[This is a reedit (and probably a legal parody) of this article about mosquitoes, published June 22 2004, in the New York Times, by James Gorman. I was annoyed by its cute attitude and arrogant humanism. Not that I blame the reporter -- that's how you have to write in the dominant media, and he at least raised the issue of intrinsic value. But I thought it would be fun to turn the tables.]

-------- is the kind of professor who gives the ivory tower a good name.

She is an anthropologist and environmental ethicist at the University of Arizona, and I called her to ask a simple question: What good are humans?

Dr. -------- seemed like a good person to call because she has spent some time thinking about these issues. She has an article in the current issue of Restoration Ecology titled "Restoring Nature, Without Humans?"

In it she notes that in planning development, we sometimes fail to give enough thought to one inevitable consequence -- more humans.

So, I asked, what about humans? Would everything really collapse if we got rid of them? Well, she said, no. The web of life is not that fragile. "If you take a snip, it won't unravel."

In fact, she said, there is "quite a bit of ecological research now showing that removal of a species doesn't make a huge difference." If the societies of humans that are intimately connected with nature were made to disappear, there might be some ecological disturbance, but "you probably could remove them without catastrophe."

Do they do anything of value, then? That depends on your point of view, she said. The philosophical arguments about intrinsic value versus instrumental value can get quite complicated. In essence they ask whether a human, or a tree, or anything, has a value in and of itself, apart from what other species think.

This is the sort of discussion that may be intriguing in an ideal world, but seems absolutely incomprehensible near a clearcutting operation. If there's a chance that our children might get exterminated, then we're ready to wipe humans off the face of the earth.

One small step beyond this "me, me, me" approach is to think about the value of any given organism to environmental balance. This is still not intrinsic value, but it is a bit less self-centered. One possible value of humans is population control. Humans have historically kept wild plant and animal populations down worldwide, and still do in much of the world. The problem is that they do this by facilitating poisoning and death, so this is not going to enhance their status, among nonhumans at least.

Humans may also keep some populations down by spreading disease -- something we might be able to see the value of. And other creatures -- some big cats and bears -- eat them. It's possible that if we were able to wipe out humans, some other species might either suffer from lack of food, or explode in numbers.

In any case, the reality, said Dr. --------, is that "we're not going to get rid of the humans." It's just impossible, particularly if we want to use methods that don't kill off everything else.

When I asked Dr. -------- if she thought it was immoral to try to make a species go extinct, assuming you could do it without hurting other organisms, she thought the question was significant enough to require a formal statement. "Striving for the unachievable is not an appropriate use of resources," she said. "If one acknowledges that eradication is highly unlikely to work or might have serious side effects, the moral thing to do would be to find another way." In other words, don't be stupid.

What she suggests is that we take the middle ground and try to kill some of the humans some of the time.

I mentioned to her at the end of our conversation that although humans were not that much fun to be around in reality, I shared her fascination with them. As a subject to talk and write about, they are irresistible.