6

CORBETT NATIONAL PARK

The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: ‘What good is it?’ . . . If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something that we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.

—ALDO LEOPOLD, ROUND RIVER

Emotion. That, as Belinda Wright, the director of the Wildlife Protection Society of India, saw it, was the greatest reason the world should invest in saving its last tigers.

At the end of our conversation in New Delhi, before we each ventured back into the sticky afternoon heat to fight through the thickets of diesel-belching trucks, tired-looking cows, and zigzagging tuk-tuks, I asked Wright the question that had been gnawing at me for days. Hundreds of species had gone extinct without provoking a serious shift in how societies protect the natural world. I had seen the probable end of the Yangtze River dolphin and, in the wild, of the Chinese sturgeon. The world hadn’t blinked.

The tiger was higher profile. Conservation groups and governments had invested hundreds of millions of dollars in its protection, setting aside wilderness sanctuaries, training park rangers to fight poaching, and educating consumers about the importance of avoiding tiger products. In 2008, the World Bank had partnered with forty conservation and scientific organisations with the goal of doubling the world’s wild tiger population by 2022.1 Former Russian president Vladimir Putin, an ardent tigerphile, had organised a campaign that would culminate with a five-day summit during the Chinese Year of the Tiger, the highest-level meeting ever held to protect a single species.

But the effort seemed to be coming too late. During the decade between 1997 and 2007, the range of wild tigers had been cut almost in half.2 Why would the world behave differently to the risk that tigers might soon be found only in zoos? Given a history of neglect, what would change our response?

Wright’s answer reminded me of a sentence George Orwell had used—for different effect—in Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

“The tiger is the most charismatic mammal on this planet,” Wright said, staring at me with her steely blue eyes. “If you look at it historically or culturally or in art, it has been such a dominant force in many countries for centuries. Even in the United States, where no wild tigers ever lived, there isn’t a child who doesn’t know tigers. It was voted the most popular animal on this planet in a recent survey. Little children eating their cereal in California know what a tiger is. This is not just any old animal. So, if we can’t persuade China to take its hands off wild tigers, then I think it’s shameful. If we cannot save the tiger, which is such a powerful presence, what can we save? What hope is there for mankind?”

The argument that tigers are a kind of test for humanity—that if we fail to carve out space for them, we will necessarily fail to protect the rest of the world’s natural estate; that they are as important as symbols of our intentions as they are for their biological roles—was powerful, and I was thinking about it as I walked into the heart of tiger country a few days later. I had travelled with Tykee Malhotra to Corbett National Park, tracing India’s overcrowded roads north from the capital through tiny farm villages and ramshackle towns, across the Ganges River and then into low Himalayan foothills. At Tykee’s parents’ tourist lodge, she had introduced me to Deep Contractor, a young Indian biologist she had recently hired to work for her non-profit. And then Deep had invited me to join her for a walk.

Without thinking much, I agreed, but as we made our way into the forest, I began to have second thoughts. More than 160 tigers lived in Corbett National Park—probably the densest population of wild tigers on the planet—and Deep estimated that 7 or 8 occasionally wandered through the managed plantations surrounding the sanctuary. I had also been reading Man-Eaters of Kumaon, a book by Jim Corbett, the British Indian Army officer after whom the park had been named. Told as a culinary chronicle of the Champawat man-eater—a tiger that arrived in the region “as a full-fledged man-eater, from Nepal, from whence she had been driven out by a body of armed Nepalese after she had killed two hundred human beings”—the work fitted well into a genre that nature writer David Quammen describes as “predator pornography . . . toothy porn [that] gives a skewed impression of the fraught, ancient relationship between large carnivores and the ubiquitous primate that, in moments of reckless desperation, they sometimes turn upon as prey.”3

Intellectually, I knew my fears were exaggerated. Even a century ago, when India had many more tigers than it does today, Corbett had noted that most of the animals showed little interest in humans. (“It is only when tigers have been incapacitated through wounds or old age that, in order to live, they are compelled to take a diet of human flesh,” he wrote.) But the instincts early humans developed to avoid becoming lunch remain strong, and as I followed Deep into the forest, I felt a powerful surge of adrenaline.

The forests around Corbett National Park are designated as borderland sanctuary, meaning that they can be used selectively with government permission, and the area where we walked had been logged many years earlier. Where native species once lived, loggers had planted sal trees, a species that grows quickly and straight and that works well as railroad ties and telephone poles. Eventually, they would be cut again.

