Yet we are special. Of all the species that have lived, only we have the power to destroy ourselves and the planet that sustains us. Roy Chapman Andrews understood this. In Meet Your Ancestors, he wrote: Like a meteor flashing across the sky [humankind] has risen to control the inanimate world, but . . . may burn out as rapidly as the same shooting star, leaving behind only the dead records of [its] once glorious past.

("Following the Trail of Roy Chapman Andrews," p. 61)