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Does it matter? What claim should this bird, or any other missing creature, have on our conscience? Extinction is nothing new; there are more extinct species than extant ones. We ourselves stand on the bones of superseded primate ancestors. Extinction is hardly a phenomenon only of modern industrial civilization; it is widely believed that the woolly mammoth was hunted to extinction by Neolithic man, and I learned from a book about avian extinction called Hope is the Thing with Feathers that "prehistoric islanders in the Pacific killed off some 2,000 bird species, diminishing by one-fifth the global number through a variety of activities, including habitat destruction."
But there is something about the disappearance of animals in the modern age that is different. I would not presume to know the mental state of those prehistoric islanders, but I can't help but imagine they were not conscious of the end they were causing. Edward O. Wilson, the great biologist, has speculated that, having evolved in the midst of abundance whose limit we could never fathom, we are all but programmed to go at nature with an exterminating fury necessary for our own survival that, until quite recently--when modern technology amplified human will to an equally unfathomable degree--had few lasting consequences.
I associate that pre-modern delusion of abundance with my assimilating grandmother, who was born on the Lower East Side in 1900. Shedding Yiddish and Jewish ritual observance as a young woman, it never occurred to her that her language or people could disappear in traumatic fashion; there was plenty back in the old country and a sense of everrenewing abundance. Similarly, those first settlers who came here--like Audubon himself, who arrived in this country from France in 1803, the year the Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the country--could hardly imagine that swinging an ax or firing a gun might, in the space of 50 or 100 years, lead to the end of entire species. Nowadays, though, we must prop up the natural world we evolved to contend with, which is, to say the least, stressful and confusing.
