Page 93 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

fractious animals? 5

In H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald observes that when a species is threatened its

decline, from a human vantage point, is not only numeric but also semantic. “The rarer

they get, the fewer meanings animals can have,” she writes. “Eventually rarity is all they

are made of.”

The stuffed bird in the glass box. The vast world diminished in the unearthly space of the

museum, the zoo, the nature sanctuary, the poetic set piece.

The point I wish to make is that we should be less concerned with the diorama as form

than with the diorama as “a way of seeing.” Or as a way of thinking. We do not, after all,

need the glass vitrine to encase nature. We do it all the time.

We do it with our literary fiction and our lyric poetry and we do it with conservation efforts

that reinforce a “reserved, distanced view of modern nature-appreciation.” There are

many ways of enshrining nature.

Indeed, one might ask: What is most sad? That the world has become a place filled with

absences? That many of us don’t know that these absences exist? That we place

technology in and around the gaps? Or that, in the name of protection/conservation, we

risk imposing a diorama on the world itself?

A few days after I visit the passenger pigeon display, I will speak with the director of a

local wilderness awareness school for children. He has just come from a meeting with