The morning after Donald Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Accords, this old climate warrior climbed out of bed feeling better about the chances of the sizzling, souring world than I have for months. Not just feeling better, feeling positively energized. The worst climate policy news had broken, and suddenly the sense of possibility and power was overwhelming.
When a fearsome storm is bearing down on a great ship - the first winds shuddering in the sails, the first waves burying the bowsprit, sullen clouds obscuring the horizon - the captain shouts the order. "All hands on deck." Every sailor knows what that means. Each person on board, no matter their rank or watch, has an absolute duty to rush from their gambling tables or bunks to their stations, to do whatever has to be done to save the ship.
Concerned ecologists recently made the case for the ecological urgency of action to save the world’s terrestrial megafauna (Ripple et al. 2016). These large mammals, desperately endangered by human depredation and habitat destruction, are critical to the functioning of the world’s ecosystems, and thus critical to human survival. To the extent that we value human survival, then, we ought to value the survival of the great beasts.