As species crash and vanish, the world loses diversity, something it’s been doing for centuries. But the loss of abundance is even more startling. Nature is simply not as full as it once was.

Bill Clinton let slip some years ago that the American Secret Service had once found Boris Yeltsin, during an official visit to Washington in 1995, wandering drunk in his underpants down Pennsylvania Avenue looking for a pizza. Who knows what Russia might be like now if Yeltsin had been left to stagger on into the night, rather than returned to his bedroom in Blair House? At that point in Russia’s transition everything was still possible. In the four remaining years of Yeltsin’s miserable reign the possibilities drained away, until only Putin was left.