Still, the forest provided a better wildlife show than anything I had seen in North America. Near where we turned off a dirt road, we found metre-tall termite mounds that looked like the weathered stones used in Japanese gardens. We broke off small pieces to peer into straw-shaped tubes that descended into a dark insect underworld: somewhere in the blackness, a fat queen engorged herself among her writhing family. We paused to watch a troop of two dozen Hanuman langur—large monkeys with jet black faces ringed with grey fur that puffed into pompadour-like crowns—swing through the canopy. Rounding a hill, we surprised a sambar—a large deer the colour of well-steeped Darjeeling tea—that bleated and charged away. As we walked, Deep and a local guide named Nursing, a thin man with soft, friendly features and a quick eye for wildlife, listed a wide variety of animals they had seen in the forest: elephants, pythons, sloth bears, cobras, leopards, and several varieties of deer.

Deep also tried to calm my nerves about meeting a tiger. As a graduate student at the Wildlife Institute of India, the country’s top school for con-servation biology, she had spent several months setting camera traps in the national park and, on foot, had encountered tigers three times without being mauled. On the first encounter she had needed to replace the batteries in a camera trap 12 metres from a resting tigress. “I was really nervous, but she didn’t mind me,” Deep recalled. A few months later she was counting pugmarks in a riverbed when she startled a tiger. The animal growled and began to approach, but when Deep and a colleague climbed a tree he stalked off. “I realised that unless you approach a tiger or scare him, he won’t attack you,” Deep said. “Really they aren’t so different from housecats in their behaviour.”

The afternoon was dry and the temperature of a New England fall day and after an hour I began to relax. But then Deep bent down and picked up a small, fuzzy white lump. “Tiger scat,” she said matter-of-factly. “I guess it’s twenty days old.” She pointed to head-high scars on a nearby tree where the animal had sharpened its claws on the bark.

As anyone who has ever rounded the bend of a trail to find a bear loping through the forest or, scuba diving, has witnessed a shark slide effortlessly from the dark distance knows, the presence of great animals makes the natural world more poignant, our experiences more meaningful, and I recalled a line from David Quammen’s book Monster of God: the alpha predators, Quammen wrote, “allow us to recollect our limitations. They keep us company. . . . If we exterminate the last magnificently scary beasts on planet Earth, as we seem bent on doing, then no matter where we go for the rest of our history as a species—for the rest of time—we may never encounter any others.”4

As I peered into the darkening forest, I felt a surge of euphoria. Suddenly everything seemed more alive.

Unless they’ve travelled to the great spaces of Africa, India, or Brazil, Westerners have difficulty imagining what healthy wilderness looks like. Largely, that is because the developed world emptied our great spaces of their largest species hundreds of years ago. In Europe—which like much of China has sustained a dense population for centuries—almost all of the lowland forests were cleared for farming more than a millennia ago.

In North America, the change came later and more suddenly as settlers pushed across the continent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and began to slaughter wildlife. First to go were species that, like sturgeon in American waterways, could be harvested easily. An estimated 50 million bison lived on the Great Plains in the 1600s—once travelling in herds so thick that they were described as robes covering the land. But settlers hunted them for their skins and meat, and by 1890 fewer than a thousand survived.5

The impact on North America’s predators—wolves, mountain lions, and grizzly bears—was as extreme. In the early nineteenth century, a million wolves may have roamed the continent, and when Lewis and Clark journeyed from Missouri to the Pacific Coast between 1804 and 1806, they encountered thirty-seven grizzlies, after polar bears the world’s largest terrestrial carnivore.

Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, hunting, trapping, and a government-led eradication campaign decimated their ranks. By the 1970s, grey wolves occupied less than 4 percent of their former range in the contiguous states. Its southeastern cousin, the red wolf, was extinct in the wild. Today, grizzlies are rarely seen, living only in a few isolated pockets of wilderness.

The result is that North American and European national parks are what one Indian conservationist called “green deserts”—spaces that preserve faint reminders of their former diversity. When I first heard the term, I did not understand, but as I drove with Deep into Corbett National Park the next day I began to see how wildlife can shape and colour a landscape.

