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Terry Glavin is a renowned writer and conservationist. His book The Last Great Sea: A Voyage Through the Human and Natural History of the North Pacific Ocean won the Hubert Evans Prize, and This Ragged Place: Travels Across the Landscape was a Governor General's Award finalist. A frequent contributor to newspapers and magazines, Glavin is the recipient of numerous regional and national journalism awards. He is currently an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia's fine arts department, and he serves as an adviser to the Sierra Club of Canada's B.C. chapter. He lives on Mayne Island, in B.C.'s southern Gulf Islands.

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A tiger
Night of the Living Dead

I was greatly disturbed at the apparition. I walked to the left along the slope, turning my head about and peering this way and that among the straight stems of the trees. Why should a man go on all-fours and drink with his lips? Presently I heard an animal wailing again, and taking it to be the puma, I turned about and walked in a direction diametrically opposite to the sound.
—H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau

The tiger lay in a clearing in the twilight, on the other side of a trickling stream, perhaps ten metres from where I stood. The cries of nightjars drifted through the trees and mingled with the thrumming of frogs and the chirping of crickets in the muggy jungle air. It was long past sunset. I'd just strolled a half-kilometre down a jungle path and across a swaying footbridge over a ravine. Then I saw it. The man-eater of English schoolboy nightmares, the great Terror of Batavia.

The tiger turned its head abruptly and glared at me. Suddenly, the crickets fell silent, and the stream with its little waterfall fell silent, and it was suddenly empty of water. Maybe somebody, somewhere, had thrown a switch by mistake. Whatever had happened, a light briefly flickered, illuminating the enclosure where I stood. I noticed a plaque—Malayan Tiger Viewing Shelter, Adopted by Chemical Industries (Far East Ltd.). There was thick plate glass separating the tiger from the outside world. There was a sign that read, Please Don't Knock, and another that pleaded, No Flash Photography, Please.

As the light flickered on and off, my view of the tiger was obscured within the image of my own face on the glass wall. At that instant, the question posed by the Romantic poet William Blake—Tyger! Tyger! burning bright / In the forests of the night, / What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?—seemed to have found something of an answer in the way the innovative modern poet E.E. Cummings described the experience of seeing such animals in captivity: It's not animals that we see. Instead, it is "a concatenation of differently functioning and variously labelled mirrors, all of which are alive.… No mere spectacle of monsters, however extraordinary, could so move us. The truth is not that we see monsters, but that we are monsters."

In the fearful symmetry of Singapore's Night Safari, an auxiliary function of the Singapore Zoological Gardens, there are no cages. There are 68 lush jungle hectares, surrounded by the calm waters of the Seletar Reservoir, and the most imaginative and elaborately cunning landscape architecture is put to the work of maintaining all the illusions necessary to the suspension of disbelief. The night air is fragrant with orange blossoms and pigeon orchids. A Gir lion prowls among gaharu trees. There are banded palm civets, giant ant-eaters and babirusas—the "deer pigs" of Sulawesi's rainforest, and lesser mouse deer—the smallest of all hoofed creatures. Among the staghorn ferns and meranti trees are rare sloth bears and Malayan tapirs, those odd little things that are distantly related to both horses and rhinos and have the same colour markings as pandas.

The place is like a seventeenth-century Wunderkammer of the rare, the peculiar, and the vanishing, built on a massive scale. There is even an electric tram that you can take for an excursion through it all. It takes about 45 minutes.

A few kilometres away, at Singapore's famous Jurong Bird Park, you can take a monorail that will deliver you at such outlandish simulated-reality settings as the world's biggest artificial waterfall. It tumbles down the face of a 33-metre cliff at the rate of 8300 litres of water per minute, becomes a stream meandering through the world's largest "walk-in" aviary, and then gets pumped back up to the top, where it starts all over again. There are black-capped lories from New Guinea, African red-throated bee-eaters, hyacinth macaws from Brazil, Bali mynahs, Humboldt penguins, and 500 parrots from more than 100 species, almost one-third of all the parrot species on earth. Jurong houses the world's largest collection of hornbills and toucans, including the southern pied hornbill, the black hornbill, and the Great Indian hornbill.

You can wander through a series of micro-habitats taken from African savannahs, semi-deserts, and rainforests. More than 10,000 specimens of plants from 125 species create these illusions, aided wherever necessary by murals. You can walk across a swaying suspension bridge through an artificial jungle while more than 1000 Australian lories flutter around you. There are ostriches, rheas, emus, and cassowaries. The naturalistic settings and stage-light manipulations even manage to fool the birds. In the World of Darkness birdhouse, the lighting system tricks the night herons and the snowy owls and other nocturnal birds into thinking day is night and night is day. You can visit during the daytime and stroll down what looks and feels just like a starlit jungle trail. A giant mango tree grows up out of the middle of everything, and you have to read the plaque at the base of it to know that it is really just a replica of an "actual tree" in Selangor, West Malaysia.

The designers and animateurs of the Night Safari and the Jurong Bird Park have succeeded in creating a spectacularly weird simulacrum of the real world. But certain things are not so easily concealed by all those ingenious sightline considerations, psychological barriers, hidden moats, floral assemblages, and ecologically correct reproductions of landscape. There is captivity, and there is freedom. There is also what we want to believe about nature and about ourselves in that great "concatenation of differently functioning and variously labelled mirrors."

Over the course of the twentieth century, the world's tiger population fell from roughly 100,000 to about 7000. The Malayan tiger lying in the clearing in the Night Safari is a member of a species reduced to perhaps a few hundred animals, cowering in the ruins of their ancient haunts on the Malay Peninsula. The last Caspian tiger was shot in Turkey in 1970. The last Javan tiger was spotted during the 1970s in Java's Meru Betiri National Park. The last sighting of a Bali tiger, and it was a questionable sighting, was in 1976.

Most of the world's remaining tigers are Bengal tigers that survive precariously within the shallow recesses of India's national parks and wildlife reserves. A few hundred Amur tigers remain, but most of them are in zoos. There are still several hundred Indo-Chinese tigers, and perhaps 400 Sumatran tigers, but the South Chinese tiger, widely believed to be the ancestor of all tigers, has been reduced to fewer than 50 known animals, all of them in zoos. The South Chinese tiger numbered about 5000 as recently as the 1950s, before the Chinese government embarked on a pest-eradication program. The last time one was seen in the wild was in 1979. It was killed.

The 1990s began with only 14,000 Sumatran orangutans in the world; the decade ended with about 7000. In 2004, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) reported that the population had been halved again. This left the species officially listed as critically endangered, with populations expected to keep dropping as a consequence of forest clear-cutting and hunting. At the Singapore Zoo, you can pay to have tea with a Sumatran orangutan, all by yourself, for the equivalent of $95 U.S.

If you come to the zoo in the afternoon, you can watch pygmy hippos from behind the glass of an underwater viewing station. They loll and splash around in what for all the world appears to be a deep marsh somewhere in Sierra Leone, but nobody can say whether any pygmy hippos remain in Sierra Leone. There are only about 7000 left in all of West Africa, and most of them are confined to Liberia's Sapo National Forest, but their numbers are declining rapidly. Logging companies are turning their swamp forests into wastelands, and the hippos are being killed for food and by trophy hunters who want their teeth. With the collapse of order in that part of the world, the civil wars and insurrections, the hippos' prospects aren't good. A related group of pygmy hippos was once common in Nigeria; in 1969 they were found to be a distinct subspecies, but there have been no confirmed sightings since then.

