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This question of ecological certainty, patriotism, or the egotistical aggrandizement connoted by the manufacture of images involves conundrums of psychology, of speculative realism, panoramic endemism, picturesque escapism, those postcards and billboards, the rational and irrational, potential and actual, underlying principles of identity, integrity, and place. Ultimately, the landscapes of mind, those myriad, wistful losses of physical identity into the greater miasma of an aesthetic swamp that is the photograph, leave us ecologically stymied. There could be no stranger paradox than that of a landscape photograph. Judgments are not part of the aesthetic questions.

For nearly a decade as court painter to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612), Belgian-born, Netherlandish painter Roelant Savery (1576–1639) produced an astonishing body of work at Rudolf’s limitless castle in Prague, particularly focused upon paradise images and an unprecedented array of life-like animal portraitures, including several of the Dodo, arguably painted from life. The relationship between Rudolf and Savery, and that of the Dodo and its eventual iconic extinction, poses an insoluble mystery, ever tragic, and almost formulaic with respect to humanity’s paradoxical relationship with birds, and Nature in general.

Miguel de Cervantes alone suggests that the creative imagination is humanity’s response to its own annihilatory impulses. That is not to say that creativity does not exist in every living organism. It does. But the degree to which Don Quixote himself must “dream the impossible dream” is evidence enough to render a formal commentary. Our motives are mixed, as Shakespeare most probingly delved. But it can easily be argued that our compulsion to rectify and ameliorate; to save and be saved; and to restrain, exert tenderness, speak of compassion, formulate town halls, vote, assist, and engage in all those actions of kindness with which our myriad prophets and saints have been absorbed dates most recently to the quixotic in human nature.

The Anthropocene has caught up the history of philosophy in the worst paradox of all: ecocide purporting to seek ethical balance between fundamental logic, common sense, classical pillars of reason, and the search for some ideal that exists only in the languages of art, science, and mathematics, but not in life herself. Our consciousness is not unaware of this inherent contradiction. If all other tools have failed us in one exercise after another to rectify the clarity of our crisis, what is left? Clearly the path to activism heralds an unblemished pathway.

Ultimately, to transcend the double-bind which, inherently, recognizes the philosophy of bioinvasives—whether a virus, a feral cat, a flea, or a human being moving from continent to continent—we are condemned to the paradoxical embrace of some version(s) of biological chaos in the name of community, renascence, and re-evolution. Is this a betrayal of evolution? Our second-guessing of natural selection involves more than chance and wagers, and, rather, goes to the core of our species’ singular edifice of millennia-long manipulations.

The worlds and community interactions of all other species, including eusocial insects, appear to rally free of the stultifying commands and controls that have worked against our re-uniting in some manner with them, for reasons we have no clue. This is particularly the case with respect to an absolute freedom to exist everywhere outside human consciousness; to engage the world at a level of reciprocity between species—the very reality of which has given rise in our minds to the natural sciences, to the perception, and accompanying theories, of interdependence, the most crucial element in the worlds of both Mahavira and Buddha, that source of true reciprocity potential among humans and other species.

Every creation (Being) harbors an unwavering proliferation of microcosms (e.g., bacteria, follicle mites, tens of trillions of cells) whose interactions—which are translatable at some distant levels of ornate mathematical aphorism—are most relevant to deep biology, something entirely different than deep learning, as it is commonly applied to algorithms, machine intelligence, and neural networks. Deep biology preserves in consciousness the readiness, willingness, and reciprocity potentials of the conscience. It extends from nerve endings, and all those trillions of individuals within us, to the external world of mice and spiders and whales. To companion animals and woodpeckers.

This chapter examines diverse and troubling landscapes (sacred and profane) which invoke an ambient mosaic of contradictions. As our species struggles to redeem ourselves in favor of all those kindred spirits everywhere in the world, we must re-invent an enchanted and pragmatic ethic that generously confers sovereignty to all those Others and their habitat—a lasting tenure of coherence, that will rise to the occasion of down-to-earth, non-violent policies for everyone. This human geography and geopolitical challenge is elucidated in places like the sacred cliff monastery of Taktsang, in the Paro Valley of Bhutan, at Mount Everest, and elsewhere.

