Losing Things

History is rife with lost things. The ancient library in Alexandria. Shakespeare’s manuscripts. Pirate treasures. Famous paintings stolen and never seen again.

I’ll bet that many of us have personally experienced losing things that were important to us. Rings. Keys. Children’s drawings.

The loss of physical objects can be heartbreaking on a personal level and devastating on a cultural level. Losing the library their city had been famous for must have changed the way ancient Egyptians thought about Alexandria. Losing a drawing your child gave you 40 years ago must be crushing.

There have been times we humans have lost something irreplaceable, another living creature, because we imagined the species to be in endless supply, as we have wantonly eradicated it. This is called anthropogenic extinction, and the Passenger Pigeon is a sad example of it.

Once the most numerous bird in North America, up to 5 billion Passenger Pigeons sailed above prior to the 1800’s. The skies would turn dark with great numbers of migrating pigeons, and there seemed no end to the supply of this game bird. But the introduction of the shotgun, and the relentless appropriation of their habitat by humans gradually brought their great numbers down to dangerously low levels. And the hunting and habitat loss continued, until by 1870 the population of the Passenger Pigeon had dropped to the point that it could no longer recover. The last wild pigeon was shot (note, they were still being hunted even when on the brink of extinction) in 1902. A few clusters were kept captive, and the last survivor (named Martha, after Martha Washington) died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.

Today, the only way to see a Passenger Pigeon is as a museum specimen.

Passenger Pigeons in the NYS Museum Collection

I wonder about all these losses, those inflicted on us and those we bring about ourselves. How does loss change us? How much are our identities, both personal and cultural, tied up with the myriad objects and beings surrounding us? Were the ancient Egyptians changed in some fundamental way when their great library went up in flames? Is a parent’s self-identity altered when some precious creation of their child is lost? Did Americans feel different knowing that they would never again witness the flight of millions of Passenger Pigeons? Would we in America today be somehow different if those flights were still occurring?

I think that we, at least to some extent, are defined by the things and beings in our lives. And believing this should matter. Knowing what we have lost should matter. It should, at least, make the things that continue to surround and accompany us through our lives more valuable, more precious, more worthy of protecting.

We may not have the ancient papyrus scrolls from Alexandria. But we have books. Books that we are free to read and that are available in many public and school libraries. Knowing what has been lost should make every one of those books precious, whether we choose to read them ourselves or not.

We may have lost something precious to us, something made by a child long ago. We may not have that anymore. But we know that all around us there are children who want to give from their hearts. And knowing how precious and irreplaceable those gifts can be for parents, we might want to support the arts in schools at a time when funds are scarce for such programs.

We may not have the Passenger Pigeon. Extinction is, after all, forever. But we still have Sea Otters. We still have the Hawaiian Monk Seal. We barely have the North Atlantic Right Whale. We still have bumblebees and coral reefs. But for how long? All are threatened or endangered, some are on the brink of extinction. We have lost an abundant species. This should make protecting threatened ones paramount.

If loss changes us, may we embrace that change. May the hole we feel in our reality drive us to prevent that reality from further tearing. Since we can’t bring back the lost, may we preserve what survives.

To learn more about some of the threatened species of the US: https://wildaid.org/endangered-species-us/

To learn more about the Passenger Pigeon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon