While species loss is a process of Nature, the role humanity has played in their disappearance is undeniable
By Pramod K Nayar
David Owen in Thylacine: The Tragic Tale of the Tasmanian Tiger writes of the last of the thylacines: “With genuine distress in her voice, Alison recalled to me the last weeks of her life at the zoo in 1936… Powerless, keyless and shortly to be dismissed from the zoo and turned out of her home, she listened at night to the distress calls of the zoo’s remaining carnivores: the last thylacine, a Bengal tiger and a pair of lions, all too frequently locked outside in the open to face the cold, rain and snow of the Hobart winter.”
The thylacine died on the night of 7 September 1936.
Elegiac in tone, capturing the inhumanity of humanity, Owen’s work is imbued with the sense not only of loss — because the species will never be seen again — but of lastness.
Late and Last
The English Romantic writers, 1798-1832 were obsessed with lateness and lastness. Mary Shelley, of this group of writers, authored the first novel about lastness: The Last Man (1826). In addition to Shelley’s classic work, ‘the last man’ was the subject of a play by Thomas Lovell Beddoes, a poem by Thomas Campbell and a famous painting by John Martin. Across the Atlantic, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans also appeared in the same year as Shelley’s novel.
In Coleridge’s famous The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the mariner is haunted by his lastness: he is the sole surviving member from the ship. Coleridge’s mariner mourns:
“The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I”
In Byron’s apocalyptic ‘Darkness’, every dog, says Byron, ‘assail’d their masters’. Even here, there is lastness, because Byron adds: ‘save one’. This last of the faithful dogs, supposedly humanity’s most loyal friend, dies of starvation because he refuses to leave the master’s corpse:
“he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famish’d men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
Lured their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answered not with a caress—he died.
Ben Hutchinson in his study of this preoccupation with being the last of its kind writes: “Lastness refers to the final link in a teleological chain… the last man may be the conclusion, but he is also the culmination of a given tradition or race.”
In these texts, the sense of being the end of the line is a haunting one, as Shelley’s last man enunciates it: ‘To none could I ever relate the story of my adversity; no hope had I’.
Endling Narratives
But for the last of the animal species, or at least those humanity has witnessed dying, poignant records survive. Jeff Corwin writes of one such:
“George is the last living member of a subspecies of giant tortoises called the Abingdon Island tortoise … This gentle giant … quickly became a symbol for world wildlife conservation… he remains a poignant image of the last of his kind, a solitary sentinel of extinction.”
One of the most famous recorded deaths of an endling is of Martha, the last Passenger Pigeon. Martha’s final years have been documented.
Joel Greenberg writes:
“Martha had sole reign of her environs for another four years or so. Her fame grew and people made her aviary a destination. The New York Zoo is said to have done all they could to get Stephans to part with his unique exhibit. Protected from the violence that would have claimed her in nature, Martha’s vitality slowly ebbed. Keepers lowered her perch so it was mere inches above the floor. She rarely moved anymore, hardly the performance expected by the crowds. Joseph Stephans, Sol’s son, said that “on Sundays we would rope off the cage to keep the public from throwing sand at her to make her walk around.
Most accounts say she died on September 1, 1914. Almost certainly, this was sometime after the noon hour, most probably closer to one, although it might have been four hours later. Keeper William Bruntz might have discovered her crumpled body, or perhaps the Stephanses kept her company as the life force reluctantly flickered to its conclusion, bringing closure to the feathered whirlwind that defied human understanding, if not the human capacity to destroy.”
Greenberg’s book highlights the role the Apex Predator — humans — played in the creation of species lastness.
Martha and George are ‘endlings’. The term ‘endling’ was coined in 1996 by Robert M Webster and Bruce Erickson in a letter to Nature, and is now used to describe nonhuman organisms, mostly animals and some plants, that have been identified as ‘the last vestige of their species’.
Sense of an Ending
Endling narratives are important for several reasons.
The last specimen represents not just a final individual but the culmination of an entire species, a way of life, which cannot, as the philosopher Dominique Lestel says, be ever retrieved, remembered or reproduced.
Lastness adds a singularity: for not only having outlasted the others of the species but also being this culmination of a teleology that began thousands of years ago. Endling narratives are what the literary critic Ursula Heise calls ‘species elegy’, mourning for and nostalgic about species that we shall never see again.
Endling narratives are also about the biodiversity loss that Planet Earth witnesses on a daily basis. Diane Ackerman puts it well in her Rarest of the Rare: Vanishing Animals, Timeless Worlds:
“As more and more species become rare, angles of color will be deleted from this living kaleidoscope, reducing the possible combinations. Variety is not only the spice of life, it’s the indispensable ingredient”
Third, they remind us that without the animals, Planet Earth would be poorer for us. Hence, Charlotte McConaghy opens her novel Migrations with the statement: ‘The animals are dying. Soon we will be alone here’. The novel’s protagonist says:
“The Arctic tern has the longest migration of any animal. It flies from the Arctic all the way to the Antarctic, and then back again within a year. …And because the terns live to be thirty or so, the distance they will travel over the course of their lives is the equivalent of flying to the moon and back three times … I think of the courage of this and I could cry with it.”
Later, McConaghy ponders the moment when the last of the terns, the endling, would die: ‘What happens when the last of the terns die? Nothing will ever be as brave again’.
But the larger point many of the endling narratives make is: while species loss is a process of Nature, the role humanity has played in their disappearance is undeniable.
Endling narratives communicate the sense of an ending, of the lives of others, but also of ourselves.