There are precious pictures of Nikos Kazantzakis and Albert Schweitzer enjoying a forest picnic together somewhere in Europe, long ago. Both men seem to be grinning. They know something. Neither the author of Zorba the Greek nor the Doctor who spent much of his life in West Africa helping people and other animals was a nihilist, not at all. They believed in the ability of our species to act with compassion, intellect, and heart. Schweitzer was convinced that Homo sapiens had what it takes to make things right. Kazantzakis, for his part, at least by some interpretations, seems to have been unsure. But he was intent upon the very optimism that is life itself. Kazantzakis’ unprecedented literary oeuvre, schooled by one of the most remarkable biological hotspots within a hotspot, Crete, is—in every sentence and impulse—a paean to ecological integrity and endurance; and to the human spirit which figures in that great Cosmic drama of earth.

Divisive evolutionary forensics, including great riddles of taxonomy and phylogenetics, may not simply be a complication of consciousness: a flaw in the mathematical space harboring, somewhere, the conscience, even as the picture postcards would all deny the mayhem of survival and extinction, in favor of the Mona Lisa’s smile. Somehow unmiraculously, we perpetually fail to favor one constant over the other. While bad news punctuates headlines, leaving the soft murmur of the peaceful largely unheralded, the tallies of destruction will never outweigh the totality of quiet footprints of all those who remained pacifist bystanders beside the fury.

Acknowledging that neither mathematics, cosmology nor personality equal personal destiny (no matter how eloquent Plutarch, Ovid, Shakespeare, and Saul Bellow were on the topic), the mere desire, even firmly fixed hope, to deflect catastrophe does not add up to tactic. Our life-strategies are not fixed in any biological code.

By 1811, Percy Shelley had begun to put his map of the human psyche together for himself in a way that would spell out a charged sequencing of humanity’s shortfalls, particularly as they triggered political injustice and animal abuse. By 1813, in his most famed and trenchant epic, “Queen Mab,” Shelley spelled out A Vindication of Natural Diet that would also be published separately, setting forth the moral, philosophical, and scientific rubrics for the animal rights revolution in the UK and elsewhere.

By whatever surrogate form of logic or unreason one approaches religions or spirituality, what is undeniable is the Christ Passion itself. Which, it must not be underestimated, has inspired much of the most enduring aesthetic articulations ever produced by our species. The fact of unfathomable suffering in this world has lent to us the heart through which to see, to hear, to touch, to feel, to affiliate with and protect so much beauty; and to reciprocally recognize the fragility and very sensory organs of biodiversity herself; of every sentient being; and the consequential role of humanity in either continuing to perpetrate the psychopathology and unbearable madness of the entire crucifixion, or halting it, once and for all.

Graphically, we look at one easily fathomed outcome of the Anthropocene: personal nihilism and its untoward and ineffective cul-de-sac, namely, suicide. Cornered, losing out to the far more powerful social norms, the conscience is indeed trapped, even as it clings to ideals it knows, from a rash of empirical data sets that could set things right. This is the psychoanalytic struggle to somehow break free of the logical corollaries of a worldly ecocide with oneself.

Our fanciful notions of destiny that have girded one doomed civilization after another form the full circumference of a uniformly irreligious distress. Within the orbit of those enduring anxieties, the natural disassembly of the body, external causes of injury and mortal wounds, there will always emerge some Symeon the Stylite (390–459) to cheer us up. The saint and his pantheon of prayers bolsters the great ash tree, the formidable ziggurat in every dream of Nature; the dialectic out of which God grows and plays fanatically with the credulous.

They are by far the most persecuted, tortured, and slaughtered terrestrial vertebrate on the planet. Humans, for the most part, despise chickens, eating them without the slightest pause. This may be the most historically documented facet of the madness and perversion of our species, who have singled out and killed nearly one trillion chickens in the past 40–50 years. What this says about chickens and their perdurable forgiveness is nothing less than transcendent, spiritual. What it must say about ourselves is something else entirely.

The calamities and stubbornness driving us toward biological negation is a problem in reality as much as one in mind. If we believe despair and annihilation to be inevitable—every sign suggests just that—then we cannot awaken ourselves in time to fix it. If citizen science, environmental law, and ecological ethics are taken up by so meager a percentage of our kind as to be statistically irrelevant, then that by itself speaks to our species’ elimination in the vaster scheme, which is running out of all patience with our illegitimate and petty species-claims to tenure. However, we are firm in our resolve that there remains a critical mass of goodwill, informed science, inspired activists, and the mechanisms for collaboration inherent to human common sense and proven generosity of spirit, which leave a wide margin for planetary amelioration.