We had set out early that morning for Ramnagar, a city just outside the park’s southern border where Deep collected permits and we met our driver, a tall, regal-looking Sikh named Honey Prabhujot Singh. From Ramnagar, Singh guided us through the crush of Indian humanity—past overflowing shops, rainbow-painted trucks, alleys full of women squatting beside butane stoves—and half an hour later we arrived at a rickety checkpoint at the edge of the park. Deep showed our papers to a young guard, and after he scrutinised them for several minutes, he swung open a metal gate and we entered an entirely different world.

Part of what makes Corbett among the world’s best places to see wildlife—a window into a natural realm now mostly gone—is that it was established early. In 1936, the British colonial government declared the park India’s first government-funded wildlife sanctuary, and it has remained one of the country’s best-managed reserves ever since. Despite scattered poaching—including two tigers killed in and around the park in the years before I visited—Corbett is India’s only reserve that has maintained a steadily growing tiger population, and it protects dozens of other species: Indian elephants, jackals, langurs and macaques, rock pythons, wild boar, sloth bears, Eurasian otters, monitor lizards, 4 species of deer, 580 kinds of birds, and a highly endangered crocodile called the gharial (Gavialis gangeticus) that is the only surviving member of an ancient family with long, slender snouts.

Like China’s national parks, India’s sanctuaries are designed like matryoshka dolls, the Russian wooden figurines with progressively smaller replicas inside of them. First there are the managed perimeter forests that are heavily used, typically by timber companies that lease the land but—because they are rarely patrolled—also by herders and locals looking to collect wood and other useful things.

The forest at the edge of the national park was an example of this outer ring, and we drove through a landscape similar to where Deep and I walked a day earlier. The sal trees rose as straight as rulers and, because monocul-tures planted at the same time don’t allow spaces in the forest canopy, there was little undergrowth. Still, the wildlife was greater than anything found in the United States, with the possible exception of untouched sections of Alaska. Singh stopped to point out a sambar and a pair of chital—delicate-looking small deer with soft white spots—feeding from a low bush beside the road. A stork-billed kingfisher slept on a tree branch above them, its purple-red beak tucked under midnight black wings.

The second level of protection in Indian sanctuaries is what Westerners would recognise as a national park: hunting, logging, and collecting are banned and the land is richer. Instead of plantations, the forests support a natural diversity of plant life and as we crossed into that zone, the landscape became denser, creating the base for greater animal numbers. Singh pulled our open-topped jeep to the side of the road to watch a troop of langur swing through the canopy of an Indian gooseberry tree. A large female from the clan sat on a nearby branch and slowly poked leaves into her mouth, her copper eyes staring out from beneath a flamboyant tuft of fur.

Farther in, the forest opened into a wide floodplain around a tributary of the Ramganga River. Fuelled by the warmth of the winter sun and the safety provided by large, open spaces, the valley provided a greater accounting. A troop of macaques paraded through the top of a mimosa tree. An elephant pulled saccharum grasses from the riverbed and beat them against the ground to clean their roots before using her trunk to push the meal into her soft, pink mouth. Muntjac—animals more commonly called barking deer because, when alarmed, they emit canine-like yelps—picked their way warily along the edge of a road, pausing to eat from low bushes. A crested kingfisher, a beautiful bird with a striking black-and-white mantle, rested on a rock in the strong afternoon light.

For Deep, the profusion of life was a perfect illustration of why predators should be protected. “Some people argue that we don’t need tigers,” she said as we pushed farther into the park. “They don’t care if they go extinct. Some people even think they should go extinct. But they don’t understand the im-portance of biology and that it took aeons to achieve this natural balance.”

Without tigers, she added, the carefully balanced environment would quickly spin out of control. Each tiger typically requires about six kilograms of meat each day and will kill an animal roughly once a week. If herbivore populations spike, as might happen after a series of wet years, when foliage is plentiful, hunting would become easier and tiger numbers would rise in a similar arc. If the tiger population grew too large, some would leave to seek new hunting grounds and—as food became scarce—mothers would produce smaller litters.

That cycle is central to healthy ecosystems: without tigers, the herbivores would begin to consume their food base at an unsustainable rate, eventually stripping accessible plants of their leaves until they began to starve. Their population would crash and the few survivors would start the more extreme cycle again as the plants that remained regained health.

“If you don’t have tigers, the natural cycle will be destroyed,” Deep said. Eventually, such changes would damage not only the ecosystem but the services it renders for nearby communities, like regulating climate and pro-viding clean water. “A deteriorating ecosystem creates negative changes that can ricochet for centuries,” she added.

