Outcompeting ourselves.

• Author: Ayres, Ed
• Position: Ecological and social repercussions of unbridled competition

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...