Another resident of the Singapore Zoo is the douc langur, an extravagantly coloured little monkey that suffered enormously during the American defoliant-bombing of Vietnam. Douc langurs are found only in Vietnam and neighbouring Laos. They are being hunted for food, for the pet trade, and for the folk-medicine market. Their forests are falling to chainsaws. Another zoo inmate is the endangered and increasingly rare ruffed lemur from Madagascar. Known in its home range by a name that translates as "night-wandering ghost," the ruffed lemur is one of the world's most unobtrusive primates, quietly going about its nocturnal rounds, barking only to warn its comrades of danger. It is a key pollinator for several plant species because it has an inordinate desire for nectar, and tends to go from flower to flower, its nose covered in pollen. There are proboscis monkeys at the zoo, too. They're the weird-looking, big-nosed monkeys from Borneo. Their numbers are dropping sharply because of the spread of timber operations and the rise of oil-palm plantations. The lion that strolls among the gaharu trees is from a vanishing population: only 200 of those regal creatures remain in India's Gir forests.

The hyacinth macaws at Jurong are critically endangered, numbering fewer than 300 in their home forests in Brazil. The Bali mynahs at the bird park are among the rarest of the world's birds; only a few dozen persist on their home island, outnumbered more than ten to one by the Bali mynahs in the zoos and aviaries of the world. Humboldt penguins too are undergoing a precipitous decline in their home waters, in the Pacific, partly because the fish they eat are being depleted by fishermen, in whose nets the penguins also often perish, and partly because their nesting sites are being mined for guano. Great Indian hornbills are disappearing, too, because the forests of India are disappearing, but also partly because the birds have long been a favourite of bird collectors. They're the largest of the world's hornbills, standing well more than a metre in height, and they're possessed of such endearing habits as offering their captors morsels of food. For decades, one of the London Zoo's most popular animals was Josephine, a Great Indian hornbill. She died in 1998, at the age of 52.

About 2000 animals from 250 species are held at the Singapore Zoo and the Night Safari, 9000 birds from about 600 species at the Jurong Bird Park. These institutions are routinely and deservedly praised by the appropriate international bodies as well-managed and progressive places, but there are other words that might be used to describe them. Here are three: Hospice. Necropolis. Tomb.

The Great Indian hornbill, the Bali mynah, the hyacinth macaw, the proboscis monkey, the ruffed lemur, the douc langur, the pygmy hippo, the Sumatran orangutan, and the Malayan tiger belong to a special class of rare and vanishing creatures of the wild world known as the "living dead." It's a term biologists have begun to use to describe those species that are not expected to escape extinction without significant human intervention, such as captive breeding. Among the world's endangered mammals, birds, and reptiles, already 1500 species are expected to be wholly dependent upon captive breeding by 2050.

Specifically, the term "living dead" is used to describe species that have been rendered incapable of independent survival because other species upon which they depend are disappearing or are already gone. The living dead include species that exist mainly in zoos, such as the Amur tiger, and those suffering "latent extinction," which appears to be the douc langur's condition, as it slowly withers away as a result of habitat loss. Not all the critically endangered species on earth are necessarily counted among the living dead. It's hard to say whether a species has crossed into that netherworld unless you have a pretty clear idea about its long-term prospects. A key factor to consider is the extinction debt racked up from habitat loss that has already occurred.

One grim example of the way extinction debt works its misery comes from a study published in the journal Conservation Biology in 1999. Its author, Guy Cowlishaw, of the London Zoological Society, looked at the extinction debt incurred from forest clearing in Benin, Burundi, Cameroon, the Ivory Coast, Kenya, and Nigeria. Cowlishaw determined that the impact of logging would likely result in the extinction of one-third of those forests' primate species. That was the outstanding debt, even if all logging and poaching stopped the moment that Cowlishaw published his findings. It might take a century for those primate species to limp along, slowly paying off the debt until reaching equilibrium with their very extinction. But the debt will be called, and it will be paid. The trees keep falling. West Africa is expected to lose 70 percent of its already diminished forests by 2040. East Africa's forest losses are projected to be as high as 95 percent.

Singapore itself provides a vivid example of the way extinction debt works, as well as a rare glimpse into the way the world's current extinction crisis might be expected to unfold in the coming years.

The island nation of Singapore is situated in the humid tropics, which is the epicentre of the planet's current crisis in the extinction of wild things. The tropics are playing a central role in the ongoing story of extinctions because tropical forests contain the world's deepest reservoirs of terrestrial species diversity, and it is in the tropics that forests and other "old-growth" ecosystems are disappearing the fastest.

It's mainly this vanishing of tropical habitat that results in estimates putting the current global extinction rate as high as a thousand times the "normal" background rate. Those estimates are extrapolated from the relationship between habitat size and species diversity and a calculation of what habitat loss will mean for species loss. Another method involves tracking the progression of species through their trajectories on the status lists maintained by the IUCN, the main international body that monitors the collapse of biological diversity. These methods may seem a bit speculative around the edges, but they tend to be confirmed by the hard data produced by specific analyses of trends in well-known families of birds, plants, and animals in well-defined locales. Singapore is precisely one such well-defined locale. And unlike much of the tropical world, Singapore is positively robust in empirical data related to biological diversity and its withering.

Avocational naturalists and birdwatchers have been going about their business in Singapore since the earliest times, compiling meticulous records of the local flora and fauna. The island already had its own formal naturalists' society in the 1950s. It has been a tireless little group, providing at least a marginally effective voice for conservation despite being often only barely tolerated by the authoritarian regime that has controlled the country since the 1960s. But Singapore's naturalist traditions reach all the way back to the founder of the former British colony, Sir Stamford Raffles. Although Raffles earned his reputation as a vigorous but fair colonial administrator and an able challenger of Dutch commercial interests in the East Indies, he was also an avid collector of animal and plant specimens. That is what they will tell you at Singapore's Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research, where the Old Man's tradition has been kept alive in collections, which include 18,000 plant specimens (2000 strains of fungi, even) and the carefully preserved bits of 300,000 dead animals from more than 10,000 species. The place is a marvel.

Biologists Barry Brook, Navjot Sodhi, and Peter Ng, an Australian and two Singaporeans, reckoned that by looking at what had happened to biological diversity in Singapore, they might get a better grasp of the real impact of habitat loss elsewhere in the tropics. Mindful that the island is especially bollixed from an ecological point of view, Brook, Sodhi, and Ng reckoned they might draw from Singapore's experience some well-informed projections about the fate of biological diversity in the years to come and test those global trends in extinction that are otherwise unavoidably inferred from statistical models or by extrapolation. The Singapore study was published in the journal Nature in 2003.

The study revealed that fully half of the island's species existed only as relics within the mere one-quarter of 1 percent of the land mass that had been protected as forest reserve. Many of those species carried on in the weird half-life of the extinction debt arising from past habitat loss, a debt conventionally paid with the eventual oblivion of species. Three such Singaporean animals found to be among the living dead were the white-bellied woodpecker, the banded leaf monkey, and the cream-coloured giant squirrel. There were only four of the woodpeckers left, fewer than 15 of the monkeys, and fewer than 10 giant squirrels. Singapore had lost at least 95 percent of its forest cover since Raffles's time. Documented and conservatively inferred extinctions had occurred among 80 percent of the island's fish species, almost 80 percent of its mammal species, more than 70 percent of its plant species, about 60 percent of its bird species, 70 percent of its once-abundant butterfly species, and 70 percent of its amphibians.

Brook, Sodhi, and Ng calibrated these rates of local-population losses against the patterns of deforestation throughout Southeast Asia, which are projected to result in the disappearance of 74 percent of the region's forests. They concluded that somewhere between 13 and 42 percent of all Southeast Asian species—mammals, birds, plants, amphibians, decapods, phasmids, butterflies, reptiles, the lot—were more or less done for. Furthermore, half of the region-wide extirpations that would follow from forest loss could be expected to result in global extinction. That's because so many of Southeast Asia's life forms are endemic, which is to say they occur only locally.

