Sometimes we have to be grateful for small mercies. The deal on biodiversity that more than 190 countries agreed to in Nagoya last Friday was, as these things usually are, "a day late and a dollar short," but it's a lot better than nothing. It's even better than most people expected.
Technically, it was only the 10th biennial "Conference of the Parties" who signed the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) 18 years ago, but it was not just another meeting.
It was a serious effort to move past rhetoric and come to grips with how to stop the slow-motion catastrophe of species extinction. (The current rate of extinction is at least a hundred times higher than the historical rate, perhaps as much as 10,000 times higher.)