Stretch your arms out, fingertip to fingertip. Measure the span. Let’s call it six feet. (For most, it’s less.) Now swipe a nail file once across the middle fingernail of your left hand and measure the distance again. You won’t be able to tell the difference. But, for perspective, let’s imagine that you’ve removed about one-two thousandth of the span. That happens to correspond to about the same ratio as how the whole of the human species' history (call it two million years) compares to the history of the Earth itself—about four and a half billion years.

It is easy, and in the past in fact theologically mandatory, to see humankind as the culmination of life on Earth. And, we have yielded readily and greedily to the temptation.

One of the opening verses of Genesis, for example, deploys a purposeful creator with a list of action steps for his pet creation: be fruitful and multiply, the deity instructs, fill the Earth and subdue it, establish “dominion” over “every living thing that moves on the earth.” And so as not to leave anything out, the writer(s) of Genesis also included commands to establish domain over the “birds of the air” and “fish of the sea.”

We humans have made a pretty thorough job of planetary conquest, populating the earth to the tune of more than 8 billion, bringing more than a third of the land under cultivation, and since the end of the last Ice Age, clearing about a third of the world’s forests and overfishing about nine-tenths of the worlds’ oceans. In the process of standing on top of the world, we have accelerated the loss of other species........

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