My mum lent me a book yesterday called 'Last chance to see'. If you have never read it please do, it is an account by Douglas Adams of his travels with a zoologist called Mark Carwardine. They go around the world trying to find animals we have nearly run out of. It's a really spectacular read (and has an introduction by Richard Dawkins, but don't let that put you off.)

People seem to have stopped talking about endangered animals. It doesn't seem to be as trendy any more to go on about saving the rainforest and the whales etc. I presume this is because of the massive and terrible realisation that actually we need to save the whole planet for all the species including us. Suddenly a few komodo dragons seem unimportant by comparison. We'd rather concentrate on the bigger picture, trying to get a binding agreement at COP16 for example, or just getting people to stop driving blinking great 4x4s around London.

Maybe that's an exaggeration. Greenpeace did only just run a viral campaign against Nestle on the basis that their use of palm oil was wiping out orangutans. Maybe we do have a place in our hearts still for engangered animals. I'm usually no advocate for animal charities because at the end of the day there are children starving in Africa but as Sam Bond put it commenting on a previous blog entry I wrote 'Difference between starving children dying of AIDS and cute furries is, unfortunately, that we're not in danger of running out of dying children forever.' Except we are, if the climate does change and we humans can't survive it.

But maybe sometimes we need to be reminded of the smaller picture. We need Douglas Adams to go out into the wilderness and describe the aye-aye for us, to make us look around at all the small beautiful species we are driving out of existence.

Adams describes the aye-aye as staring at him 'with a sort of serene incomprehension.' It doesn't know, or understand, that it is humans who are ensuring its untimely destruction. But today my housemate sent me a link to a story which paints a very different picture of the threatened species. Locusts, vampire bats and jellyfish are attacking us. The bats, deprived of wildlife to feed on by the deforestation of the Amazon, are swarming on villages, drinking human blood and causing outbreaks of rabies. A plague of Portuguese Man-of-War jellyfish in Spain is partly down to overfishing but also a lack of rain. Unusually large swarms of locusts this year due to the warm spring. Caused by climate change? Caused by people?

It's like armageddon. Millions affected by flooding, and now we find the animals are fighting back. Perhaps a few species dying out should stay higher up on our agenda after all.