A World-class Pathogen

Conservation--the attempt by some to slow the rate of world-death, or at least slow the rate of increase of the rate. 

Homo sapiens--as a world-class pathogen, we can now congratulate ourselves on at last having metastasized. In our formative millenia we remained relatively rare and relatively harmless, just one among untold millions of minor parasites on the clean skin of Ma Earth. Then quite suddenly one local strain of H. sapiens became virulent, and with lightning speed, over the space of a few short centuries, spread itself throughout the whole world, injecting its virus of lethality into all other strains, disrupting all the countless local accommodations that had been worked out over millenia between parasite and hosts, finally causing a sudden explosion in parasite-load everywhere throughout the world and all at the same time, turning the glowing unblemished skin of Ma Earth into a pocked and scabious, suppurating sore. 

In California there was room for a multitude of paradises. Now there is room for way fewer.