The importance of top predators has become clear to science only over recent decades. One of the earliest studies to highlight their often critical role was done in the early 1960s by a young ecologist named Robert Paine. Over several years, Paine regularly visited a stretch of rocky coast on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Once there, he made his way to a tide pool and meticulously cleared it of large orange starfish.

Capable of growing as large as 45 centimetres in diameter, the starfish, formally called Pisaster ochraceous, were the small ecosystem’s dominant predator and, without them, the pool’s ecology changed. P. ochraceous are able to eat a variety of prey but prefer a large mussel named Mytilus californianus. Without Pisaster, Mytilus flourished: within a year the mussel had taken over half of the tide pool; in time, it pushed out every other species—barnacles, limpets, snails, anemones, sea sponges, and other creatures—that had shared the space. All that remained was a blanket of dark blue Mytilus.

The paper Paine wrote about the experiment—“Food Web Complexity and Species Diversity”—became one of the most cited works in the history of ecology. He summed up its hypothesis in one sentence: “Local species diversity is directly related to the efficiency with which predators prevent the monopolisation of the major environmental requisites by one species.” A follow-up paper introduced the concept of “keystone species”: like the keystone of an archway, some species—including Pisaster ochraceous in the tide pools of the Olympic Peninsula—are crucial to the health of entire ecosystems; removing them can lead to rapid collapse.6 (In short, George Orwell was right: even if all animals are equal, some are more equal than others.)

Later studies added weight to Paine’s findings. In 1974, two graduate students published a paper showing that the extermination of sea otters from an island near Alaska—to use their skins in clothing—had led to a proliferation of sea urchins that ate kelp, ultimately leaving barren pavements of algae that supported little diversity. Twenty-seven years later, a group based at Duke University published a paper titled “Ecological Meltdown in Predator-Free Forest Fragments”. The scientists spent nearly a decade studying small islands formed by a reservoir in Venezuela and found that the loss of predators—including harpy eagles, jaguars, armadillos, and army ants—had led to an explosion of herbivores. Over time, howler monkeys and leaf-cutter ants killed off many trees, leaving only thickets of thorny, inedible plants.

“The end point in this process is a nearly treeless island buried under an impenetrable tangle of liana stems,” the group wrote. In little more than a decade, green, species-rich jungle was reduced to a brown wasteland, and they added that their observations “are warnings because the large predators that impose top-down regulation have been extirpated from most of the continental United States and indeed, much of Earth’s terrestrial realm.”

Late in the afternoon, at the edge of a floodplain of the Ramganga, I saw my first tiger. Because India’s wildlife is ever vigilant for its alpha predator, we had known for over an hour that she was nearby: in the late afternoon heat, everything had become strangely quiet. A chital looked up from a low bush, its ears twitching nervously. A sambar with large horns suddenly lifted its head toward the riverbed and then cocked its front leg, as if preparing to sprint. A pack of macaques at the top of a tall tree carefully scanned the valley for movement.

The animals knew that somewhere a tiger padded quietly, its legs pumping like soft pistons, its shoulders rising into a muscular hump like a Brahmin bull’s, its colours—more rust and charcoal than orange and black—blending into the tawny grasses and dry shrubs. Without seeing her, we knew she was there, her mouth hanging open to reveal a wide, pink tongue wedged between scimitar teeth, her ears tipped forward, listening through the electric stillness for movement—the snap of a branch, the faint click of a hoof striking stone—her tail curled into a question mark that seemed to punctuate the forest.

We had also seen pugmarks. Half an hour earlier, Deep had found two sets of paw prints pushed into thick dust at the edge of a dirt road. One of the tigers was male, a fact obvious to Deep because its toe pads left almost perfect circles above a large, leathery palm. The other left longer, oblong impressions—a female. Tigers generally mate during the winter, when they can find prey more easily, and Deep speculated that the male was pursuing the female. Pulled to the side of the road, we joined the wildlife in their taut vigil, scanning the thick grasses for movement, listening intently for sounds.

As we waited, Deep whispered a brief explanation of why Panthera tigris is one of the most finely built killing machines ever to evolve. Adult tigers can weigh two hundred and seventy kilograms yet need only a few seconds to accelerate to a sixty-kilometre-per-hour sprint. They are capable of the same acrobatic feats that house cats perform—leaping tens of metres, climbing trees, cornering sharply, crawling into small spaces. Yet they generally hunt by stealth. Their colouration makes them a perfect match for the Indian winter grasslands. Their soft footpads allow them to stalk noiselessly.