The Lamb dominates the final book of the New Testament, “Revelation,” (apokalypsis), particularly the final chapters 14–22, wherein atop Mount Zion the Lamb, with 144,000 disciples, sings untranslatable praise for the creator, “a new song before the throne….” That throne is the world, but it is also locatable in Ghent, Belgium, where the van Eyck brothers’ all-enduring masterwork “Adoration of the Mystic Lamb” c. 1421–1431 belies the harshest of contradictory truths. A city, 600 years later, that celebrates the Lamb of God, but also, with the exception of Thursdays—when the city prides itself on trying to go largely vegetarian, like India’s city of Pushkar—thinks little of its slaughter.

From nation to nation, hamlet to megacity, our encultured codes of survival have changed little from our earliest documented desperations and visions. Throughout the history of science and human philosophy, we keep asking the same questions. Nor have our answers changed. Only the baseline, the very Weltanschauung, the world’s context, has been seismically altered in relation to the extent of pain in the world, and the unnatural cruelty meted out by our kind. What this clears the way for is a constellation of improved choices by our kind, just as Dante’s Inferno had its mirroring pinnacle in Paradise.

The variables of the underlying contradiction have been discussed for thousands of years, involving such fundaments as life and death, the soul and matter, senses and reason, change and permanence, being, becoming, yes, no, here, there, not and why not, etc. These contraries, antonyms, oppositional forces, knowns and unknowns are no less intriguing and mysterious than those same combinatorial effusions which highlight poetic function, form, beginnings and ends, throughout the biochemical world we think of as earth, which translates and transliterates every inkling of DNA, every cell, molecule, and atom.

Humanity’s colossal ecological crisis is an explicit function of our architectural and socially enforced spaces of occupancy, plots of arrogation, the places in which we choose to live, altering our surroundings, inventing and constructing “our” possessions. This is an entirely ephemeral habitation, obviously, which has only its ancestors, or futurist scenarios and pictorial cosmologies, to cling to, or benefit. Between the environmental impacts of a naked ascetic in India, and a Taj Mahal or Viennese Schonbrunn Palace, our predilections as a species have laid claim to the earth in ways that obviously and emphatically deviate with enormous percussion from the bionarratives of all other species.

The longing for an end to longing; for implosion whose self-destructive image can somehow manage the hat-trick, moving philosophically and painlessly from inaction to the iconic stamping out of the entire passion play that is human existence, with its order of magnitudes as concentrated as the instantaneity of an electrical current. In such remote contemplations, this is where metaphysics and natural history converge, pivoting upon the question of human worth among the animals. Of the whole sequence of events following upon the Garden of Eden and expulsion of its first two hominins.

The history of museums may be likened to the labyrinthine twists and turns of evolution itself. Accept that by the time we arrive at, say, Rome’s resplendent Galleria Doria Pamphilj, we cannot help but meditate upon the anomalies of the human presence as expressed within the multitudes of artistic artifacts of self-reference—objects of passing devotion (even in The Eternal City that is Rome) whose creators are no less impermanent than the paintings and relics of their devotion. Such ensembles of energy and inspiration are, themselves, exhibits to all that we strive to understand, overcome, even outlive—against biological odds impossible to calculate.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, Eli Whitney’s 1793 invention of the cotton gin had enabled Georgia to become the veritable fountainhead of the Industrial Revolution, monetary profits from which propounded the lure of European immigration to unprecedented levels—“6.2 million” in the decade of the 1850s. By the time the Civil War would devastate commercial cotton, Georgia boasted over 1000 plantations, over 1000 acres each, populated in large measure by slave laborers doing all the back-breaking work. Emancipation would decrease the size of family farms, but also provide for a liberated agriculture not surprisingly at odds with native biomes. From the vantage point of a river, somewhere in Georgia, this chapter encapsulates a brief history of ecological Georgia, a microcosm for all of North America.

Dialectic is crucial to ecological concerns—whether in the debate (linguistic, artistic, conceptual, and geopolitical) which seeks to communicate the substance of what life means to us; whether there is actually any significant difference between one species and another, given the through-story of life herself; questions concerning “wilderness” that have turned to a crossword puzzle of patchwork between sand-traps, pavement, megacities, toxic waste-dumps, and all the other largely inorganic congeries of human existence. Wilderness, like evolution is an idea, a word, that continues to elude us.

