I long have been of the opinion that snow leopards are the most beautiful animals on earth. There are a couple in a zoo near where I live. I visit them a couple of times a year, and never leave without feeling peaceful for having watched the way they move. Stop me before I go Peter Matthiesen all over.

So it turns out that they might be making something of a comeback in Tajikistan. (And how cool is it that one of the cubs decided to "play" with the camera and ripped the damn thing out of the ground?) This is why conservation, as we used to call it, matters. This is why the earth is more than something to run your damned pipelines through. When wingnuts sneer about tree-huggers and clubbing baby seals, something like this is why most of them are big bags of hammers.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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