At the Singapore Zoo, oblivious to the world outside, the living dead carry on. The proboscis monkeys are producing offspring. The zoo boasts the highest numbers of orangutans bred in captivity at any one institution—21. Twenty-two Malayan tigers have been born at the Singapore Zoo since 1973, along with 28 chimpanzees and 3 douc langurs, those exceedingly rare monkeys from the defoliated mountains of Vietnam and Laos. Other captive-bred members of living-dead species at the zoo are golden lion tamarins and white rhinos. Fourteen pygmy hippos have been born there. Around the world, 178 pygmy hippos live in 74 collections, and most of those hippos were born in zoos, to zoo-born parents. At the Jurong Bird Park, meanwhile, captive-born offspring have been hatched among more than 100 bird species, including many endangered species. Jurong is the only institution in the world to have successfully hatched fledglings from the southern pied hornbill, the black hornbill, and the Great Indian hornbill.

Among the growing ranks of the living dead, the ancient paradigm of evolution, as Darwin described it, is over. If their kind are among us at all a century from now, they will be wholly different from the creatures humans first encountered. They will not be "wild" animals at all. They will be functions of artificial selection. They will live on in zoos, and perhaps some large parks. They will live in a world populated by animals we have chosen, with traits we have chosen, and in numbers we have chosen. If they live on in wilderness at all, it will be a wilderness of our own making. They will live in a simulacrum of the real world, in places like the Jurong Bird Park or the Singapore Zoo and its adjacent Night Safari grounds.

Every year, the Singapore Zoo attracts 1.5 million visitors. Ah Meng, the Sumatran orangutan with whom you can pay to take tea, received a special award from the Singapore Tourism Board in 1992. She had raised five of her own babies at the Singapore Zoo.

She became a grandmother there.

In Greek myth, the chimera was a grotesque fire-breathing animal with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a dragon's tail. The term has come to mean a fanciful creature made up of different animals, and Singapore actually has its own chimera. "The Merlion" is an absurd-looking creature with the head of a lion and the tail of a fish. According to the official story, the Merlion comes from a thirteenth-century Malay legend and Singapore chose to adopt it as its national symbol. In the real world, the capitalist-authoritarian regime of Lee Kuan Yew, the Singaporean Tito, invented the Merlion in the 1960s, around the time it was jailing newspaper editors and left-wing intellectuals and shuttering Nanyang University. You will read in countless travel articles that the Merlion chimera has been considered the island's guardian since ancient times. Actually, it wasn't until the 1990s that tourism bureaucrats put their final touches on the fabrication of the legend. In Singapore, you can't even use the symbol of the Merlion for anything without government approval.

Singapore lies just off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, a few sea miles from several small islands immediately adjacent to the coast of nearby Sumatra. For all its grasping materialism and stifling political culture, Singapore has remained secular, multicultural, and stable, and has avoided the violence and despotism that convulsed nearby Malaysia and Indonesia throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. But four million people are packed into a country smaller than the Canadian city of Edmonton. As the 2003 Nature study showed, Singapore has almost completely devoured what was a largely uninhabited tropical island when Stamford Raffles and the British East India Company arrived in 1819. But the government has not been satiated by the island's living things: it has been pulling down the mountains and bulldozing them into the sea to make more room for itself in the shallows of the Singapore Strait.

With its cheek-by-jowl high-rise office towers, its vulgar residential complexes, its surfeit of American fast food franchises, multinational corporation branch plants, and off-the-shelf urban architecture, Singapore has been subsumed within the dreary homogeneity descending upon the cultures of the world. By the end of the 1990s, most of Singapore's buildings were less than 30 years old. The city is a bit difficult to describe, in fact, because it is so much like everywhere else. Even its oldest and largest graveyard, the venerable Bidari Cemetery, was bulldozed to make more room for urban development. In 2004, William Lim, a leading authority on urban development and architecture in Southeast Asia, described Singapore as a place where urban planners have "systematically removed and destroyed unprotected city areas and historical sites that had acted as containers of history, values and cultures."

During my time there, I found regular solace at the In The Name Of Allah The Most Gracious The Most Merciful Mohd Rajeen & Brothers Café, a happy little establishment in Arab Street. The Muslim quarter is one of the few places left in Singapore that feels and behaves like a real place. Apart from a handful of neighbourhoods that have somehow retained the old Malay kampong village atmosphere, Little India and Chinatown are the only other significant districts where some authentic local sensibility can be found. The rest of the city has been adequately described by the celebrated Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas as a place devised by "pure intention: if there is chaos, it is authored chaos; if it is ugly, it is designed ugliness; if it is absurd, it is willed absurdity. Singapore represents a unique ecology of the contemporary."

Singapore more or less straddles the intersection of the "security first" and "markets first" roads the UNEP scientists were talking about in the Global Outlook report I referred to in the Prologue. Its people, most of whom are ethnically Chinese, have suffered the country's Orwellian conditions of official truth, reinvention, construction, demolition, and reconstruction with a remarkably jolly grace. They take what little comfort they can in the country's strides toward liberty and democracy. In 2002, for instance, the government relaxed its laws against the importation of chewing gum, but the people still have to be careful about asking too loudly for much more. As Singaporean journalist Cherrian George reports in his brave book Singapore, The Air-Conditioned Nation, the September 1, 2000, inauguration of a speaker's corner in Ho Lim Park marked the first time since the colonial era that Singaporeans were allowed to address their fellow citizens publicly without a government licence. Still, having sustained 40 years of single-party rule by the People's Action Party (PAP) since independence, Singapore is burdened by press-freedom restrictions that led Reporters Without Borders to rate it only slightly above North Korea and Myanmar.

The rating upset Information Minister Lee Boon Yang, who explained that in Singapore, journalists were expected as a matter of course to contribute to "nation building." By this phrase, the minister was referring to the government's obsessive preoccupation with deforestation, urban expansion, construction, population growth, the enforcement of official mythology, and the burial of history—in other words, all those things contributing to the extinction of animals throughout the tropics, and to the extinction of local cultures, distinct urban landscapes, and ways of life. Not satisfied with having the third-highest population density of any country after Hong Kong and Monaco, PAP officials unveiled a plan in 2004 to boost population growth rates by offering multi-children families tax breaks, reduced maid fees, better maternity benefits, cheap mortgages, and heftier family-allowance packets.

The entire country, which has practically no natural resources of its own, is the product of the limited company, which evolved into the multinational corporation—a statutory chimera fused with the same legal rights that Western democracies found first only in living, breathing human beings. It is well represented by the Merlion, of which there are four officially recognized statues. One of them gazes out from an imposing waterfront commercial-entertainment-office complex at One Fullerton, down at Collyer Quay. It magically spits water into the Singapore River. The most grotesque is the gigantic Merlion statue on the artificial island of Sentosa. You can even go inside it, where there are gurgling sound effects and murals depicting fanciful pirates. The Sentosa Merlion is 37 metres tall. It emits laser beams from its eyes and smoke from its arse.

By the first decade of the twenty-first century, there were many chimeras moving through the world. The final walls between nature and artifice and between captivity and freedom are being scaled and breached at every rampart. Less than a century after H.G. Wells wrote The Island of Doctor Moreau, transgenic laboratory chickens were trilling like quails and a Canadian company had spliced the genes of a spider into the genes of a goat in the hopes of processing from the goat's milk a "biosteel" with the tensile strength and flexibility of a spider's web. A transgenic zebra fish, the "glofish," has been genetically engineered by a Texas company to glow fluorescent red in the darkness of an aquarium tank. In 2004, a California firm, saucily named Genetic Savings and Clone, went into the business of cloning pets at $50,000 a clone.

Even that thick pane of glass between the tiger and the rest of us is starting to crack. Scientists have bred mice with human brain cells, pigs with human blood in their veins, and sheep with human cells growing in their hearts. In 1987, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, following upon a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, declared that man-made organisms could be patented. Canadian and European government agencies eventually followed the American lead. Stem-cell research has opened up a vast potential for eliminating diseases and genetic abnormalities, and there are few rules to go by.

