Page 92 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

But are there limits to such grand-tragic frames?

Last week a friend of mine visited an expert on Scandinavian butterflies. The expert’s

concern was that Climate Change has become such a dominant narrative that other

notions of time (and associated phenomena) within butterfly studies are now becoming

lost. The politics of climate anticipation press deeply on ecological research and species

are being increasingly framed as climate indicators— small additions to the robust

climate story. We are all becoming swept-up in the temporalities of our climate

performance. What does this mean for less indicative species? What does this mean for

a bigger wilder messier picture? 3

Back by the diorama, three new children have arrived. They do not look at the case. A

“touch table” hosted by two ROM volunteers has upstaged the passenger pigeons.

Placed on a trolley is a mounted Great Horned Owl. An older woman who resembles an

airline stewardess with a tidy bob and chic neck scarf holds a Snowy Owl aloft and

invites the children to touch the bird’s plumage. They approach the dead bird as though

greeting an unfamiliar pet and stroke it with a mixture of warmth and wariness.

In the museum, and not just in the museum, nature has become a tableau imbued with

4
melancholia and what Rachel Poliquin calls “a vague sense of noble tragedy.”

I wonder: is it possible to see an extinct or threatened bird beyond the meanings and

uses humans apply to her? Can it be anything other than a cipher of human loss, a tidy

icon of sadness/failure to us humans? What of visceral, idiosyncratic, complicated,