Because my concept of democracy as the right to...

“Because my concept of democracy as the right to live widens beyond Homo sapiens, and because I knew a young orangutan when I was young, the death of his whole life-form will seem such a particularly genocidal tragedy to me — like that of chimps, the great whales, elephants, and other megafauna I’ve been privileged to encounter on occasion — that I want my personal extinction to precede theirs. It will anyway, but I don’t want to live in a world drained of elephants and sharks and whales, where my grief over how we’ve treated captive apes is dwarfed when the last wild carcasses are concealed under the loads on log trucks to be cooked as bushmeat in Kinshasa’s slums. Better to be already simmering in the soil myself.”