, medicines, gross national products - the twentieth century has been amazing. If you look at a map of the Earth from say 1948 and all autocracies and communist regimes are in red, and all multiparty democracies are in blue, the map will be mostly red.

That same map today is almost all blue.

But Earth is more than that – it’s a thin membrane where we act as the mind and all the other species its body. Allowing the membrane of life to pulsate onward - that is what it’s all about. If we remember that we are part of nature, and all our joy is connected directly to it – then we’ll realize that we’re really just saving ourselves.

With meager resources in law and economics, we can only concentrate on those most majestic of species – the Siberian tiger, the California condor. The animals that ordinary people can get behind. But ecosystems care not for majesty. The idea is to shift salvation from carrying two buckets of pupfish to ending HIPPO. HIPPO is an anacronym for habitat destruction, invasive species, pollution, population, and overharvesting. Keeping humans from HIPPO is big stuff.

Even in industrialized nations like the U.S., however, selling this sort of thing to the public is a tough business. There’s a writer – he’s kind of like a conservative Michael Moore, although instead of being fat, ugly and filled with generalizations, he is smug, pretentious and filled with generalizations. Thomas Sowell, unfortunately, gets more play in the media than say, the guy with the two buckets of pupfish. In 2001, Sowell was mad as hell at what he called, ‘the green bigots’ – people like you and me.

The problem was that the red-legged frog - a threatened species – was coming into conflict with zoning for future development on the west coast. Sowell, in his essay “Green bigots versus human beings”, claimed that frogs may be a species, but not red-legged frogs. He claimed that environmentalists make up whatever they want to call a species.

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