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captive breeding programs in zoos and biological research stations in several nations. Perhaps, one day, Partula can be reintroduced into Moorea. But Euglandina must be eliminated first, and no one knows how this can be done. Deep grafts, whether physical or emotional, are hard to extirpate—as Mary Martin discovered in her unsuccessful attempt to wash that man right out of her hair. Hope remains in Pandora’s box, but how do you reenclose the bad guys?
    Moorea may be the Bali Ha’i of our dreams, but life for Partula has become an unenchanted evening. Now night has fallen.
    The story would be sad enough if only Moorea (and Bermuda) had fallen victim. But Euglandina is spreading just as rapidly on the larger, adjacent Tahiti, and Partula now survives in only two valleys. The even more diverse Achatinella is gone (or nearly so) on Oahu, largely for the same reason, although the spread of Honolulu hasn’t helped either. More than half the species of bulimulids are extinct on the Galápagos.
    It is so hard for an evolutionary biologist to write about extinctions caused by human stupidity. Emotions well up and extinguish rationality and writing. What can be said that hasn’t been stated before—with great eloquence and little effect. Even the good arguments have become clichés—as corny as Kansas in August, as normal as blueberry pie.
    Let me then float an unconventional plea, the inverse of the usual argument. Inverses often have a salutary effect in reopening pathways of thought. An undergraduate friend during my year in England, a brilliant debater, had to argue the affirmative in that tired old cliché of a subject: “This house believes that the monarchy should be eliminated.” Instead of trotting out the usual points about the queen’s expense account and the negative symbol of royalty in a democratic age, my friend claimed that the monarchy should be eliminated because it is unfair to monarchs and their families. All possibility of a normal private life evaporates. You can’t have a date, drink a beer, or, God forbid, even belch in public without a headline in next day’s scandal sheet.
    The extinction of Partula is unfair to Partula . This is the conventional argument, and I do not challenge its primacy. But we need a humanistic ecology as well, both for the practical reason that people will always touch people more than snails do or can, and for the moral reason that humans are legitimately the measure of all ethical questions—for these are our issues, not nature’s.
    So I say, let us grieve for Henry Edward Crampton when we consider Partula on Moorea—for Euglandina and human stupidity have destroyed his lifetime’s dedication. Crampton visited the Pacific a dozen times, when transportation was no aerial picnic. He tramped up and down the valleys, over the dangerous precipices, in intense tropical heat. He spent months and months measuring snails and toting up columns of figures sans computer—the worst sort of scientific drudgery. He published three great monographs on Partula .
    The work is of great and permanent value in itself. But Crampton did not write for personal glory or to establish the frozen evolutionary moment of his own studies. He labored all his life to provide a baseline for future evolutionary work. Partula was a natural evolutionary laboratory, and he toiled to establish a starting point, with utmost care and precision, so that others could move the work forward and continue to learn about evolution by tracing the future history of Partula . What is more noble than a man’s intellectual dedication—a lifetime of perseverance through the Scylla and Charybdis of all field biology: occasional danger and prolonged tedium? Crampton’s work is now undone, even mocked. Grieve for his lost and lofty purposes.
    Yet I also appreciate that we cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well—for we will not fight