Professor Diamond is the author of a Pulitzer prizewinning book called "The Fates of Human Societies," and he knows about the rise and fall of civilizations. His findings are that civilizations do collapse, that their decline usually starts at their peak, and that it is always due to the destruction of the environmental resources on which they depend.

The message here is not that societies must find a balance that works between the environment and human needs. A healthy environment and human needs are not opposing claims that must be balanced, for they are inexorably bound by cause and effect.

It with relief, then, that here in the Keys, in this tiny theater in the greater drama of civilization and its discontents, we can report that a public utility intends to act on behalf of the environment, over and above human needs.

When Florida Keys Aqueduct Authority purchased a parcel on Cudjoe Key for $200,000 from the Zophie estate, it did not anticipate public reaction to its plans.

By law, just over one acre of the parcel's 18 acres of protected hammock and freshwater wetlands may be developed. Earlier this year, the FKAA announced it would seek a county building permit for a pumping station plus 1.25 million-gallon storage tank on the site.

Into the fray leaped Joan Borel and her fellow activists at Last Stand, representing what Borel called "pretty much unanimous disapproval of this site."

At a public workshop set up by FKAA in response to the dissent, the tract was described by Dennis Henize of Last Stand as a prime, upland tropical hardwood hammock, undisturbed, densely populated by slow-growing plants native to the Keys, a habitat for listed wildlife and a resting area for the threatened white-crown pigeon.

The county itself has already rated this Cudjoe parcel as Tier 1, the highest priority for protection. Such large tracts are rare in the Lower Keys, but filled sites, scarified sites or otherwise disturbed sites are not.

At the workshop, the authority's interim director, Jim Reynolds, promised that FKAA will look for an alternative site for its pump station and storage tank.

We urge the authority to keep this promise. Saving the hardwood hammock may seem to be but a small victory for the environment, but there is glory in the thinking behind it.

More technology, says history, will not always solve the environmental problems originally caused by technology. It does produce changes that can be either for the better or for the worse.

But leaving a place alone, leaving a natural place that is already in equilibrium to its own devices, is the respectful way to go -- and the better way to go -- when treating the environment as one of the basic building blocks of civilization.