The Target

The Himalayan lion stands on a ridge he has known since cub hood.

Below, a road cuts through the valley.

Off-road vehicles climb where no wheels have ever turned.

They carry emblems of lines.

French, Australian, Chinese, German.

Stamped on grills that cuff back diesel into air that once smelled of juniper and snow.

His kingdom, once inaccessible, is shrinking.

The herbs thin.

The prey scatters.

The silence breaks daily.

The biochemist arrives on foot.

He carries a canvas bag and a troubled face.

Twenty years ago, he climbed this mountain once a year and left smiling.

Now he comes monthly, and every visit brings complaint.

The fish are suffering, the lion says.

The ocean creatures too.

The forests are thinner each season.

The biochemist nods.

Natural products have contributed to roughly a third of approved small molecule drugs over four decades.

Yet biodiversity loss threatens the source of that innovation.

The raw material disappears before it can be studied.

I need funding, he says.

My lab is barely surviving.

My sequencer sits under a dust sheet.

The grant that paid for it ended two years ago.