Imagining Extinction: Black Rhinoceros and the Last of the Race

Black Rhinoceros / Extinction

Imagining Extinction:

The Black Rhinoceros and the Last of the Race

This paper intends to discuss the idea of extinction. Such discussion necessarily entails a certain amount of scientific discourse, but in particular I would like to ramify the scientific discussion with some literary and cultural insights as well. The reason for this should be obvious. Extinction as a scientific concept is the end of a species: as species are scientifically defined by the ability to breed and create fertile offspring, the very concept of a species depends upon the notion of reproduction, perpetuation, posterity. Extinction, therefore, entails the cessation of this reproduction, followed by the death of all representatives of the given species. In discussing the idea of extinction, however, we face a standard philosophical problem. To the extent that we are discussing death, there is nothing to discuss. Disregarding the perpetual publishing frenzy purporting to describe "near death experience" (like the recent book and film Heaven is for Real, based on the account given by a five-year-old child) and various well-known religious myths and testimonies, no one has a firsthand idea or conception of the state of being dead. From the scientific perspective, it is a state about which no subjective evidence can be offered. However, as regards extinction, this is also quite clearly a process: a period of time exists between the moment when a species ceases to reproduce, and the moment when the last living representative of that species is actually dead. It is this time period that I wish to focus on, in part because it is the only space for a human imaginative response (or any other kind of response) to the very idea of extinction. In this paper, therefore, I will pursue three basic lines of inquiry: how science deals with this period of time, with particular attention paid to the question of whether or not we are all living in such an imaginative space at the present moment (in what might be called the Anthropocene Extinction Event), how culture deals with the same period of time (in a consideration of what might be termed the mythology of the "last of the race"), and offering a specific examination of one case study (the critically endangered black rhinoceros, or Diceros bicornis).

To begin, let us consider some noteworthy examples -- noteworthy, perhaps, because of the accretion of cultural meaning onto what might otherwise be considered unremarkable -- and contemplate the cases of George and Martha. When I say that I am keen to examine the cultural meaning of these cases, I will begin with an obvious disclaimer: I am not referring to George and Martha Washington, the first President and First Lady of the United States of America. However, that historical duo is not entirely irrelevant to what we are discussing because -- in a country whose political system was founded in opposition to hereditary monarchy -- it is worth mentioning that George and Martha Washington died without having children together. (Martha Washington had four children by her first marriage, but her marriage to George produced no offspring.) In some sense, then, the failure to reproduce could be understood as a larger statement about human social organization, and the resistance to biological inheritance of culturally-constructed status and meaning (like being the "father of one's country" without literally being the father to any offspring). In any case, the historical George and Martha Washington have this status in common with the actual George and Martha that should be discussed: that would be Lonesome George, the last surviving representative of the Pinta Island subspecies of Galapagos tortoise (Chelonoidis nigra abingdonii), and Martha, the last surviving passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius). Lonesome George is, of course, a recent phenomenon: he died in 2012, in captivity, at the Charles Darwin Research Station in the Galapagos Islands. Martha, who was indeed named in honor of Martha Washington, died in 1914, in captivity, at the Cincinnati Zoo in Ohio (Greenberg 186).

Both of these animals have received a significant amount of media and cultural attention, perhaps because of the innate spectacle involved in considering each as the "last of their race." It is worth noting that species become critically endangered or exceptionally rare on a daily basis, yet human beings have not seen fit to come up with a cute nickname for the most recently-discovered coelocanth. There is cultural meaning in the very fact that humans feel the need to refer to this deceased tortoise as "George" and the last passenger pigeon as "Martha" -- it is, to a certain extent, anthropomorphism that perhaps betrays a significant sense of guilt. However, in each case, there was significant cultural meaning accorded to what was entailed in the extinction event. Lonesome George received a significant amount of attention because of attempts on the part of conservationists to get him to breed before he perished -- as a member of a subspecies, it was possible that George could have fertilized the egg of another subspecies of Galapagos tortoise, but the attempts were unsuccessful. But more to the point, George was from the Galapagos, famous for being the locus in which Charles Darwin observed and worked through his theory of natural selection. What was not discussed was the way in which Darwinian science might indeed complicate the notion of Lonesome George's death. After all, the theory of natural selection posits reproduction and extinction, considered as vastly long historical processes, as being the origin of species in the first place. This is emphasized by Barnosky et al. In a 2011 paper for Nature: they write "Of the four billion species estimated to have evolved on the Earth over the last 3.5 billion years, some 99% are gone. That shows how very common extinction is, but normally it is balanced by speciation" (51). Rockstrom et al. In their 2009 paper for Nature wish to emphasize that the current conditions definitely qualify as an extraordinary circumstance: "Species extinction is a natural process, and would occur without human actions. However, biodiversity loss in the Anthropocene has accelerated massively. Species are becoming extinct at a rate that has not been seen since the last global mass-extinction event." (472).

