“Depending on what happens to human societies, we will spend the next few generations coming to terms with what we have lost...We won’t know most of what we have lost because it will have never been named. Some of the species we will have lost will have had important medicinal values. Some of them will have pollinated our crops. Some of them will have been strange creatures deserving explanation. Some will have been beautiful. Some will have had values that we are not yet capable of understanding.

We live in a vast living museum that is being flooded and burned and ravaged. We know that we must save some of the art, but we don’t know anything about the art. So we grab the showiest things and hope they are important.”