As early as 1988, the University of Virginia's Joseph Fletcher, a founder of the field of study known as bioethics, spoke approvingly of genetic manipulation to create "parahumans" with the physical capacity to do dangerous and demeaning work without the burdensome encumbrance of human rights. In 1997, two Americans, biologist Stuart Newman and biotech critic Jeremy Rifkin, applied to patent a "humanzee," a speculative part human, part chimpanzee species. Their application was a provocative stunt intended to force debate, and Newman and Rifkin were turned down. But by November 2002, U.S. and Canadian scientists had gathered in a closed meeting in New York, co-sponsored by Rockefeller University and the New York Academy of Science, to discuss the feasibility of creating a human—mouse chimera. The discussion centred on the possibility of injecting human embryonic stem cells into an early mouse embryo, to test whether it was possible to create a "mouse" carrying the full complement of human genes.

Freeman Dyson, with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, argues that we should all be pleased with the possibilities. "Now, after some three billion years, the Darwinian era is over," Dyson wrote in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's online Technology Review magazine in March 2005. "Cultural evolution is running a thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution, taking us into a new era of cultural interdependence that we call globalization. And now, in the last 30 years, Homo sapiens has revived the ancient pre-Darwinian practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, blurring the boundaries between species." Dyson is positively ecstatic about the prospects: "There will be do-it-yourself kits for gardeners, who will use gene transfer to breed new varieties of roses and orchids. Also, biotech games for children, played with real eggs and seeds rather than with images on a screen. Genetic engineering, once it gets into the hands of the general public, will give us an explosion of biodiversity."

But a rather less utopian future seems just as likely, a future a bit too much like the hideous island world H.G. Wells imagined in the late nineteenth century. "Of course these creatures did not decline into such beasts as the reader has seen in zoological gardens—into ordinary bears, wolves, tigers, oxen, swine, and apes. There was still something strange about each," the narrator relates in The Island of Doctor Moreau. "In each, Moreau had blended this animal with that. One perhaps was ursine chiefly, another feline chiefly, another bovine chiefly.… The dwindling shreds of the humanity still startled me every now and then—a momentary recrudescence of speech perhaps, an unexpected dexterity of the fore-feet, a pitiful attempt to walk erect."

There were no creatures quite like this on hand at the Night Safari in Singapore. There were, however, many representative specimens of the new, globalized, and "culturally interdependent" Homo sapiens that Freeman Dyson would approve of. They came in the form of affluent and disaffected young Singaporeans roaming in half-drunk flocks, their skulls fitted with wires from their iPod headsets, all accompanied by the sound of ceaselessly chiming cellphones. They were draped in the predictable array of Gap knock-off sweaters, brand-logo sweatshirts and Britney Spears T-shirts. This sort of thing is harmless enough, but it is not unrelated to those things William Lim observed about the deracinated, dehistoricized place Singapore had become. It is directly related to those things the Singapore Zoo's animateurs would rather we not notice. It is about the bleeding away of differences in the living world, and of differences between captivity and freedom, between the real and the fabricated, between what we would want to believe and what is really happening, all around us.

Linda MacDonald Glenn, senior fellow with the American Medical Association's Institute for Ethics, says that such differences are becoming obscured along with the differences between species, and between humans and animals. On the immediate horizon is a world of wholly new creatures, forged from the DNA of different species. It is a world of cyborgs, parahumans, and Jurassic Park revivals of extinct animals. With exogenous pregnancies, the development of implantable brain chips, and transgenic engineering, we are already on the frontier of that world. By these innovations, we are "forging the next step in our own evolution," Glenn says. "Future developments will likely challenge our concepts of what it means to be human," she predicts. "What once was fiction has now become fact."

But certain things have not changed and are not likely to. "Nature" has always been both an objective reality as well as the sum of our ideas about it. At the same time, nature is always changing, and so are the ways we think about nature. In the "wild" world, it has never been easy to separate fact from fiction, as the story of the Malayan tiger reveals.

The tiger known to the Malay people was not a "wild" animal in the modern understanding of the term. It was not the same animal out of those ripping tales in Boys of the British Empire magazine during the 1920s and the London Illustrated News in the 1930s. When the Dutch and the British first set out to trade with, colonize, and ultimately conquer the East Indies, no terror of the dark jungle loomed more ominously in the colonial imagination than the tiger. Even now, to Westerners, nothing better typifies the "wild" world—the "natural" world—than the proud, savage, and noble tiger. But the Malay peoples never saw the tiger quite this way.

The Malay relationship with tigers perplexed outsiders from the earliest times. In a fifteenth-century Chinese account of a visit by Chinese traders to a Malay village, tigers occasionally turned into men, becoming "weretigers" that walked undetected among people. In the late seventeenth century, the Scottish trader Alexander Hamilton insisted that people in the vicinity of Malacca enjoyed the company of tigers and rode around on their backs. There are several early accounts, not necessarily fanciful, of Malay people befriending tigers and sharing food with them, and of tigers sharing their kills with people.

A widespread Malay custom that persisted well into the late nineteenth century was the tradition of tribute to a macan bumi, the "village tiger." People took turns leaving meals of goats or chickens at a sort of shrine on the village outskirts, and the offerings were regarded as a kind of tax the tiger levied. European colonial administrators were at once baffled and disturbed by the macan bumi custom. They regarded it as a dangerously foolish superstition that also inhibited the march of progress and the clearing of ferocious and noxious beasts from the jungles. But Sir George Maxwell, writing around 1900, reported that in some Malay villages, even small children were adequate to the task of driving off a tiger that strayed suspiciously close to a herd of cattle.

In the book that resulted from his expansive, ten-year investigation of the place tigers occupied in the Malay consciousness, Frontiers of Fear: Tigers and People in the Malay World, 1600—1950, Peter Boomgaard suggests that there was a lot more to the macan bumi tribute than mere backwoods mumbo-jumbo. A tiger habituated into the role of a macan bumi was far less likely to carry off villagers or cattle. A village tiger was also understood to drive out other, unfamiliar tigers, especially saucy young males looking to establish their own home territories. That was the village tiger's part of the bargain, and should a tiger fail in its duties, and a new tiger showed up at a village, the local dignitaries would beseech the new animal to go away. A commentary on just such an event, observed on Sumatra, comes from no less a personage than Sophia Raffles, Sir Stamford Raffles's second wife: "When a tiger enters a village, the foolish people frequently prepare rice and fruits, and placing them at the entrance as an offering to the animal, conceive that, by giving him this hospitable reception, he will be pleased with their attention, and pass on without doing them harm." She does not report whether the villagers' entreaties had any effect.

But there are few generalizations that can be made about the Malay attitude toward tigers. Some tribes called him "grandfather." Others would not utter the word for "tiger" at all, but would quietly make the sign of a claw, with their hands, reportedly for fear of arousing his attention. In Java, tigers were said to make annual pilgrimages to the "heathen" pre-Muslim shrines at Arca Domas. Whenever Malays attempted to explain their ideas to Europeans, the baffled inquirers invariably reached the conclusion that to the Malays, tigers were the embodiment of long-dead ancestors or the physical manifestations of wandering human souls. The anthropologist Ivor Evans was driven to distraction trying to sort it out: "For all I know, tigers may be thought to be human beings who have assumed an animal shape."

