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.
