There is one species that resolutely refuses to decline, and that is us. Numerous species of birds, plants and butterflies are dwindling towards extinction, but we humans go on from strength to strength.
According to one expert, the world may be approaching "its sixth major extinction event." But this one will be different from the others. Whereas the previous five such events (starting 439 million years ago, when a quarter of all marine species were wiped out, and continuing at multimillion-year intervals until the elimination of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago) were caused by cosmic or geological cataclysms, this new disaster will be entirely man-made.
"You could say that this latest one is an organic event," said Jeremy Thomas, the leader of an environmental study that exposed the current crisis.
"One form of life has become so dominant on Earth that, through its over-exploitation and its wastes, it eats, destroys or poisons the others," he said.
This seems not only very unfair on all the other species, but also undesirable for us. We feel elated when we see a butterfly or even a sparrow, so rare have they become, and depres-sed the more human beings we see. There is no joy in watching a family in a Ford Mondeo stuck in a traffic jam on the M1, or in mingling with thousands of shoppers on Oxford Street. Such routine exposure to the mass of humanity is thoroughly dispiriting. Yet we are determined to do everything possible to prevent a decline of our own species.
This is not to say that we don't care about other species, too. We protect their habitats as best we can, so long as we do not jeopardize our own welfare and comfort.
I myself have just been granted some of your money, dear taxpayer, to help me to turn some degraded parkland in Northamptonshire into a sylvan idyll for little wild creatures. Rotting tree-trunks will be preserved to accommodate beetles. A pond will be dredged to attract water birds. But whatever we do to preserve and restore the habitats of the creatures that share the planet with us, this cannot begin to outweigh the harm we routinely do them in the course of our daily lives.
As long as the human population of the world continues to grow, it is unrealistic to imagine that we will not drive other species into extinction, however much we may not want to. There are just too many of us, and we like our comforts too much.
So, perhaps, instead of promoting the survival of the human race, which isn't threatened at all, we should actively encourage its decline. Instead of insisting that we don't smoke, that we drink no more than a few sips of wine or beer a day, that we eat a ridiculous number of apples and take lots of exercise, governments should turn a blind eye to our self-destructive habits and pay more attention to the welfare of butterflies.
This won't in itself solve the human population problem -- we will have bred millions of idle and obese children before we meet our early deaths -- but at least we will have cut the cost of looking after the old and have freed resources to take more care of the birds and the bees.
Those of us who want to live a long time will, of course, be allowed to look after ourselves in whatever way we choose, whether by doing yoga or, like Peter Mandelson, by drinking green tea in the mornings, but those of us who want to be dissolute will not be chided for it by the government, which will be a relief.
Reducing the birth rate is not going to be so easy. People would be resistant to government pressure to employ birth control if they didn't want to, but the number of births would doubtless fall if the government stopped all welfare payments for children and imposed a child tax on parents instead.
Unappealing though that prospect may be, I don't see why it is so much worse than bossing or taxing people into being healthy.
We are going to be confronted with a choice: either take tremendous care of ourselves, multiply, build new homes all over the countryside, and fill them with fridges and washing machines; or work for our own decline in order to ensure the survival of the other species that we are busy destroying.
It is pretty obvious what choice we are going to make, so we had better accept the next great "extinction event" as part of a natural evolution process and prepare ourselves to live contentedly in a world without butterflies. We had also better start liking each other a bit more.
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