Many of van Goyen’s contemporaries churned out commissions of sitters in their Sunday best. Unthreatening vases adrift in flowering profusions, still lifes of dead ducks and hanging venison, entire villages buttoned up in woolies, communing happily on ice skates. Or paradise scenes from the antediluvian. Van Goyen went further, managing to make the menacing world of imposing towers over troubled waters, darkening skies, and the unstoppable threat of watery chasms inexplicably amenable, their brilliant light focusing upon the inner strength of character the Dutch were granted by their very landscapes.

We can search among the behavioral data for the earliest known primates, or ants, or sharks, or the lost trilobites, and speculate upon what constitutes lasting, biological success, and, simultaneously, plumb the earliest philosophical caveats in search of that which is most common to all ecological idealism. These primeval factors—in whatever specific or combinatorial effect—from a Darwinian perspective must inform the genotypes of choice leading us into the future. What proteins, genes, ideas, and wholistic organisms, modified through descent in time, have noticeably exerted the resilience to get organisms through evolutionary cul-de-sacs? Disease outbreaks? Genetic squeezes? Intense competition? Sporadic violence searching for stability? Such questions now have genetic markers along the way of their odysseys, and a fascinated intellectual era engrossed by probability statistics that intimate the end of the line, or not.

At his very best, John Crome, founder of the East Anglian Norwich School and Society of Artists (late eighteenth, early nineteenth centuries), bids us to follow him into the depths of the Dutch Golden Age of landscape aesthetics which so affected him, at a time when British history was providing plenty of perilous political distractions. Cultivating the pleasures of a rich biodiversity in his very neighborhoods of Norfolk County, the United Kingdom, and backyard, he reminds us today of the perennial powers of perception and tenderness that can both arouse and sustain in us a devoted ecological ethic, and mentor our cynicism with the generosity of a mystical earth.

With reference to Animal Rights and Protection in the context of OIE standards, the Buddhist perspective of compassion and respect for sentient beings including the animals is assessed in Bhutan in the light of socioeconomic development and changes. Assessment and discussion also include some of the challenges associated with modern agriculture and livestock farming practices, adverse impact on climate change, and human health issues being some of the significant associated problems associated with farming systems. Within the overall context of animal welfare standards for animal rights and protection, this study provides recommendations of Buddhist practices, animal welfare policies, and interventions that provide protection to animal safety and population control to prevent suffering. Most importantly, this study recommends GNH Index for animals that would require extensive research on various themes and domains related with many indicators – including the indicators of Buddhist practices and modern animal welfare standards.

Conservation strategy for food security using the plant genetic resources and that of the most highly under-represented species in Bhutan: the microbes could be effective in safeguarding the food security, and the microbial ecosystem functions and biotechnological applications in the face of climate change. As the diversity of plant genetic resources decreases with the changes in farming pattern and climatic conditions, it is of paramount importance that we ensure the preservation of these crop genetic resources in a safe location under permafrost condition and complement it with the conservation of microbes (highly under-represented in Bhutanese taxonomic studies) for soil fertility and other biotechnological applications. Discussion on the tremendous importance of such conservation initiatives should take a center stage in the face of climate change and environmental degradation and decline in biological diversity.

While the culture of Egypt’s New Kingdom—sixteenth–eleventh century BCE—reveals a profound interest in birdlife, most evident in the Papyrus of Ani, also known as the Book of the Dead, it is clear that toxic ambiguities infiltrated that human–bird relationship, confusing flight to paradise, life after death, with ecological martyrdom meted out to a multitude of living avifauna. This syndrome can be said to have continued until this very day, with no sure end in sight.

Consciousness is subject to every conceivable verb and adjective. It binds, it combines. It exposes objects and qualities, while seeming to integrate information with a neural contagion of prospects that differs from individual to individual, species to species. Fundamentally, consciousness remains an unknown aspect of Nature, notwithstanding the appearance of our apperceptive awareness, of consciousness of consciousness. With no clear remedy in sight, one possible way to come to terms with the unknowable is to work our way backwards from the apparent results of human consciousness, the eco-dynamic fallout of human interaction with its surroundings, the consequences of those interactions in the tangible world.

Alberto Giacometti was in exile from the Nazis in Switzerland and already moving toward that attenuated vision that would see him create the set design, in 1953, for his friend Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”—a lone, tortured tree of raw plaster. The synthetic biology of being alone was sculpturally writ as a looming reminder that the history, stature, and attitude of the philosopher in each of us come down to a troubled thinker. By necessity, our solutions must arise in steps, every day, by fronting, and believing in that definitive bias in favor of positive change.