Deep explained those adaptations as part of the perfectly balanced In-dian forests. Despite their power and speed, tigers hunt prey that is faster and has more stamina. Nine times out of ten, tigers fail to catch a target. If they’re noticed before reaching striking distance, they will often abandon a hunt.

Sound is the warning of the Indian forest, and a few minutes later, as the sun began to drop toward distant hills, a macaque high in the canopy began to howl—a rising call that sounded like a loud squeaky door. A moment later a second macaque joined as it spotted the tiger.

As their screams reverberated through the valley, other animals abandoned what they were doing. The sambar stared intently upstream. A muntjac swung its head toward the riverbed and began to make cackling, canine yelps. Looking in the same direction, the sambar took several steps backward and joined the chorus with a series of low, agitated cries.

And then I caught sight of my first tiger. She emerged from behind a large stone that blended with her autumn colours; if she stood still, I would not have seen her. At first, she seemed unreal: I had imagined she would appear with a sudden burst of speed and colour to tackle some ruined victim, but instead she was moving slowly, her head down, mouth agape, seemingly indifferent to the warning calls that reverberated through the forest. She placed each paw purposely, stepping between clumps of grasses and then climbing a shallow bank toward the road.

She crossed in front of our jeep, her colours contrasting sharply with the pale dust, and I was struck by her combination of power and grace. Her neck was a pillar of muscle. With each step, her body seemed to contract and then expand outward, yet she moved lightly around stones and fallen trees. She seemed strangely weightless.

As she approached a gnarled tree and squatted against it, Deep leaned over to whisper that she was marking it with urine. The male would smell her elevated hormones and follow the scent to mate with her.

The explanation had the technical precision common to science, but I was content to play the philosopher. The tiger rubbed her head against the mottled bark of a fig tree, crossed the road again, and then, for the first time, looked at us. Her one-metre-long tail almost perpendicular to her back, her left paw extended, her head down, ears cocked forward, each a patch of white ringed with woolly black, she stared up the dirt road with what appeared to be contempt: I imagined that she was disgruntled but also flattered by our intrusion—we had disturbed her walk, but she was queen of this land and we had come to pay homage. Eventually she flicked her tail, turned, and stalked into the forest.

After her colours had faded into shadows, I paused to evaluate my euphoria. I had seen one of the world’s great beasts, and although tigers stand on the edge of extinction, their existence had suddenly become real: no longer were they confined to television pixels, children’s stories, and zoos. We waited half an hour hoping she would reappear, but our desires meant nothing, and eventually we drove slowly back through the park past the vigilant muntjac and chital and sambar.

On my final morning in the national park, I put away my notebook and simply enjoyed the forest. We set out at dawn and quickly spotted a hawk surveying the forest floor in the red-orange light. Then starlings began to hunt, their dark wings cutting circles through the brightening sky.

As we drove north, the sun crested the canopy, silhouetting the trees. A heron skimmed the top of the braided, low Ramganga River and two peacocks strutted along the edge of a dirt road, their plumage tucked neatly behind them. A pair of jackals cut through a burned-over field with long loping strides.

After the sun had warmed the forest floor, we stopped to admire rock pythons sunning themselves. Each was nearly two metres long but I almost missed them: their skin perfectly matched the dried leaves and twigs of the forest floor; only their heft—as round at the middle as my thigh—and their flicking black tongues gave them away.

And as we were driving out of the park, it offered one last treasure. Near noon we were stopped at the edge of a road overlooking the river when a macaque hidden in the canopy sounded an alarm. A barking deer joined and a moment later a sambar standing downstream backed up and began to make its deep, guttural call. I drew a bead from where it was staring to where a tiger stalked out of dry grass beside a thin arm of the winter river.

She padded to the river’s edge and stepped into it, her rust and charcoal power reflected in its still water. As she crossed, submerging herself to her shoulders, two otters swam the other way, seeking momentary refuge. She looked healthy and full and paid them no attention.

A moment later—only a few seconds after she emerged—she reached the other side and disappeared into the dark forest.

Two years later and half a world away, I made my way past the Washington Monument and the neatly trimmed White House rose gardens to meet Thomas Lovejoy, one of the founding voices of conservation biology. Over a forty-five-year career, Lovejoy has held a series of jobs at the intersection of science and policy, serving as a biodiversity adviser to three U.S. presidents—Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Clinton—and the president of the World Bank, but also continuing field research, and I wanted to ask him how China had changed his thinking about global biodiversity. How had China’s rise shifted the picture?