In some districts, it was only when an individual tiger persisted in killing villagers or their livestock that the locals took matters into their own hands, and even then the hunters took great pains to beg the animal's forgiveness before killing it. In other cases, the hunt was an elaborate ritual overseen by a tiger charmer. After the animal was trapped, a tiger charmer would spend days explaining in great detail the gravity of its transgression, why it had been wrong to kill the village livestock, and why the villagers had been left with no recourse but slaughter. In still other districts, the tigers themselves were regarded as enforcers of village custom, giving rise to the assumption that anyone who was eaten by a tiger must have been a thief or an adulterer or had secretly recited a taboo poem, but in any case must have had it coming. Some Sumatrans would not kill a tiger no matter how grievous its offence. Some Javans wouldn't hesitate to kill a tiger that had provoked a village by killing a cow. Colonial officials routinely complained that regardless of the inducements offered, a Malay could rarely be prevailed upon to kill a tiger. One headman of a Sumatran village where a tiger had been reluctantly killed refused the generous bounty available to him on the grounds that taking money for the act would be like selling an ancestor.

Malayan tigers were actually quite rare before the eighteenth century. But as pasture land and plantations began to open the unbroken forests, making more room for boar, deer, and other ground-dwelling herbivores and omnivores, such as goats and cattle, tiger populations rose. Imperialist expansion, the adoption of new technologies, and a shift to more permanent towns and an agrarian economy were changing things radically. The ways Malay people thought about tigers changed too. By the early nineteenth century, an average of 500 Javan people were being killed by tigers every year. During the same period, tigers killed roughly 1000 people a year on Sumatra. In the Sumatran district of Lampung, in 1820, at least 675 people were reported to have been killed in attacks. A kind of order had collapsed, and the Malay peoples responded in different ways. In some places, to the great delight and encouragement of Dutch colonial administrators, the ritual slaughter of captured tigers, in gruesome public displays, became commonplace. In other places, the old rules held.

Now, like then, it is hard to tell where the old rules will hold and where they might give way. Nature changes and evolves, just as our ideas about nature change and evolve, sometimes because of scientific discoveries and sometimes because of changes humanity has forced upon nature. Even the Malayan tiger, a showcase among the nocturnal animals in Singapore's Night Safari, was not always exclusively an animal of the night. It's almost certain that the tigers' habit of hunting at night is largely a recent response to the ubiquity of humans, who usually go about their affairs during daylight hours. If that is so, it is an adaptive mechanism the tigers figured out on their own, as a way to share the world with us.

Human beings change nature. In its turn, nature forces changes upon us, upon the way we imagine nature and what we "know" about nature. And round it goes. It's the way the dialectic has always worked. What's different now is the pace and scale of the dialectic, which is being driven partly by the pace and scale of extinctions and partly by the pace and scale of what we are coming to know about extinctions.

What we know is that the earth is undergoing a period of mass extinction comparable to only five cataclysms that have occurred over the past 440 million years. For crude shorthand purposes, we'll call those other extinctions the Ordovician extinction, the Devonian, the Permian (the most destructive of them all), the Triassic, and the Cretaceous (the one that carried off the dinosaurs). We also know with some certainty, from the fossil record, that the earth's current wealth of biological diversity may well be twice the average of any period in the history of life on earth. Given the accelerating rate of extinctions, there is little comfort to be taken in this knowledge.

One big unknown is just how many species of life there are. Reckoning those numbers can be contentious, only partly because of disputes and changes in our understanding of what constitutes a species, what constitutes a subspecies, and so on. While I was writing this book, for instance, the Malayan tiger was turning out to be not nearly as closely related to the Indo-Chinese tiger as once thought. It was being transformed by the International Species Information System (ISIS) in a way that moved it out of the subspecies Panthera tigris corbetti into its own subspecies, Panthera tigris jacksoni (after tiger conservationist Peter Jackson).

Another problem with definitively stating just how much diversity is out there is the sheer magnitude of the task. There are fewer than two million known species, and those figures are generally held to represent only a small fraction, maybe 10 percent, of the species in the world. About 15,000 "new" species introduce themselves to science every year. These additions to the known world include a mélange of well-known species that finally end up formally recognized and named. They also include completely "new" orders of life found in such places as deep-sea thermal vents, as well as discoveries arising from innovations in microscopy, revisions in our understanding of species' compositions following advances in analysis of mitochondrial DNA sequencing, and so on.

Only a small fraction of these additions to the sum of the known world come from species that people have just encountered. Such discoveries are becoming more commonplace as the earth's last tracts of wilderness give up their secrets to humanity, yet even big things in well-explored areas can hide from taxonomists for a long, long time. North America's largest land tortoise, for instance, was unknown to science until 1958. The 14-kilogram animal was found in Mexico's Chihuahuan Desert; it didn't take long to earn an endangered classification. Another "new" species is the Bornean cat. The outside world had been dimly aware of it, from a few nineteenth-century skins and skulls, but in 1992 scientists confirmed its existence through genetic analysis of a female that had been captured and photographed in Sarawak. In the picture, the cat's face looks like something that would result from crossing a cougar with a monkey. But it was probably just an unflattering portrait.

In addition to the great revelations that deep-sea submersible technologies are bringing back from the depths, the oceans continue to provide surprises. Several rare beaked whales are known to exist out there, or at least to have existed, although with the lack of concrete evidence it's not easy to describe them as ever having been really "discovered." The Indo-Pacific beaked whale is known from only two skulls, one found on an Australian beach in 1822 and another in Somalia in 1955. The pygmy beaked whale is the smallest (four metres in length, tops) and most recently discovered. It wasn't formally described by science until 1991, from the evidence of only a few sightings and a handful of dead whales found by Peruvian fishermen. Another, the Andrews' beaked whale, is known only from carcasses washed up on the beaches of South Pacific islands.

The "new entries" in-basket for species is absolutely crawling with bugs. The great entomologist E.O. Wilson, who looms over the study of biological diversity like some latter-day Darwin, discovered a new ant in 1989 in the Washington, DC, offices of Kathryn Fuller, president of the World Wildlife Fund's American chapter. Bug discoveries happen all the time.

Then there are the special cases that confound our understanding, such as "wild" creatures that exist in captivity but whose origins are a mystery. In a shrine at Chittagong, in Bangladesh, black, soft-shelled, three-clawed turtles have subsisted on the offerings of pilgrims for about 1200 years. Five hundred of these animals remain. Nobody knows where they came from, but pilgrims insist they are the incarnations of the first followers of the saint to whom the shrine is dedicated.

Every now and then, cheerful news surfaces about the "rediscovery" of a species that everybody thought was extinct. The aye-aye of Madagascar, a nocturnal primate that looks like a cartoon goblin, was routinely killed by local people, who considered it a portent of evil. Its numbers had dwindled to the point that it seemed almost certain to have vanished entirely from its remnant home forests, but then, in 1986, two adults were found and captured. The Jamaican iguana was written off as extinct in 1946 but showed up again in 1990. A captive-breeding program has produced 100 of the animals at Jamaica's Hope Zoo, but hopes for their reintroduction are not high, due to the depredations of dogs. Jerdon's courser, a long-legged, plover-like bird discovered in India's Andhra Pradesh state in 1848, showed itself in public only three times during the nineteenth century. The Bombay Natural History Society mounted a faint-hope search for the bird and found a few, in 1976, in Telugu. In 1993, an American scientist came upon a Madagascar serpent eagle that had been thought extinct in the 1930s. And in a most dramatic find, Spanish scientists looking for reptiles in the Canary Islands in 1999 came upon six specimens of a type of giant lizard, on a cliff on the island of La Gomera, that had been believed extinct for 500 years.

All this sort of knowledge is fairly easy to take in. We can always say, well, if there's a species out there, we can name it, and if it disappears from the world, it's extinct. But progress, as it's often called, marches ahead. The alchemies of cryogenics, transgenetic manipulation, and the emerging biotechnologies that zookeepers are developing raise the very real possibility that many of the "living dead" species of the world will never become extinct, at least not in the way that geneticists or taxonomists use the term.

