At the end of the last Ice Age around 10,000 years ago, the pace of our rise quickened. We occupied the Americas, coincident with a mass extinction of big mammals that we may have caused. Agriculture emerged soon thereafter. Some thousands of years later, the first written texts start to document the pace of our technical inventiveness. They also show that we were already addicted to drugs, and that genocide had become routine and admired. Habitat destruction began undermining many societies, and the first Polynesian and Malagasy settlers caused blitzkrieg-like mass exterminations of species. From 1492 AD onwards, the worldwide expansion of literate Europeans lets us trace our rise and fall in detail.

Within the last few decades we have developed the means to send radio signals to other stars, and also to blow ourselves up overnight. Even if we do not blunder into that swift end, our harnessing of much of the Earth's productivity, our exterminations of species, and our damage to our environment are accelerating at a rate that cannot be sustained for even another century. One might object that, if we look around us, we see no obvious sign that the climax of our history will come soon. In fact, the signs become obvious if one observes and then extrapolates. Starvation, pollution, and destructive technology are increasing; usable farmland, °od stocks in the sea, other natural products, and environmental apacity to absorb wastes are decreasing. As more people with more Power scramble for fewer resources, something has to give way.

So, what is likely to happen?

There are many grounds for pessimism. Even if every human now alive were to die tomorrow, the damage that we have already inflicted on our environment would ensure that its degradation will continue for decades. Innumerable species already belong to the 'living dead', with populations fallen to levels from which they cannot recover, even though not all individuals have died yet. Despite all our past self-destructive behaviour from which we could have learned, many people who should know bette.r dispute the need for limiting our population and continue to assault our environment. Others join that assault for selfish profit or out of ignorance. Even more people are too caught up in the desperate struggle for survival to be able to enjoy the luxury of weighing the consequences of their actions. All these facts suggest that the juggernaut of destruction has already reached unstoppable momentum, that we too are among the living dead, and that our future is as bleak as that of the other two chimpanzees.

This pessimistic view is captured by a cynical sentence that Arthur Wichmann, a Dutch explorer and professor, penned in another context in 1912. Wichmann had devoted a decade of his life to writing a monumental three-volume treatise on the history of New Guinea's exploration. In 1,198 pages he evaluated every source of information about New Guinea that he could find, from the earliest reports filtering through Indonesia to the great expeditions of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries. He grew disillusioned as he realized that successive explorers committed the same stupidities again and again: they showed the same unwarranted pride in overstated accomplishments, refused to acknowledge disastrous oversights, ignored the experience of previous explorers, repeated previous errors, and hence blundered into unnecessary suffering and death. Looking back on this long history, Wichmann predicted that future explorers would continue to repeat the same errors. The bitter last sentence that concluded Wichmann's last volume was, 'Nothing learned, and everything forgotten!

Despite' all the grounds I have mentioned for being equally cynical about humanity's future, my view is that our situation is not hopeless. We are the only ones creating our problems, so it is completely within our power to solve them. While our language and art and agriculture are not quite unique, we really are unique among animals in our capacity to learn from the experience of others of our species living in distant places or in the distant past. Among the hopeful signs, there are many realistic, often discussed policies by which we could avoid disaster, such as limiting human population growth, preserving natural habitats, and adopting other environmental safeguards. Many governments are already doing some of these obvious things in some cases.

For example, awareness of environmental problems is spreading, and environmental movements are gaining political clout. Developers do not win all the battles, nor do short-sighted economic arguments always prevail. Many countries have lowered their rate of population growth in recent decades. While genocide has not vanished, the spread of communications technology has at least the potential for reducing our traditional xenophobia, and for making it harder to regard distant peoples as subhumans unlike ourselves. I was seven years old when the A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so I remember well the sense of an imminent risk of nuclear holocaust that prevailed for several decades thereafter. But nearly half a century has now passed without any further military use of nuclear weapons. The risk of a nuclear holocaust now seems more remote than at any other time since 9 August 1945.

My own outlook is conditioned by my experiences since 1979 as consultant to the Indonesian government on setting up a nature reserve system in Indonesian New Guinea (called Irian Jaya province). On the face of it, Indonesia does not seem a promising place to hope for much success in preserving our shrinking natural habitats. Instead, Indonesia exemplifies the problems of tropical Third World countries in acute form. With over 180 million inhabitants, it is the world's fifth most populous country, as well as one of the poorer ones. The population is growing rapidly; nearly half of all Indonesians are under fifteen years old. Some provinces with an inordinately high population density are exporting their population surpluses to the less populated provinces (such as Irian Jaya). There are no armies of bird-watchers, no broad-based indigenous environmental movements. The government is not a democracy in the Western sense, and corruption is viewed as pervasive. Indonesia depends on logging of its virgin rainforests, second only to exploitation of oil and natural gas, as a source of its foreign exchange.

For all these reasons, one might not expect preservation of species and habitats to be a national priority pursued seriously in Indonesia. When I first went to Irian Jaya, I was frankly doubtful that an effective conservation programme would result. Fortunately, my Wichmann-like cynicism proved wrong. Thanks to the leadership of a core of Indonesians convinced of the value of conservation, Irian Jaya now has the beginnings of a nature reserve system comprising twenty per cent of the province's area. Nor do those reserves exist just on paper. As my work proceeded, I was pleasantly surprised to come across sawmills abandoned because they conflicted with nature reserves, park guards out on patrol, and management plans being drawn up. All these measures were adopted not out of idealism, but out of a cold-blooded, correct Perception of Indonesia's national self-interest. If Indonesia can do it, so can other countries with similar obstacles to environmentalism, as well as much richer countries with broad-based environmental movements.

We do not need novel, still-to-be invented technologies to solve our problems. We just need more governments to do many more of the same obvious things that some governments are already doing in some cases. Nor is it true that the average citizen is powerless. There are many causes of extinction that citizen groups have helped throttle in recent years—for instance, commercial whaling, hunting big cats for fur coats, and importing chimpanzees caught in the wild, to mention just a few examples. In fact, this is one area where it is particularly easy for a modest donation by the average citizen to have a big impact, because all conservation organizations now have such modest budgets. For instance, the annual combined budget for all primate conservation projects that the i World Wild Fund for Nature supports throughout the world is only a few hundred thousand dollars. An extra thousand dollars means an extra project on some endangered monkey, ape, or lemur that might otherwise have been ignored. On pages 352-41 suggest some specific starting points i for interested readers.