Outcompeting ourselves.

It may come as a shock to many to find that our closest genetic relatives on the planet - the primates - are diminishing in numbers at an alarming rate. If we were to draw a graph tracking the evolution of primates over the past four million years, this decline would appear, in the last 1-percent of the time-line, as a free-fall.

Primates are by no means the only category of life going into free-fall.As past WORLD WATCH articles have documented, mammals in general are in decline;birds are in decline; amphibians are in decline; freshwater fish are in decline; and now we find that reptiles are in decline too. And, in numbers of species, all of these categories together add up to only a small fraction of the Earth's diminishing bio-diversity. As Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson estimated a few years ago, thousands of species of smaller organisms are disappearing forever each year.

Not everyone who learns of this collapse is shocked by it, however. Many are indifferent;they don't see why it matters. And some are unapologetically hostile to any form of wildlife that interferes with human hegemony: witness the anger of U.S. ranchers toward coyotes, or of Zimbabwean farmers toward elephants, or of Japanese fruit growers toward monkeys. A few years ago, I spent some time in the Mojave Desert of California, where the Desert Tortoise is endangered. I learned that the single largest cause of tortoise death is bullets to the head, delivered by land owners who fear they will be prevented from "developing" the land by the tortoises' protected status. Ironically, the fact that they are "protected" seems to have made them more endangered.

Then there was the time I went out for a long run, up a road through the Angeles National Forest, and came upon a crew of workers in Forest Service uniforms clearing brush. Just as I passed, one of the men screamed. As I turned to look, he went berserk, slamming his machete at the ground, again and again, then leaping up and down, whirling, and wildly slashing every tree or bush within reach while bellowing obscenities at the top of his lungs. The other men stood gaping. If, as I surmised, the man had been bitten by a rattlesnake, he was doing the worst thing possible - sending the venom racing into his heart. None of his fellow foresters suggested to him that he calm down.

I didn't stop to find out, but whatever snake had been disturbed in its habitat had doubtless been slashed to pieces. As I ran on, I wondered: if a professional custodian of our forests can be this alienated from the environment he's entrusted with "managing," how alienated - or just disconnected - are people at large? Most Californians weren't in the woods at all that day; they were in shopping malls, air-conditioned buildings, or their cars. But if I could have stopped them to ask, I suspect many would have said they wouldn't mind at all if the world's reptiles just disappeared. "Snakes? Crocodiles? Lizards? They look like dinosaurs, and so what if they go the way of dinosaurs?"

As Howard Youth points out in his article in this issue, reptiles have more importance to the stability of our environment than most of us realize - and may have more than we yet know about. After all, some of them have been around more than two-thousand times as long as Homo sapiens has. But if the fact that we're killing off some of our planet's most venerable examples of ecological success doesn't give us pause, how about the fact that we're also killing off our closest genetic relatives? We humans are primates, yet as John Tuxill's article shows, the reason most primates other than we are in decline just as reptiles are, is that we are killing them. Isn't that something people can relate to?

I hope so, but I'm not quite sure. It's no coincidence that - as Tuxill observes - the decline in primates has coincided with the explosion in human population. In biological terms, we're outcompeting our relatives; and as those who are hostile or indifferent to nature are prone to say, that's just the way evolution works. Competition, today, is almost a first principle of the dominant culture. When we were kids, we were told by athletic coaches that competition "builds character," and as adults we're told that it builds a healthy economy. It's Darwin brought to the service of business. Not only are the intrinsic values of primates (not to mention their ecological roles) overlooked, but their genetic connection with us is disregarded.

What's most significant, perhaps, is that this reveling in conquest (or unthinking acceptance of it, at least) does not seem to stop at the borders separating our species from others. Within human society, too, competition is eroding diversity. Just as non-human primates are dying off, many non-dominant human cultures are dying off. Of the world's 6,000 distinct human cultures, some 3,000 are believed to be headed for extinction. Many of the remaining 3,000 are being weakened by the homogenizing influences of global media and commerce. Some analysts worry that we are moving too rapidly toward a world in which there will be only a few, highly dominant, cultures - or even just one.

I don't question that competition has great importance in human evolution, or indeed that it is deeply ingrained in our behavior and motivation. I have an irrepressible urge to compete, and generally get it out of my system by running marathons. I can be in 1,719th place in a race, half a kilometer from the finish, and will run my heart out to beat the stranger just ahead of me, so I can be 1,718th. There's no logic to it, but there's great emotional force - just as there was in the forester who went berserk, or in the ranchers who shoot tortoises. Competition, like technology, is neither good nor bad in itself. It can make a business more productive or more ruthless; it can make a species more robust or more rampant. Competition, whether economic or ecologic, is too powerful to be loosed on the world with no guidance or restraint.

For a long time, the victims of unrestrained competition were easily forgotten or marginalized; it's the winners who feast on Thanksgiving Day and control the writing of history books. But now we see a change happening: when there's too much losing, even the winners become victims. If human population continues to grow while the biodiversity of the planet continues to shrink, there will come a point (or points) where we will begin to regret our dominance. And the same regret now faces us as we extinguish cultural diversity. Just as an accelerating depletion of the gene pool begins to break down the web of life, the homogenization of cultures breaks down the diversity of creativity, inventiveness, perception, and sensibility that make up our collective global heritage.

RELATED ARTICLE: CITINGS

The dinosaurs went extinct. And I don't miss them.

Ruben Ayala, a California state senator who uses this argument to explain his opposition to preserving endangered species for which he sees no use.

In a sense, the dinosaurs did not all go extinct. The group that included the dinosaurs, the "ruling reptiles," has living representatives.... Birds are direct descendants of dinosaurs. Indeed, some biologists think they should be considered living dinosaurs. People would surely have missed the birds had their progenitors disappeared without issue.... Much more important, insects - by many measures already the most important predators and competitors of Homo sapiens - probably would be even more abundant and successful. Indeed, it is conceivable that without the birds, life would have been sufficiently more rigorous for people in an insect-dominated world that the agricultural revolution, and thus the rise of civilization, would have been impossible.

Paul and Anne Ehrlich in Extinction: The Causes and Consequences of the Disappearance of Species