These same advances are raising the prospect of bringing extinct species back from the dead. In 2002, scientists associated with the Australian Museum in Sydney extracted DNA from the pickle-jar fetus of a Tasmanian wolf, a marsupial thylacine driven to extinction in the 1930s. The hope was to reassemble its genetic structure to eventually clone and produce live specimens. Then Britain's Natural History Museum embarked on an ambitious plan to preserve the genetic blueprints of all the world's endangered species, just in case future scientists proved capable of pulling off the kind of magic trick the Australians had in mind for thylacines.

Meanwhile, "taxon advisory groups" all over the world are developing species survival plans overseen by the ISIS. The scientists are routinely confronted with the most vexing questions about what to do now, not what they might do in the future. Which species should be simply abandoned? Which locally adapted population should we try to save? Which unique subspecies in the wild should we write off in favour of deepening the genetic reservoir available to the species as a whole? In the zoos of the world, the old business of tossing hay bales at caged elephants is rapidly giving way to the work of preserving the embryos, sperm, and tissue of endangered animals in nitrogen freezers. Newborns among many critically endangered species are as likely as not to be products of artificial insemination, test-tube fertilization, electro-ejaculation, or matches arranged by geneticists. Semen is being extracted from anesthetized tigers and stored away in frozen test tubes. The fertilized embryos of endangered gaurs are being implanted in Holstein cows. Horses are giving birth to zebras.

The faint possibility that "extinction" might not be so final after all has reopened hotly contested debates about whether parks and protected areas, zoos, aviaries, and aquariums could serve as the basis for a new "ark." The idea is utopian, based as it is on the hope that some day the flood of extinctions will recede, a dove will appear on the horizon, and we will find ourselves on the shore of some enlightened age where we can let all those animals loose again. But to get a better glimpse of the future of zoos and parks, we need to look back at where they came from and what uses they've served. And in that story, too, Singapore has played a leading role.

The story of the modern zoo begins with Sir Stamford Raffles, founder of the colony of Singapore, servant and champion of British imperialism. Raffles is well remembered in Singapore. Along with the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research, there is Raffles Boulevard, Raffles Road, and Stamford Road. There is the Raffles Hospital, Raffles Plaza, and Raffles Park. Most famously, there is Raffles Hotel, the opulent nineteenth-century Singapore institution associated with Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, and Somerset Maugham. I enjoyed a gin and tonic there, a few paces from the spot where the last tiger in Singapore was shot and killed in 1902 underneath a pool table in the Bar & Billiard Room.

Raffles himself introduced several species to science. His own private menagerie included orangutans, monkeys, tigers, gibbons, and bears, but the species with which he is most intimately associated is Rafflesia arnoldi, the largest and arguably the most hideous flower in the world. A parasite upon a particular sort of jungle vine, the Rafflesia produces a stemless flower that can reach a metre in width and looks something like a gigantic rotten orange mushroom that some child has tried to sculpt into a flower using a dull carving knife. The flower blooms for only a few days, and when it does, it emits an overpowering smell, just like a heap of rotting flesh, which attracts flies, its primary pollinator.

Raffles's more enduring legacy is in having established the London Zoological Gardens, at Regents Park, after returning to England from his tumultuous and successful colonial service. The institution laid the foundations for the modern zoo and even gave the word zoo to the English language.

The Regents Park zoo wasn't the world's first grand bestiary. The earliest is believed to have been a collection of perhaps several thousand animals at Saqqara, in Egypt, about 4500 years ago. Its holdings included 1134 gazelles, 1305 oryxes, and more than 1200 antelopes of a variety of species. Three thousand years later, the pharaoh Thotmees III established an even more vast menagerie and botanical garden, with monkeys and leopards. On the far side of the world, 500 years after that, the Chinese emperor Shen Nung, the Divine Husbandman, is said to have established a huge "Garden of Intelligence" containing an impressive array of animals and plants. In the early sixteenth century, when the Spaniard Hernando Cortés arrived in the Valley of Mexico, he came upon a grand zoo in Montezuma's great city, Tenochtitlán.

But what Raffles set out to assemble was the most expansive collection of animals in history. He was not content to create a grand extravagance, a mere collection of curios for the "vulgar admiration" of the hoi polloi. It would be instead a giant laboratory, an institution that would facilitate the study of the animal world. He wanted something on a scale and of a class wholly different than, say, Polito's Royal Menagerie, a hideous place in London where lions, tapirs, monkeys, tigers, an elephant, and a rhinoceros were kept in cages so small the animals could barely stand up in them.

Raffles set out to create "a grand zoological collection in the metropolis" that would cater to fashionable company and would be to zoology what the Royal Botanic Kew Gardens was to botany. As Kew set out its collections according to the order devised by Carolus Linnaeus (the founder of modern taxonomy), the London Zoo would arrange its exhibits according to the best semblance of taxonomic propriety its zookeepers could manage. One of Raffles's chief advocates and colleagues in the zoological-garden enterprise was the great Sir Joseph Banks, who accompanied Captain James Cook on his historic explorations of the South Seas, served as the director of Kew Gardens, and presided over the venerable Royal Society. The London Zoo opened, with 200 species, in 1828, shortly after Raffles's death. In its first few years, the zoo was open only to wealthy subscribers. By the 1840s, anyone capable of paying the one-penny admission could attend.

For the animals of the world, though, the opening of the London Zoo was not a welcome development. It set off a frenzy of imitators throughout Europe and North America, all supplied by constantly moving caravans of caged animals from the most remote reaches of the empire. Singapore emerged as a major centre of the global animal trade and held that position for several decades. Wholesale markets for wild animals could be found all along Rochor Road, and Singapore provided a key base of operations for Frank Buck, one of history's most notorious animal dealers. Buck made a documentary film about himself in the 1930s, in which he claimed that over his 30-year career he had captured or bought and sold more than 60 tigers, 49 elephants, 5000 monkeys, and 100,000 birds.

Leopards, lions, kangaroos, crocodiles, bears, cougars, cheetahs, giraffes, wolverines, gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees—a seemingly endless list of species, in seemingly endless numbers, filled the cargo manifests of countless ships. Most of the animals died along the way. They succumbed to disease, heatstroke, and exhaustion, perished in shipwrecks, and starved or died for lack of water during the long trek across the deserts of North Africa. Some shipments were written off entirely, the whole "cargo" having died en route. Of those animals that survived the journey to European zoos, most were dead within three years of arriving. In Africa, gorilla populations sustained enormous losses. As late as the mid-twentieth century, only a small fraction of the gorillas captured for the zoo trade survived their journeys, and most died within a few months of arriving in their cages. A common ailment was "indigestion," a euphemism for the consequence of feeding vegetarian primates a steady diet of such delicacies as sausages and beer.

It has been argued that as Europeans found themselves increasingly settled in large, sedentary villages and towns, and ultimately turned to urban fodder for the Industrial Revolution, they found themselves increasingly removed from "nature" and developed a kind of addictive craving for the presence of living wild animals. There may be something to that still. The average North American zoo visitor today is a middle-class, college-educated woman in her twenties, accompanying a child, attending a zoo in the spring or summer. Zoo surveys show that people want to see some active animals, they love to see baby animals, and if they could, they'd be happy to touch something. Petting zoos are enormously popular.

By the nineteenth century, Europeans had become positively manic for travelling troupes of freaks, monkeys, leopards, giants, jugglers, and other such wonders. But something sinister was at work. The extravagance at Regents Park was also about displaying the wealth and majesty of empire. That's the other thing about grand bestiaries. They serve an ancient, obsessive desire of warlords, magnates, and kings to acquire, bequeath, trade, and display exotic, strange, and magnificent wild animals.

