Abstract

Diary of a Mad Law Professor

John Robinson, vice president of the Wildlife Conservation Society, has been quoted as saying that people don't really worry about cockroaches or newts too much, but when one loses a large primate that's a culmination of lots of years of evolution and with which they share a lot of genes, the consequences to humans of that kind of loss-both practical and emotional are much greater. It scarcely needs stating that the ecological devastation of tropical forests is a matter of considerable practical import to the survival of all primates, but the author was intrigued by the suggestion that this represents an emotional loss as well. He does not propose holding up as models either his own childish anthropomorphizing or the relentlessly disengaged views of certain social Darwinists. But somewhere between the ideologies of primate-eat-primate, there is a symbolic realm where play various images of the world and of its inhabitants.