In the case of Martha, the last passenger pigeon, we face a very different cultural meaning. In his 2014 study of the extinction of this bird, published for the centennial of Martha's death at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914, Greenberg notes some extraordinary facts about the species:

Nothing in the human record suggests that there was ever another bird like the passenger pigeon. At the time that Europeans first arrived in North America, passenger pigeons likely numbered anywhere from three to five billion. It was the most abundant bird on the continent, if not the planet, and may well have comprised 25 to 40% of North America's bird life. When the flocks moved for migration or foraging, the earth below would be darkened by shadows for hours: famed naturalist John James Audobon recorded a pigeon flight along the Ohio River that eclipsed the sun for three days (1).

Unlike the Galapagos tortoise -- which is a rare and unusual animal confined to an extremely small geographic region (tiny volcanic islands off the coast of Ecuador) -- the passenger pigeon was about as common a species as could be imagined; their numbers, as Greenberg notes, were vast. It was purely human activity that managed to wipe out these vast numbers in what was a relatively short space of time. Moreoever, as Primack and Cafaro note in their 2014 editorial for Biological Conservation, the passenger pigeon's extinction has been wrongly used to indicate that such a vast change in the speciation of an entire continent is by no means catastrophic, although they are keen to dispute this facile reasoning:

Presumably these extinction events were indeed catastrophic for the species in question, and perhaps too for other species that preyed on or parasitized them, or depended on them in other ways. But such catastrophes do not appear to count morally for the authors -- they are not real catastrophes -- as long as the "ecosystem functions" that benefit people remain intact. Regarding the near-extinction of the American chestnut and the demise of the passenger pigeon, among the most abundant tree and bird species in temperate eastern North American forests five hundred years ago, if they had no "measurable effects," we may assume that was because no one bothered to measure them at the time. (1)

However this provides us with an indication of the current disconnect between scientific discourse concerning extinction, on the one hand, and the moral or cultural discourse on the other hand (as Primack and Cafaro's editorial is entitled "Species extinction is a great moral wrong"). Science has no way of quantifying ethics. When it comes to species extinction, the approach of science is bound to seem remote from anyone trying to translate it into cultural terms. While the meaning may be fairly clear, it is not easily packaged into narratives -- and while Lonesome George and Martha make for astonishing narratives, they are individuals who hold an equivocal place in the experimental and statistical methods of science.

A survey of scientific responses to extinction at the present moment is fairly unambiguous, however. Paleontologist James Kirchner calculated in 2002 that extinction rates could more or less be statistically inferred from the fossil record, and uses this to quantify what he terms "evolutionary speed limits," which is to say the rate at which the Darwinian process of natural selection (which depends upon the effective extinction of species insofar as they will diversify and evolve into other species) to note that, in the current moment, the extinction rate proceeds so rapidly that "diversification rates are unlikely to accelerate enough to keep pace with it. Thus, widespread depletion of biodiversity would probably be permanent on multimillion-year timescales." (67). This emphasis on biodiversity, which is of course readily quantifiable by science, is ambiguous however, insofar as there is no ready way to predict the consequences of such a rapid decline in biodiversity. This is emphasized by Bradley et al. In a 2012 article for Nature, where the authors note that "Functional traits of organisms have large impacts on the magnitude of ecosystem functions, which give rise to a wide range of plausible impacts of extinction on ecosystem function." (61). In other words, all of the different ecological roles that might have been played by the vast number of passenger pigeons in the North American ecosystem are impossible to quantify in full -- to some extent, even a hundred years after their extinction, this remains a scientific experiment in progress whose upshot cannot yet be confidently summarized. More to the point, as Naheem et al. indicate in a 2012 article for Science, it is entirely possible that the way in which the human imagination approaches these issues -- by offering cute names to the last animals of their species, or focusing on the preservation of charismatic species rather than the more abstract conception of preserving biodiversity within whole ecosystems -- may actually draw attention from the more scientifically significant activity: regarding the present scientific emphasis on biodiversity, Naheem et al. write