From Kublai Khan to the Mughal emperor Akbar the Great, and from the thirteenth-century Holy Roman emperor Frederick II to American press baron William Randolph Hearst, bigshots of one stripe or another have always employed vast animal collections in dispensing and procuring loyalties and allegiances, favours, and alliances. Among the bears, monkeys, and other animals Charlemagne kept at his various residences was an elephant given to him by the Caliph of Baghdad. Phillip VI of France, Louis IX, and England's Henry II all kept extensive animal collections, trading specimens as tokens of esteem and fealty. To cement their newly established diplomatic ties in the sixteenth century, Russia's Ivan IV presented England's Queen Mary with "a large and faire Jerfawcon," and Queen Mary returned the compliment with a pair of lions. That tradition persists. In return for his 1972 gift of two muskox to the People's Republic of China, U.S. president Richard Nixon received a couple of pandas. Around the same time, Canada gave Saudi's King Khalid a present of gyrfalcons. The first collections at the Jurong Bird Park, when it opened in 1971, comprised mainly gifts from ambassadors.

In the ostentatious display of animals what's often at work is something deeply rooted in power, conquest, prestige, and domination. It can be as benign as the corporate sponsorship by Chemical Industries (Far East Ltd.) of the Malayan tiger viewing shelter at the Singapore Zoo (which sells such corporate sponsorships for 4000 Singapore dollars a year) or as savage as the excesses of the Roman emperors, who never flinched from the vices of debauchery. The Romans took the fetish to its most barbaric extremes. A single festival could involve the torture, maiming, and massacre of thousands of animals—bears, lions, giraffes, crocodiles, elephants, and bulls. If a few human beings were thrown into the bloodbath, all the more grisly and better the spectacle.

But captive humans would also sometimes suffice. In the sixteenth century, to impress the menagerie-fancier Pope Leo X, a Catholic cardinal kept a collection of humans. Among them were Tartars, Africans, Indians, and Moors. The bestiary of Aztec emperor Montezuma, not long before, had included an array of dwarfs and "human monsters" among his animals at Tenochtitlán. Europe's medieval travelling menageries were often complemented by displays of humans, and as recently as the nineteenth century, English people were regularly coaxed out of a few pence to see collections of Laplanders, African bushmen, Ojibways, and Inuit. Such travelling shows routinely included even more exotic human specimens: bearded women, "boneless" children, giants, and even less fortunate people billed merely as "humanoids." The carnival, the freak show, the zoo—the lines were often blurry.

Even Carl Hagenbeck, the German bestiarist considered the founding father of the modern open-plan zoo—his naturalistic 1907 Hamburg Tierpark was the first to experiment with the concepts so elaborately perfected at the Singapore Zoo and Night Safari—was not above such vulgarities. The great innovator who pioneered methods of training animals through conditioning rather than beatings and privation once presented the German public with an impressive collection of human specimens from 36 ethnicities, including Sudanese, Patagonians, and Eskimos.

Around the same time, the New York Zoological Society's William Hornaday, who so passionately decried the extinction of species, oversaw a display at the Bronx Zoo that included hundreds of humans. Among them were Kwagewlths from the British Columbia coast, Zulus and pygmies from Africa, and Igorots from the Philippines. A popular exhibit at the time was Ota Benga, a pygmy from the Congo, who shared a cage with an orangutan named Dohong. Another was Geronimo, the famous Apache war leader who bravely fought invading American forces in the late nineteenth century. Geronimo died shortly afterward in 1909, at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, still technically a prisoner of war. Benga, after enduring a brief life as a travelling exhibit, hanged himself in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1916.

After all these years, just when we thought we had clearly demarcated the lines between freak show and menagerie, zoo and wilderness, and human and animal, order is collapsing again. It is collapsing in ways no one foresaw, with the possible exception of such early science-fiction writers as H.G. Wells.

The argument for building an ark by using zoos, parks, aquariums, and aviaries, or even by relying on the contents of test tubes in the deep-freeze units of the British Natural History Museum in London, rests on some questionable assumptions.

One assumption is that human populations will one day stabilize at some tolerable abundance that will leave room for all those other forms of life. As it turns out, this is not unrealistic. Human population growth is occurring at different rates around the world. In Europe and North America, the population would be shrinking but for immigration, and worldwide, growth rates are starting to level off. But that does not mean that any time soon we'll all be living within our ecological means on a planet where the forests have grown back and the global climate has resumed some sort of stable pattern.

Michael Soulé, founder of the Society for Conservation Biology and chair of the Environmental Studies Board at the University of California at Santa Cruz, concludes that we have already entered a "demographic winter" that will last at least two centuries. After that, if human populations have not already imploded from disease or famine, or from wars fought over the world's dwindling natural resources, there will be a period of ecological restructuring that will last who knows how long. And maybe, after all that's happened, the non-human world can be gradually repopulated.

It is also unclear whether the drastic assumptions about the inevitability of species extinctions are justified, and whether radical intervention and "triage" are applicable only in such places of the world as the humid tropics.

When it comes from the zookeeping fraternity, the "ark" justification for zoos often has the faint whiff of casuistry about it.

Growing up on Canada's west coast helped me become inured to arguments zookeepers sometimes make. Vancouver's Stanley Park Zoo insisted that keeping whales in big swimming pools and training them to do endearing and humanlike things was all for the greater good. Every time the Stanley Park Zoo captured another killer whale for the aquarium trade, and every time one of its own killer whales died, and every time one of its killer whales' calves died, it was always the same. It was for the greater edification of the public, to more effectively inculcate a concern for the great whales of the seas. By the 1990s, British Columbia's distinct southern subspecies of killer whales was endangered, and its numbers continued to fall. The proximate causes of the killer whales' peril were the dwindling salmon stocks upon which the whales fed and the contaminants that had made the whales' bodies comparable to toxic waste. But the subspecies had not been helped by having had its numbers thinned in the first place by the lurid business of catching whales to supply the Stanley Park Zoo and other whale-show attractions around the world. During the 1960s and early 1970s, 62 killer whales were captured for the aquarium trade. A dozen died during their capture. Of those that survived, many died after only a short time in their tanks.

The Stanley Park Zoo also housed polar bears. The last one was Tuk, who died in 1997 at the age of 36. I have a vivid memory of being 12, perhaps 13, and watching a polar bear robotically pace in a concrete tank sculpted to look like a piece of iceberg. The bear simply paced back and forth—it was an automaton, not an animal—and I remember being possessed of an overpowering desire for it to be killed and put out of its misery.

The bear's condition, known as stereotypy, is a common ailment among zoo specimens. It's a kind of madness that is found among almost all mammal species, in most zoos, and is only one of several pathologies that come with captivity. Cannibalism, self-mutilation, hypersexuality, eating disorders, and a whole range of pathetic behaviours afflict as many as one-third of all the mammals in North American zoos. This was so even in "progressive" institutions, such as the famous San Diego Zoo.

For all the captive-breeding efforts of the Singapore Zoo, the Jurong Bird Park, and most other "progressive" zoos around the world, the work is mainly about keeping zoo populations reproductively healthy and transferring animals among and between zoos to further that purpose. In the Canary Islands, at Tenerife, several captive-breeding programs are underway at the opulent Loro Parque, home to thousands of specimens from hundreds of species. You can stroll through a glass tunnel while sharks and manta rays swim about you, see chimpanzees in their painstakingly reconstructed African micro-habitat, and view the Bengal tigers on their island in an artificial lake. In the oil-rich sheikhdom of Qatar, which remained outside the protocols of the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) until 2001, a private menagerie, owned by Sheikh Saoud bin Mohammed bin Ali al Thani, contains thousands of animals. Many of them are from endangered species, and al Thani employs entire teams of veterinary scientists and biologists in his various captive-breeding programs.

At Tenerife, a small community of endangered gorillas provides an important genetic resource for the European Breeding Program's plans for the gorilla's "future insertion into the wild." And the Singapore Zoo did embark on a minor effort to reintroduce mouse deer and otters to Singapore's postage stamp—sized protected areas, though it was largely a public relations exercise. The program initially included a plan to reintroduce civet cats and leopard cats, but that idea was dropped on the more sensible counsel that it would probably result in an extirpation of the remnant populations of the cats' prey species.