Lovejoy kept an office at the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment, a nondescript building near the centre of Washington, D.C., and we met in a conference room without any of the mountains of papers and lab equipment common to most researchers. In dress, however, he had the no-nonsense demeanour of many scientists I had talked with: he wore an orange short-sleeve shirt buttoned open to mid chest and a battered plastic Timex watch; his wispy sand-coloured hair was dishevelled; in a city where language and meaning often part company, he spoke with the measured cadence of someone who says precisely what he means.

His big-picture response was that China had hit the conservation community suddenly and hard. He had only begun to think that China could become a problem “five or six” years earlier, but by mid-2011 it had become the problem, and while quantifying China’s impacts was difficult, they were also obvious. “In terms of Africa alone, I am sure China has increased the pressure on biodiversity by many times over the state before they got engaged,” he told me. “There was a very slow, almost dawdling economic trajectory in many of these countries and then, boom, China comes in and things get snapped up and before you know it, most of the story is already foreordained.

“Suddenly they are a new driver of problems because they are buying up all kinds of land and mines and forests and stuff like that, and it’s happening in a snap of the fingers.”

Lovejoy’s comments were poignant partly because he has spent most of his life trying to get the world to realise what it could lose. In 1979, he made one of the boldest predictions about the damage man might do to the natural world. In “about half a human life span . . . hundreds of thousands of species will perish”, a reduction of “10 to 20 percent of the earth’s biota,” he wrote in a frequently quoted essay.7 Starting from 1979, half a human lifespan takes a person roughly to 2020, and I asked him to evaluate his prognostication three decades in.

“It’s not too far off,” he said. “In fact, I think it’s going to be worse than that in the direction we’re now going.” A report he had worked on for the UN Environment Program (UNEP) seemed to confirm his pessimism. The report was blandly titled Global Biodiversity Outlook 3. But if it had a boring name, its contents were anything but: the United Nations set out to evaluate progress on a target, set in 2002, to “achieve by 2010 a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the global, regional and national level”, a goal that had grown from the Convention on Biological Diversity. That treaty had been endorsed by the UN General Assembly as one of eight millennium development goals and, in theory, involved a commitment from almost all of the world’s governments.

But like most of the millennium goals, the world had missed the target by a wide margin. Of twenty-one “biodiversity subtargets” none had been achieved globally. Some had been abject failures: most habitats in most parts of the world ended the first decade of the twenty-first century “declining in extent”; invasive species had become more common; genetic variety had dropped; the risk of extinction “for many threatened species” had increased. The details were often more frightening, and the ninety-four-page report offered a variety of other depressing numbers, graphs, and pie charts: the populations of wild vertebrate species, for example, had fallen by an average of nearly one-third between 1970 and 2006, with rivers, lakes, and tropical areas hit particularly hard; bird populations in North American grasslands fell 40 percent between 1968 and 2003; 42 percent of all types of amphibi-ans were declining in number; globally, almost one in four plants was threatened with extinction.8

Lovejoy, however, was more worried about what could happen as China and the rest of the developing world continue to get richer. “Everybody’s basically mimicking what America did, but the reality is that in the end, there’s just not enough world to go around for everyone to live a top-of-the-food-chain American or European lifestyle,” he said. “When somebody like me is looking at the world and where it’s going, what I can see is we’ve already reached the stage where we are seeing ecosystem failure. There’s bleaching of tropical coral reefs—which is mostly about elevated temperature; the incredible mortality of coniferous trees in North America because summers are longer and bark beetles get the upper hand. Then you see the Amazon clearing and die-back, and coastal estuary dead zones that are doubling in size every five to ten years.

“What I’m trying to say here is that biodiversity loss can look sort of like a stream—and with the addition of China it’s a much more rapidly flowing stream now—but we have to realise that there are going to be some big thresholds that are crossed and there’ll be huge chunks of biodiversity lost. And some of that we can predict, but others we’ll only know about when they happen.”

The overall message was that with the addition of China’s demands—and behind China the rising demands of the rest of the developing world—time to stem the losses is running out: “Somehow the message has got to get through to China,” Lovejoy said. “The issue is, how much do we want to shoot ourselves in the foot?”