This focus is sometimes understandably seen as contrary to widespread and urgent conservation efforts to save species and ecosystems from extinction for non-utilitarian, cultural reasons. Indeed, species targeted for conservation, reserves, and protected areas represent a tiny fraction of the biosphere and are therefore not likely to strongly influence biogeochemically derived ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration and food production. Yet the cultural values of biological diversity can themselves be construed as ecosystem services, and their preservation is fully coherent with non-utilitarian conservation efforts and arguably no less important. Nothing in biodiversity and ecosystem functioning research should dissuade conservation from its efforts to bring our age of extinction to a halt. (1406)

This could be taken as a scientific way of noting the relative unimportance of, say, the Galapagos in the vast scheme of things. When Lonesome George becomes the public face of biodiversity depletion in the past five years, this leads to the movements to approach this small archipelago which is, to employ the words of Butchart et al., a "tiny fraction of the biosphere." The attempt to maintain and mate Galapagos tortoises and preserve them from extinction is thus a distraction from the more urgent trend of stopping the overall depletion of biodiversity, for the simple fact that the results of the larger trend are far more unpredictable. This is emphasized by Barnosky et al. In their 2012 article "Approaching a State Shift in the Earth's Biosphere," which notes that there is a fundamental unpredictability about biological processes until they reach an obvious tipping point:

It is now well documented that biological systems on many scales can shift rapidly from an existing state to a radically different state. Biological 'states' are neither steady nor in equilibrium; rather, they are characterized by a defined range of deviations from a mean condition over a prescribed period of time. The shift from one state to another can be caused by either a 'threshold' or 'sledgehammer' effect. State shifts resulting from threshold effects can be difficult to anticipate, because the critical threshold is reached as incremental changes accumulate and the threshold value generally is not known in advance. (52)

In other words, if we are indeed living through the Anthropocene Mass Extinction Event -- as plenty of scientists are willing to argue that we are -- then to some extent the full consequences of the event will only be quantifiable at the precise moment that it is too late to do anything useful to forestall it. This is consistent with the point made by Butchart et al. In their 2010 survey for Science, in which they consider what has actually been done to halt the loss of biodiversity, and they conclude that the only possible solutions would be extremely large-scale policy approaches:

Our results show that, despite a few encouraging achievements, efforts to address the loss of biodiversity need to be substantially strengthened by reversing detrimental policies, fully integrating biodiversity into broad-scale land-use planning, incorporating its economic value adequately into decision making, and sufficiently targeting, funding and implementing policies that tackle biodiversity loss, among other measures…[including]… sustained investment in coherent global biodiversity monitoring. (1168)

However this would require an alteration of the cultural landscape potentially as vast as the alteration humans are currently permitting to occur on the planet's ecosystems. The real difficulty is the gap between what culture is capable of imagining -- Lonesome George and Martha -- and what science is suggesting might potentially be required to halt the troubling present trends.