It is only rarely, however, that captive-breeding programs are about the recovery of freely sustained, self-supporting, and viable populations outside of zoos. And rarely have those efforts succeeded, anyway. Attempts to resuscitate near-extinct animals go back to the sixteenth century, when the Polish nobility established huge wildlife reserves in hopes of saving the aurochs, the wild ancestor of most modern cattle. It didn't work. Only a handful of near-dead species can be said to have revived, even from local extirpation, even partly because of purposeful reintroduction.

One clear success story is the Przewalski's horse, a rugged little equine native to Mongolia that is likely the evolutionary ancestor of modern horses. There were none left in the wild in the 1950s, but following an ambitious reintroduction program based on small, domesticated herds, today about 1000 range the Mongolian steppes. The case of Père David's deer is difficult to situate in the discussion. Named after the French missionary Père David Armand, this species of Chinese deer was extinct in the wild for several centuries, and by the nineteenth century there was one remaining herd confined to the Chinese emperor's hunting park. Père David Armand obtained permission to ship some off to Europe, which proved fortuitous, since there were none left in China by the early 1900s. The 18 surviving European specimens were gathered at Woburn Abbey by the Duke of Bedford, and from this small herd, a population of 600 grew. But all of these deer are in various zoos around the world.

Most of these valiant efforts remain, at best, ongoing experiments. Such experiments are underway with the Arabian oryx, the peregrine falcon, the golden lion tamarin, the California condor, the Alpine ibex, the Aleutian goose, and the European bison, also known as the wisent, which survives in small herds in a forest reserve in Poland. For most endangered animals, zoos are hard to think about as stations on some trail back to Eden. Zoos are where they go extinct.

The quagga, a zebra-like creature known only from a handful of photographs taken of a single animal—a captive of the London Zoo bought from an animal dealer in 1851—ended its existence as a species in the form of another single animal, which died in a Dutch zoo in the 1880s. Pink-headed ducks from India appear to have died as a species with a single pair in the private collection of a member of the London Zoo's governing council, during the Second World War. The ducks were last observed in the wild in 1936, in India. Expeditions to remote northern regions of Myanmar and Tibet have failed to find any.

Even North America's great wilderness parks have a lousy track record in conserving wildlife. Environmentalists learned far too late (and many still haven't figured out) that small and isolated "representative" samples of wilderness, scattered across vast landscapes where untrammelled resource extraction otherwise proceeds apace, do far more harm than good. They provide a release-valve service to economies that require their firing chambers to be continually stoked with trees for lumber, mountains for minerals, and land for real estate development. Concessions in the form of parks, wilderness reserves, and marine protected areas have too often performed precisely that service, and it's one of the reasons why Montana conservationist and author Richard Manning astutely observes that a new park is never a victory—it's really an admission of defeat.

Biologist William Newmark helped to make Manning's case in a seminal 1987 study of the great parks and wilderness areas of the North American west. By exhaustive analysis of several decades' worth of wildlife records in the parks, Newmark showed that the parks had suffered a slow death of "mammalian faunal collapse." The parks were too small and the mammal populations they supported were too fragile to remain viable over the long term. More importantly, the parks were too isolated from one another to allow their mammals to maintain viable populations. Endangered animals won't be saved by confining them to fragments of habitat types that parks are intended to represent, Newmark found. What's needed are bigger parks, more parks, and the careful restraint of human activity within carefully managed wildlife corridors connecting the parks.

On the side favouring zoos as arks, as a temporary solution, is journalist Vicki Croke, an animal enthusiast but no naive advocate. In her 1997 book, The Modern Ark: The Story of Zoos, Croke makes a good case that the loss of genetic diversity that has befallen so many vertebrate species, especially birds, is irreversible, and it's time we faced it. There is no real wilderness left, she says, and what remains will soon be gone: "The wild world is becoming a series of megazoos." She is positively enthusiastic about cryogenic methodologies and test-tube solutions to the problem of extinction. Close the zoos, Croke says, but reopen them all the next day, with more resources and a different mandate. Make them arks. Just keep selling tickets.

On the other side of the debate is a formidable intellectual who, like Croke, does not come from the disciplines of zoology, the veterinary sciences, or the ecological sciences. David Malamud is an associate professor of English at Georgia State University. His 1998 book Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals in Captivity looks closely at the ways we have understood zoos and "constructed" them in our imaginations. Malamud casts a cold eye on what zoos mean, in broad cultural terms. He's against zoos and he draws little distinction between old-style collections of pathetic animals in smelly cages and the more modern game parks and open-plan institutions of the kind so well represented in Singapore. "I consider differences among zoos cosmetic," Malamud writes, "or otherwise insignificant in terms of mitigating their collective implication in a culturally retrograde enterprise."

His is not a recent viewpoint. In 1913, the novelist Thomas Hardy wrote a letter to The Times expressing his disgust with the very idea of zoos, calling them "useless inflictions" where animals were made to perform silly tricks or otherwise "drag out life in a wired cell." John Galsworthy, Hardy's contemporary and fellow novelist, saw in zoos the most vulgar and hypocritical state of humanity. They were "a horrible barbarity," he wrote.

David Hancocks, director of the Open Range Zoo at Werribee, Australia, has a different vision of what the zoo might be. In his 2001 work A Different Nature: The Paradoxical World of Zoos and Their Uncertain Future, Hancocks sets out the complexities and contradictions associated with our unquestionable love of other life forms. Some people express that desire by fighting to protect forests that support bears. Others express that love by hunting bears. Go figure. As for zoos as arks, Hancocks is unambiguous. The idea is "ludicrous," he says. "Zoos are not, and for many reasons cannot be, sanctuaries for saving the world's wildlife: they deal with too few species and too little space for it.… We cannot save the world's endangered wildlife through the few successful breeding programs in zoos, just as one cannot save a language by simply holding onto a rare document."

He makes a strong argument. The United Nations' Global Diversity Assessment counts roughly 5400 known animal species that face some threat of extinction. If all the zoos in the world gave over fully half their resources to the work of maintaining viable breeding populations of endangered species, Hancocks reckons they might hold on to perhaps 800 species.

Hancocks proposes that we "uninvent zoos as we know them and … create a new type of institution, one that praises wild things, that engenders respect for all animals, and that interprets a holistic view of nature." Further, zoos must become diplomatic missions for the animal world, in the world of urbanized Homo sapiens. They should nurture the strong public desire to conserve wildlife habitat and incorporate conservation strategies as their defining organizational principles. These kinds of zoos, and no other, should be the only zoos "allowed by law."

Such zoos as Hancocks proposes already exist. The New York zoos administered by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), including the Central Park, Bronx, and Queens zoos, as well as several other local institutions, are proof that captive animals can be put to more useful, honest, and humane purposes. More than four million visitors attend these zoos every year, and the simple zoo-going experience is vastly augmented by the institutions' far-reaching education programs. The WCS zoos also serve the diplomatic-mission purpose Hancocks proposes, by linking New Yorkers to projects the organization is undertaking in 53 countries around the world. Those projects are geared mainly toward securing necessary habitat for endangered species, "from butterflies to tigers."

WCS scientists are training conservation officers in East Africa. They have rediscovered a wild pig, thought to be extinct a hundred years ago, in Southeast Asia. They're working with government bureaucrats in Iran to conserve the last tracts of habitat frequented by the endangered Asiatic cheetah. They're mapping Amur tiger habitat on the Russian—Chinese border, developing conservation initiatives for the critically endangered crested iguana in Fiji, and using radio tags to track great white sharks off the coast of South Africa with satellites. Even the Singapore Zoo is starting to do this kind of work, establishing a Sumatran rhino research station in Sabah, on the island of Borneo.

This is not the work of building arks. It's about something far more hopeful.