A couple of weeks ago, The New York Times's Jim Yardley reported from China that the world's last known female Yangtze giant soft-shell turtle was living in one Chinese zoo, while the planet's only undisputed, known giant soft-shell male turtle was living in another — and together this aging pair were the last hope of saving a species believed to be the largest freshwater turtles in the world.

It struck me as I read that story that our generation has entered a phase that no previous generation has ever experienced: the Noah phase. With more and more species threatened with extinction by The Flood that is today's global economic juggernaut, we may be the first generation in human history that literally has to act like Noah -- to save the last pairs of a wide range of species.

Unlike Noah, though, we're also the ones causing The Flood, as more and more forests, fisheries, rivers and fertile soils are gobbled up for development. The world is rightly focused on climate change. But if we don't have a strategy for reducing global carbon emissions and preserving biodiversity, we could end up in a very bad place, like in a crazy rush into corn ethanol, and palm oil for biodiesel, without enough regard for their impact on the natural world.

I met one of our generation's Noahs here in Indonesia: Dr. Jatna Supriatna, a conservation biologist who runs Conservation International's Indonesia programs. One of his main projects is saving the nearly extinct Javan gibbon, a beautiful primate endemic to the island of Java. The Javan gibbon population, decimated by deforestation, is down to an estimated 400, spread out around 20 tropical forest areas in West Java.

Supriatna helps run the Javan gibbon rehabilitation center, a collection of cages embedded in the mountains of Gunung Gede Pangrango National Park, near Jakarta, where male and female gibbons get to know each other over months. First, they live in forest cages side by side, then together and then, if everything works, they produce a couple of babies. But the process is so slow, and the species so endangered, we may soon be down to the last few pairs -- a great loss.

So much of his work here, Supriatna said, is trying to build coalitions by melding businesses that have an interest in preserving the forest with local governments, which have an interest in preventing illegal logging, with local villagers who need forests to prevent soil erosion and provide fresh water.

One of his recent projects, Supriatna said, was to pipe fresh water from the forest watershed to a nearby village so people there understood the connection. Lately, he has taken his work to the imams who run the local Muslim schools.For so many years, Indonesians, like many of us, have been taught that life is a trade-off: healthy people with lots of jobs or healthy forests with lots of gibbons -- you can't have both. But the truth is you have to have both. If you don't, you'll eventually end up with neither, and then it will be too late even for Noah.