We return then to the question of the imagination, and here I would like to note an interesting cultural trend. In the beginning of the twenty-first century, the face of species extinction is Lonesome George, the Galapagos tortoise (representative of a small and geographically-constrained species). In the beginning of the twentieth century, the face of species extinction was Martha, the passenger pigeon (representative of a once-vast population that was exterminated with bewildering celerity). What was the status of extinction a hundred years before that, in the early nineteenth century? The culture of the early nineteenth century is, after all, what produced Darwin, and it is fascinating to note that the scientific state of that moment was only emerging from the belief that extinction was not possible. Darwin's deep influence by the geology of the time hinged upon the early nineteenth century scientific debate between Catastrophism -- the notion that the observable features of the earth (like mountain ranges) had been produced by a catastrophic event in the past (such as Noah's flood) -- and Uniformitarianism, the more recent theory advanced by Charles Lyell which held that "all elevations and subsidences of the land were due to the accumulated effects of observable causes such as earthquakes and erosion" (Bowler 61). Darwin's own conversion to Lyell's view -- which happened on the same expedition where he visited the Galapagos, and was influenced by his observation of an earthquake at Concepcion -- was crucial in his understanding that, just as the earth's features must have taken place through these slow gradual processes over millions of years, so did the emergence of species take place in similar fashion. But the parenthetical invocation of Noah's flood is meant to prove a point: science in the early nineteenth century was only gradually moving out of inherited paradigms from a theological worldview, and species were no exception. The Biblical story of Noah seems to indicate a God that occasionally destroys vast populations, but that also does not permit any of the species that He created to go extinct. In the early nineteenth century, the first sustained scientific considerations of the fossil record represented the route whereby these theological ideas would be questioned: after all, fossils had previously been thought to be evidence of animals exterminated by the Biblical flood.

Out of this cultural ferment in the early nineteenth century, then, emerges a new genre of literature, the "last of the race" narrative. This genre has been examined (in a workmanlike and incomplete fashion) by Fiona J. Stafford, who traces the slow emergence of this type of story from earlier fictions. But essentially, what becomes a fascination for culture in the early nineteenth century is the story of last representatives of their kind, the human equivalents of Lonesome George and Martha. We may see it operating in a kind of early sci-fi mode in The Last Man, an 1826 novel by Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein:

Patience, oh reader! whoever thou art, wherever thou dwellest, whether of race spiritual, or, sprung from some surviving pair, thy nature will be human, thy habitation the earth; thou wilt here read of the acts of the extinct race, and wilt ask wonderingly, if they, who suffered what thou findest recorded, were of frail flesh and soft organization like thyself. Most true, they were -- weep therefore; for surely, solitary being, thou wilt be of gentle disposition; shed compassionate tears; but the while lend thy attention to the tale, and learn the deeds and sufferings of thy predecessors. (Shelley VI)

Shelley's novel, which is set in the late twenty-first century, depicts a world in which the entire human race is wiped out by a plague. The narrator of the book is the "Last Man" of the title, and in this passage he raises the crucial contradiction about this mode of imaginative narrative: if he is indeed the last living human being on earth, for whom is he writing this book? Within the rhetoric of the passage above, Shelley's narrator implies that the only potential readers for this book -- given the circumstances it depicts -- would be ghostly ("race spiritual") or descended from some new Adam and Eve ("sprung from some surviving pair") or otherworldly, whether angels or space aliens ("thy nature will be human, thy habitation the earth"). In other words, the attempt to imagine a cataclysmic and scientifically plausible mass extinction of humans seems to open up the possibilities for the religious imagination to sneak back in, even though Mary Shelley herself and her novel were not religiously inclined in the least.

What is really being imagined here? It is perhaps easier to see when we consider another novel with a similar title character, also published in the same year: this is James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans. The title character here is Uncas, who is the son of the last chief of the Mohican tribe, Chingchagook. Of course, from a scientific point-of-view, there is a difference between Fenimore Cooper's novel and Shelley's: the Mohicans are not entirely extinct, because some members of Chingchagook's tribe have intermarried with other tribes. What is going extinct is the tribe itself, and its culture:

"My tribe is the grandfather of nations, but I am an unmixed man. The blood of chiefs is in my veins, where it must stay forever. The Dutch landed, and gave my people the fire-water; they drank until the heavens and the earth seemed to meet, and they foolishly thought they had found the Great Spirit. Then they parted with their land. Foot by foot, they were driven back from the shores, until I, that am a chief and a Sagamore, have never seen the sun shine but through the trees, and have never visited the graves of my fathers… so all of my family departed, each in his turn, to the land of spirits. I am on the hilltop and must go down into the valley; and when Uncas follows in my footsteps there will no longer be any of the blood of the Sagamores, for my boy is the last of the Mohicans." (Fenimore Cooper 3)

