Illustration by Matthew Holmes

Nine years ago, I visited London's Natural History Museum, a massive building reminiscent of a cathedral with its fawn and blue-gray stone, arched windows, and pinnacles, but with the whimsical touch of animals molded and cast in terra cotta on every wall inside and out. At the time, I was doing research for a book on butterflies. With these credentials -- knowing something about writing and little about butterflies -- I was permitted entrance to the ground floor of the entomology department, an inner sanctum that went up and down six floors and contained 30 million insects in 120,000 drawers. For an afternoon, I walked dimly lit corridors and opened wooden cabinets to reveal the still-astonishing beauty of insects caught more than a hundred years ago: tiger swallowtails, red admirals, checkered whites, snouts, tortoiseshells. My guides at the museum were men and women working on such projects as the 18-volume series Moths of Borneo or tracking down the British Empire's archenemies of collections everywhere: book lice and carpet beetles.

Late in the day, I had an interview with the museum's Keeper of Entomology, Dick Vane-Wright. We talked about serious matters like the deforestation of the Philippines and the declining numbers of butterflies in the world. We also chatted at length about eating insects. When the Natural History Museum reprinted the classic 1885 tract "Why Not Eat Insects?" ("Why not indeed!" asked the author. "I see every reason why cabbages should be thus served up, surrounded with a delicately flavored fringe of the caterpillars which feed upon them."), Vane-Wright went on a promotional tour as the quintessential good sport, crunching locusts over the radio and frying up mealworms on the BBC. During the course of our interview, he explained, "Eating insects is a challenge of social mores and cultural norms. It punctures people's pomposity."

At the end of our conversation, the Keeper of Entomology said something that has stayed with me for years: "There is so much we don't know!" Vane-Wright sounded excited and distressed at the same time. "You could spend a week studying some obscure insect and you would then know more than anyone else on the planet. Our ignorance is profound."

Nodding wisely, I wrote the comment down in my notebook. I liked its humility. And I liked its challenge and implied sense of wonder -- there is still so much to discover.

Almost a decade later, the import of Vane-Wright's words has only deepened. Certainly our humility has deepened. There is so much we don't know about climate change, say, and about what life will be like without the polar ice caps or the Amazon rainforest. Our ignorance is more profound than we thought.

At the same time, as we lose about a hundred species a day in the current mass extinction, the idea that there is still so much to discover strikes me as a kind of miracle. We think we've beaten the world flat, hammered out the creases, starched the collar, hung her up to dry. We've turned the earth into our private estate -- a garden here, a junkyard there -- and as such it feels no longer wild, no longer mysterious.

And yet...You could spend a week studying some obscure insect and you would then know more than anyone else on the planet.

It's a strangely cheerful thought. Could it be true?