100 million dollars interrupting me with TV commercials and magazine ads and spam and coupons and shelving allowances and spiff all so I could ignore every single message.

By my college years, I was a devoted myrmecologist, a specialist on the biology of ants, but my attention and research continued to make journeys across the great variety of life on Earth in general including all that it means to us as a species, how little we understand it and how pressing a danger that our activities have created for it.