Contrary to our nightmares and authoritative histories to bear them out, we might yet scatter as individuals across a tortured cartography; a land of vagueness and demolished Utopias, from privileged bubble to bubble, the last remaining members of our tribes, and therein rekindle a universal freedom that involves both hominin and homily; donkeys and a sputtering candle of the divine.

What meaning have we contrived that should give us to actually believe some natural selection works on our ideas or elevates instinct in the manner of apotheosis? It is no reach to compare our social antics to a global shuffleboard of sub-atomic particles randomly skittering upon glazed, non-reflective surfaces. Distractions of life and death, and of a host of other categories, we cannot fully reconcile. While a philosophy consumed by the forbidden cities, entrances, and exits of no-meaning has little appeal to a species that squirms restlessly, there is also no good reason to discount the essence of all probability. That equation is an equal sign in whatever contest of delusions, out of which we might wonder whether something does not come of nothing. Evolution that actually gives us the range of possibilities to make something more of it than it would, otherwise, make of us.

With well over 390,000 plants species remaining on earth, most of them flowering, it is little wonder that human history is utterly enraptured by, and dependent upon, plant biomass, and the sheer aesthetic wonderment of a flower, from ancient Thebes to modern-day Amsterdam. In the case of the Dutch Republic, those well-versed denizens were equally assured of new botanical frontiers to all sides, geographically. And often, as was so much the case in the Netherlands, the enthusiasm fueling human relationships with flowers and their spiritual as well as economic values might morph into a speculative frenzy over the market worth of certain tulip bulbs, valued at far more than their weight in gold.

Considering both organic and inorganic population sizes, we touch upon the language and constructs of freedom. And because what is unthinkable—a true, elusive, existential freedom—is also unacceptable, other than, perhaps, in death, a logic with no conscription, or general accord, then what is biologically left? A new plurality of human natures and human taxa in general wherein diverse personal redemptions might serve as ecological proxies, to whatever extent, in the ethical reengineering of human population attitudes motivated by a willingness to act rationally, moving forward.

Ethics in the human context does not easily admit to innocence and is naturally frustrated by the physics of incrementality. Rather, it literally gravitates toward strategy. Evolution is instructive in this matter. Our dispositions are ecological to the core, no matter what we say or do. They function according to the logic of honeycombs, the language of the dance, a proboscis and energy balance, the discrimination of odors, and the so-called “constancy” in flowering plants.

Plato did not invent the cave but the other way “round.” This shadow-play of reciprocities easily refuses genetic distinctions. Evolution slowly reforms barriers to distribution. Mutation might tease forth a new concept now and then, testing the waters, but human time, even hominid time, is a temporality with little possibility of transcending the improbable, invoking instead a steady meditation upon the sad course of misanthropy.

From our limited and largely preemptive perspectives, we cannot attest to any span of truth. The distance between whole and partially whole truths is further widened by the duration before, during, and after the object of perception, and the event upon which it is expatiated in our contemplations and computations. With this in mind, we examine a problem whereby paradox itself propels an endless set of self-referential scientific paradoxes.

Rather than untangling this multidimensionality, one Other is more apt to revel in the heterophenomenology of yet Another, and another still… until the endless continued fraction (such as π) instills the loyalty whose common denominator is that ethos which precedes our concepts of biodiversity. We have never found the word nor managed to enunciate her underlying reality, though she is everywhere; hovering in our hydrogen selves, governing all eco-dynamics, seamlessly hybridizing individuals and populations, no matter the species or time frame. Her alterity is our identity and the similitudes between us redefine the entire scope of ecological potential.

What distinguishes the tradition of Shussan Shaka, the personalities in whom the re-emergence or obtaining of wisdom occurs, is the unambiguous attempt to solve a significant problem. It refers, ultimately, to a nuts-and-bolts philosophy of compassion. A connection from the ascetic wilds—characterized in every version of the wilderness and the endless landscape affiliations, biosemioses, histories of the idea of nature—to the autobiographical awakening that can be discerned in every great and legendary personality, whether Buddha or Christ. At that juncture the Self becomes painfully aware of something greater than him/herself, and in that perception may go on by turns to understand the challenge of liberation; the infinite individuals and souls whose lives truly are at stake.

