Extinction troubled us long before we had a name for it. The original mascot for the loss of species, even before the concept was understood, was the dodo. The bird — fat and flightless, found by 17th-century European sailors on the island of Mauritius — fell victim to one of the earliest known extinctions caused by Western humans. For four centuries, it’s been a symbol in our art and arguments.
What the dodo symbolizes has changed over time. It has been, variously, a parable, a joke and a warning. When we see it as an emblem for the destructive greed of our own species, there is no way to avoid regret and sorrow. But the morphing message of the dodo might also call us toward hope. Although we cannot undo the blunders of our ancestors, we can emerge from ecological grief with new determination to protect and enjoy the species we have left. It is possible to imagine building connections with the natural world that lead toward growth.
At first, dodos were emblems of gluttony and stupidity. Without much evidence, Europeans imagined that the dodos themselves were greedy. Painters used dodos to represent sin, as in Franz Rösel von Rosenhof’s “After the Fall,” in which a peaceful ox from a prelapsarian image became an ominous, exotic dodo in another painting. The birds’ girth — a dodo could easily weigh 50 pounds — helped foster that image. A single one could feed 25 sailors, even though dodo meat was greasy and unappetizing; in French, the dodo was known as l’oiseau de nausée, or “the bird of queasiness.” Between being hunted by sailors — an easy task, since the birds lacked natural predators — and having their eggs and habitat destroyed by rats and pigs the Europeans brought with them, the dodos didn’t last long.
The last dodos were killed before 1700. At that time, humanity could not easily conceive of the extinction of a species, let alone an extinction caused by humans. Most people presumed God could create animals at will. After the dodos vanished, many thought that their disappearance was a divine message aimed at humans. Their symbolism slowly changed, transforming them from greedy birds to emblems of European avarice.
It would take more than a hundred years for Georges Cuvier, a French paleontologist, to convince people that species could be permanently eradicated from the planet. Using fossils, he argued in 1796 that many species had become extinct in the wake of natural catastrophes. Humans had been causing extinctions at least since the Ice Age. Polynesian expansion, particularly into New Zealand, was responsible for large-scale species loss, which initially vexed European explorers. But the idea of it was almost entirely new to the same Europeans. Romantic poets and novelists, including Mary Shelley and Lord Byron, began to envision human extinction as the natural endpoint of geology and wrote dystopian works in which the earth was eventually reduced to nothing more than “a lump of death.”
Fifty years after Cuvier, when hunters killed the last of the great auks in 1844, the fact that humans could directly cause extinction came as another shock. A new understanding of the dodo’s demise arose, though it didn’t always involve mourning. Some 19th-century thinkers lauded human power — so great that it could wipe out entire species. Others, like Lewis Carroll, portrayed the dodo as a symbol of otiose silliness, a usage we echo today: When we call one another dodos, we play not for tears but for laughs.
But the dodo-as-warning idea took hold at this time, too. In 1874, Charles Darwin and his scientific colleagues cited the dodo in a plea to Mauritius’s colonial governor to save local tortoises. “It is a matter of lasting regret,” they wrote, “that not even a few individuals of these curious birds should have had a chance of surviving the lawless and disturbed condition of past centuries.” Darwin and his cohort could not save those tortoises, which soon went the way of the dodo.
Darwin certainly mourned the dodo, but he also tried to envision extinction in other ways — as a creative force, essential for evolution. “The extinction of old forms and the production of new and improved forms are intimately connected together,” he wrote. For him, one species’ demise could bring about something completely new. Extinction might mean the end of the line for one kind of creature, but it was also a moment of opportunity. You couldn’t, the logic goes, have had the rise of mammals without the end of the dinosaurs.
Later writers were influenced by Darwin’s generative response. Romantic despair was not the only way of confronting ecological change. For Emily Dickinson, “a single bone” could unfold secrets. Science and imagination, she wrote, could use the “meekest flower of the mead” to rebuild a rich habitat of “Rose and Lily, manifold, / And Countless Butterfly!” This line of thinking invites us to embrace our uncertain future. We cannot know what will emerge in the wake of extinction. Such infinite possibility is frightening but also thrilling. The biosphere is changing in ways we cannot imagine.
Today, human-caused extinction is speeding up. The dodo is one of the early entries on an already lengthy list. An additional million are on the verge. In our current ecologically anxious mood, imagining a future filled with a glorious panoply of interrelated plants and animals, as Dickinson and Darwin would have us do, is difficult. But it is not impossible.
As delightful as it may be to contemplate resurrecting long-lost species (some scientists hope even the dodo might return, with enough laboratory funding), it is probably better to acknowledge that the web of relationships that support each species is unutterably complex and always changing. That recognition might help us to prevent the extinction of more species — even if we cannot bring back those we’ve already doomed.
When I teach environmental humanities in my college classes, I find many of my students come to class primed to see loss and bleakness in the natural world. I encourage them to spend time outdoors and engage with plants and animals by observing and identifying them, and I often see their attitudes brighten. Most are learning to recognize species by name for the first time. Few know how to distinguish between a blue jay and a bluebird, much less a puffin and a penguin. Anyone can find solace and inspiration in building connections to the nonhuman world. None of us will ever see a dodo, but we can get to know the birds that still live among us. As Dickinson put it, “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers.”
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