numbers

From Snowball Earth: the story of the great global catastrophe that spawned life as we know if by Gabrielle Walker:

[An image borrowed from John McPhee:] Stretch your arms out wide to encompass all the time on Earth. Let's say that time runs from left to right, so Earth was born at the tip of the middle finger on your left hand. Slime [our earliest ancestor] arose just before your left elbow and ruled for the remaining length of your left arm, across to the right, past your right shoulder, your right elbow, on down your forearm, and eventually ceded somewhere around your right wrist. ... The dinosaurs reigned for barely a finger's length. And a judicious swipe of a nail file on the middle finger of your right hand would wipe out the whole of human history.

From The Eye of the Elephant: an epic adventure in the African wilderness by Delia and Mark Owens:
By comparing our [1988] aerial wildlife censuses with one flown in 1973 by a team from the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, we estimate that poachers have already killed more than twelve thousand of [the Zambian North Luangwa National Park]'s seventeen thousand elephants, about three of every four, and a thousand more are dying each year. Since 1973 between seventy-five thousand and one hundred thousand elephants have been poached in the Luangwa Valley as a whole; that's roughly one for every word of this book. [emphasis in original] ... At this rate [all the elephants] will have perished in four to five years.

Eye of the Elephant was a tough read. The Owenses did their damnedest to slow the killing. Elephant is not a fat book; when I came across the analogy, one word = one dead elephant ... it made the reading more painful.

Here's a hopeful update from the Owens Foundation website: "When Mark and Delia arrived in 1986, 1,000 elephants were being poached every year. From September of 1994 to May of 1997, not one was killed in the [North Luangwa Conservation Project] area. [The Project was started by the Owenses to help people living near the park thrive without having to kill the park animals.] For the first time in 20 years the elephant population of NLNP increased slightly, and villagers reported elephants, buffalo, hippos, and other large mammals in areas where they have not been seen for two, even three decades."