Page 91 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

The story of any lost life form is a tragedy, but the disappearance of the passenger

pigeon, once the most plentiful bird on earth, occurred on a scale unmatched in human

history. In Toronto, the birds were once so bountiful that “as late as 1860, one flight likely

exceeded one billion birds” (Greenberg, xii). The birds blotted out the sun.

But fifty years later, the birds were gone.

This was not the story of averted catastrophe. It is a story that offers nothing in the way

of ecological consolation.

The diorama before me is, like most dioramas, a combination of fake and real. Fake rock,

real oak leaves. Fake wildflowers, real branches.

There are children shouting near the bat cave. I wonder about this diorama. I wonder if it

can produce any signal at all in the noisy and frenetic corridor of this particular museum.

It seems strangely fitting that a memorial to a species that slipped away, as though

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vanishing in a stream through a rent in the sky, could so easily escape notice.

I wonder about the patina we place on nature—as conservationists, museum curators

but also as artists and writers. I wonder about the vitrine of story. The pedestal of plot.

We are living amidst two fairly large narratives, two outsized conceptions—the

Anthropocene and the Sixth Great Extinction. Both convey something of the epic scale

of the earth’s predicament, both are contributing to burgeoning academic and literary

output.