A publicity-conscious American scientific corporation announces that a cow it owns will shortly give birth to a cloned Indian bison whose existence in southern Asia is threatened.
More sober scientists agree that nature is even now in freefall.
There are, it is thought, somewhere between 7m and 70m species, of which only 1.7m have been named. No one has a clue what we have lost in the past 50 years, but at a conservative guess the rate of extinction is 100 to 1,000 times what is normal. Against this background, the idea that mankind, having destroyed so much, can put nature back together is insulting and politically naive, and conservation groups like the World Wide Fund For Nature were yesterday damning about the announcement from Advanced Cell Technology. To bring back an animal and see it prosper, therefore, means not only finding a habitat in which it can live, but one where all the other plants and species on which it depends can survive, too. Whole forests, coral reefs, and most of the the great centres of biodiversity are all being degraded and destroyed.