The combining of that château gene with the reality of humanity’s history of harvests, exiles, sordid feudal entitlements, existential esthetics, and of aimlessly, hopelessly looking beyond, also recognized a great demarcation of a truth. It is sociological but also fixed within that great chasm between stinging hornets (their venomous acetylcholine), fetid water, versus the sleepy-time canopied bed of lace and glossy golden satin. From Leonardo da Vinci at his final resting place of Château de Cloux, adjoining the Château of his friend and benefactor, King Francis I, to William Wordsworth scripting his famed lines at Tintern Abbey, the romance and indefinable melancholy of a fortressed inner nature lends a nearly stifling poetic to the looming reality of ephemeral lives, and the inevitable dissipation of a dream that is human life, all of life.

In apprising futurist scenarios, particularly those that see the expunging of our kind from a biological through-story, it is crucially worthwhile pausing to reflect on the miracles around us, in this time, this place. All the better by which to gauge the remaining prospects, the biodiversity that persists, the generosity of evolution, and possibilities, as yet, of deliberated natural selection pivoting upon critical, life-affirming decisions in human nature. This chapter considers the early work of futurist/paleontologist Dougal Dixon and the life of Anna’s hummingbirds.

Between the real person and its obverse fiction, the biological mass of such ideas pertaining to actual events, or unrealized chimera consisting of ideals and extrapolations, exists a theoretical contiguity of unknown properties, dimensions, and opportunities, all of which argue for epiphanies; categories of obscurity, vagueness, and emptiness, at the heart and origins of reconciling paradox and engendering some semblance of hope for the future. This chapter reviews some of the ecological, art historical, literary, psychological, and mathematical corollaries of obscurity as a realm of ideals that are critical to human, evolutionary transitions.

Not unlike an ecological New Zealand, Japan, particularly its Medieval capital, Kyoto, exemplifies yet another guise of human violence and the peace that can arise when politics, ego, greed, anger, and competition succumb to the inherent fertility of the land. In the gardens at Ryoan-ji and Ginkaku-ji, a landscape architect and a Shogun give enduring evidence of the human heart cultivating its most successful legacies.

The paradise that is New Zealand is an ambiguous one, at best. Known by conservationists as the “capital of extinctions,” the country’s ecological legacies are beset and benighted by contrary strategies and tactics for perceiving and dispatching of non-natives (save for humans themselves and the other mammals brought by humans to be slaughtered and/or exported for slaughter). This paradox of the “clean, green” epicenter of the world continues to favor mindsets and entire industries devoted to killing bio-invasives (which number at least one-third of all New Zealand native species). And despite a rich esthetic history—probably more pastoral poets and landscape painters per square kilometer than any other country—ecological riot runs rampant, challenging any universal ethic with preferred ecological imperatives unique to island nations, like New Zealand.

The state of environment of this book is a prelude to the ensuing chapters that provide a comprehensive assessment of the conservation priorities for Bhutan. It provides a review of the country’s geopolitical setting, agro-ecological zones, and land use patterns that influences the biological diversity and conservation efforts. Bhutan’s GNH policy that closely embraces environmental conservation as one of the main building blocks of achieving happiness and sustainable future – through extensive forest cover, protective area network and biological corridor, and empowerment of communities with forest management systems – is the key to Bhutan’s national development policy and strategies. The fundamental principles of other national policies including environmental policies and conservation success emanate from the GNH philosophy and deep-rooted Buddhist perspectives.

The problems involved in computational ecology, such as in the case of “plankton patchiness” and the breakdown in “conceptual modeling,” only hamper our facility for grasping the dilemma confronting humankind. The numbers, in so defying easy reach or a layman’s translation, compel that same aforementioned dissimulation, whereby horrors and bliss tend to travel together, leveling out somewhere mid-center, in the blandest climes of geography and contemplation. This is precisely where the litany of ecological disasters becomes the normal context for all remaining life forms.

In an era teeming with environmental reversals, animals and habitat in torment, how do we go about seizing upon imperatives, when everything we sense and do represent a pantheistic catastrophe, an amalgam of urgencies at the heart of any moral conception? The task before us is dizzying. But in this chapter we make clear that, notwithstanding enormous gulfs between animal rights and conservation biology, particularly with respect to the perception and treatment of bio-invasives, there are causes that everyone can rally behind, without exception. Universally, these are individuals, species, and populations whose right to exist obviously far predates our own. And this hierarchy of rights translates into privilege, duty, and other conundrums of human consciousness that we just have to deal with. We explore numerous points on the global map where both animal rights and conservation success stories continue to emerge.