To the Editor: I'm amazed when people defend hunting by saying that the animals need us to cull their ranks. The Earth worked fine for billions of years without humans supervising it. Natural laws--like the ones that govern motion--control the organisms that live on this planet. There is only one species that lives in direct conflict with the laws: people. It is our exploding population that should concern us. We think ourselves above the animals and immune to the laws that govern nature. When famine shows that too many people live somewhere, we ignore it and send food, ensuring growth and a bigger famine the next year.

We are like a man who denies gravity jumping off a cliff: since he hasn't splattered against the ground yet, he continues to believe he is beyond the law. But our culture will come to an end as surely as that man will hit the ground, unless we relearn to live in accord with the laws of life. People lived that way for millennia, until we rejected the laws and set out to conquer the world. Ten thousand years later, we find ourselves with war, crime, famine, depression, suicide and genocide increasing annually. And though it may be scarred by us, we haven't conquered the world; we've only conquered ourselves. The world will survive whether we rediscover the laws or not; it is humans who will disappear.