Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures

The greatest lie that humans ever told is that the Earth is ours, and at our disposal. It's a lie with the power to destroy us all.

It’s a thing worth knowing: that so very rarely do we discover that any living creature is simpler than we thought

Protest. Protest both when you believe it will work—for we have vivid evidence of when it has worked—and when you do not. The farmer-poet-activist Wendell Berry, in his book What Are People For?, wrote: “Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.

They are not alone in this. The human being, too, is a shining thing. We are infinitesimally bioluminescent - chemical reactions within the human body cast up photons, the elementary particle of light. The light emitted is a thousand times weaker than human eyesight, but it is constant, and clustered around the face. Like the golden mole, we too have a radiance invisible to ourselves.

If you want to nurture a forest, plant a wolf.

It is a difficult world to survive in, this one we have created. It is so very beautiful; and it is so ruthlessly perilous to the vulnerable. We will have to demand more, both from our adversaries and from our friends. The alternative—a world in which humanity lives alongside a tiny handful of species, amid empty skies and empty seas—becomes more possible every year. Now is the time to act: now, and now, and now.

I understand spiders are hard to cherish. They appear to be all right angles and stubble, and they do not sleep, and their eyes never close, and we find it difficult to admire that which does not blink.

A jumping spider the size of my little fingernail can jump upon and kill a large grasshopper, which is roughly equivalent to my leaping upon and devouring a Volvo station wagon.

We live in a world of such marvels. We should wake up in the morning and as we put on our trousers, we should remember the seahorse, and we should scream with awe and not stop screaming until we fall asleep, and the same the next day, and the next. Each single seahorse contains enough wonder to knock the whole of humanity off its feet, if we would but pay attention.

We needed a symbol into which to pour our fear and mistrust of the world, and we have chosen the wolf, and chosen it with passion and commitment.

In the last fifty years, the world’s wildlife has declined by an average of almost seventy percent. We have lost more than half of all wild things that lived. We are Noah’s Ark in reverse: it is as if we are raging through the bowels of the boat, setting fire to the stables, poisoning the water. Faced with such destruction at such pace, acquiescence becomes impossible. The time to fight, with all our ingenuity and tenacity, and love and fury, is now.

And finally, avoid the temptation to strike a pose and say "It's too late." It's not true. It's half-baked nihilism: and like all half-baked nihilism, it lazily temps us to think that what we do doesn't matter now. It does matter; it will always matter. The time to give up is never. Hope - active, purposeful, informed hope - is what we owe the world. A body of unimaginable splendor turns on its axis, calling us to its aid.

Amid all the Internet point-scoring, though, one thing is certain: spiders have no interest in your open mouth, which is moist and quivering and unwelcoming, and will not willingly go near it. There is just an inch of truth to it: you will have inhaled millions of microscopic pieces of spider in dust - but then, by that reckoning, you have inhaled substantial portions of people, too.

Storks are said to bring luck to the houses on which they roost. (They're also a fire hazard: they build nests up to six feet across and ten feet deep, returning year after year to add to them.)

Their defense mechanism has made them easy prey to humans - rather than offering protection, it renders them neatly and readily portable.

So a true fairy-tale wedding is not, like most British royal weddings, a reinforcement of a state institution through the medium of organ music and enormous dresses. A true fairy-tale wedding would be one in which secret desires leak out: one in which the aging prince, tired of waiting for his throne, turns into a wolf and eats the queen.

Hermit crabs can, if they must, make their home almost anywhere. They have been found in tin cans, in coconut halves. The Pylochelidae family evolved to make their homes not in shells but in sea sponges, stones, driftwood, pieces of bamboo. More and more, in these darker days, I admire resourcefulness. I love their tenacity; forging lives from the shells of the dead, making homes from the debris that the world, in its chaos, has left out for them.

Conservation can never thrive unless it works with those people who live on the land and who know it most deeply. The lemur cannot be protected until we seek our ways to assure the health and dignity for those who dwell alongside them; a byproduct will be the eradication of the need to hunt endangered creatures for survival.

As the great Roman naturalist Pliny wrote, the proof of wealth is "to possess something that might absolutely be destroyed in a moment.

I am glad not to be a Greenland shark; I don't have enough thoughts to fill five hundred years. But I find the very idea of them hopeful. They will see us pass through whichever spinning chaos we may currently be living through, and the crash that will come after it, and they will live through the currently unimagined things that will come after that: the transformations, the revelations, the possible liberations. That is their beauty, and it's breathtaking: they go on. These slow, odorous, half-blind creatures are perhaps the closest thing to eternal this planet has to offer.

For thousands of years Greenland sharks have swum in silence, as aboveground the world has burned, rebuilt, burned again.

The old errors are fantastical and fantastic, and revealing of human hopes and anxieties; our terrors, our desires for greater digestive health and sexual prowess, our quest for magical solutions to relentlessly human problems. And every scientist you meet will tell you: there is no reason to believe that we haven't got just as much wrong today as we have done in every generation up till now. It would be worth our holding that knowledge, tight and urgent, as we go; our learning, though vast, is an infinitesimally small fraction of what exists.

These things - everlasting flight, a self-galvanizing heart, a baby who learns names in the womb - sound like fables we tell children. But it's only that the real world is so startling that our capacity for wonder, huge as it is, can barely skim the edges of the truth.

The human being, too, is a shining thing. We are infinitesimally bioluminescent--chemical reactions within the human body cast up photons, the elementary particle of light. The light emitted is a thousand times weaker than human eyesight, but it is constant, and clustered around the face.

Spider silk weighs almost nothing--a thread of silk long enough to loop the Earth would weigh a pound or less--but it is one of the strongest materials on the planet: five times stronger than a strand of steel of the same thickness.

If you were to choose an animal to double-cross, it would be wisest not to choose a crow. They're formidable in intelligence: they are clever and wise enough to hold grudges against us.

It is hard to remember how urgently something needs protecting when it could also kill you