The notion that cultures go extinct is very different, however, from the notion that entire species go extinct. However, the idea that cultures go extinct is observable to almost anyone who is literate, and in the early nineteenth century, the sense of anxiety about culture gets combined with the sense of extinction to produce a remarkable cultural moment, where poets (like Lord Byron in his poem "Darkness," which imagines a similar human extinction to Mary Shelley's novel) and novelists (like Mary Shelley or Fenimore Cooper) are reacting to the same basic conceptual categories that are also informing the likes of Lyell and Darwin. To a certain extent, this represents a broad scale cultural crisis that affects both the sciences and the humanities in the early nineteenth century.

The best indication that the notion of extinction was entailed in some sort of broad scale cultural crisis, however, is found in the most successful example of "last of the race" fiction that was written in this time period. I describe Fiona J. Stafford's survey of this literary genre as incomplete because, bewilderingly, she does not mention it -- but perhaps she (like many others) does not regard it as fiction. Like The Last Man and The Last of the Mohicans -- but published four years after those two novels, in 1830 -- the title character of this book is the last remaining representative of his civilization, who have all been killed off, and writes his story in the hopes that someone will eventually read it:

Behold I, Moroni, do finish the record of my father, Mormon. Behold, I have but few things to write, which things I have been commanded by my father.

And now it came to pass that after the great and tremendous battle at Cumorah, behold, the Nephites who had escaped into the country southward were hunted by the Lamanites, until they were all destroyed.

And my father also was killed by them, and I even remain alone to write the sad tale of the destruction of my people. But behold, they are gone, and I fulfil the commandment of my father. And whether they will slay me, I know not.

Therefore I will write and hide up the records in the earth; and whither I go it mattereth not. (Mormon 8:1-4)

When I suggest that The Book of Mormon, first published by Joseph Smith in 1830, is the most successful "last of the race" fiction that would emerge in the same period of time when scientific ideas of extinction were first being explored in any kind of depth, I am not implying its literary artistic success. Instead, I think the way in which The Book of Mormon is a success is an indication of the deep cultural anxieties that underlie our discourse of extinction altogether. Obviously the story that is told here is basically Biblical fan-fiction, while its status as a product of the early nineteenth century -- rather than the fifth century A.D., or whenever it purports to be taking place -- is perfectly indicated by the fact that, just like Mary Shelley and James Fenimore Cooper, Joseph Smith allows for a narrator who indicates the same anxieties about extinction. Indeed, the Book of Mormon even follows the Last of the Mohicans in tying these ideas to an outsider's sense of Native American cultures -- which, like the bison and the passenger pigeon, would be subject to the same sort of gradual displacement and extermination by the growth of European transplants in North America. But my point here is simple: the same ideas about extinction that produced a number of noteworthy literary works in the early nineteenth century, and that would influence Lyell and Darwin in establishing the foundations of modern biology as well, were also used in the same time period to found a religion which, as of 2014, continues to thrive, despite all available scientific evidence to dispute the claims advanced in its central text. It is no secret to consider religion as a cultural response to the fear of death, that experience from which none of us return -- certainly the foundation of Christianity itself, and its reliance on the resurrected Jesus Christ and the stories of Lazarus along with its promise of an afterlife, makes that clear. But the foundations of Mormonism seem to expand this fear of death into a fear of extinction -- cultural or tribal extinction, racial extinction, and ultimately (considering that Mormonism promises an afterlife in which the faithful will each get their own personal planet) even biological or planetary extinction as well. Out of the same cultural moment that produced the science that underlies modern ideas about biodiversity and mass extinction, we have the emergence of a religion, based on a bad example of certain literary trends of the same moment, which also represents the dark underside of the fears related to the emergence of this scientific understanding. Joseph Smith and Charles Darwin seem to be dark doppelgangers, taking the same cultural inheritance in the early nineteenth century, and using it erect contrary edifices, one religious and wildly implausible, one scientific yet still frequently derided as wildly implausible by religious persons.