Hello, friends.

Hello, friends. Well, you know, I don't really talk too much about environmentalism on this show.

And I thought maybe I should address it. I did one episode a long time ago called Destroy Nature Before It Destroys

Us. And I'm going to carry out some of those themes here years later and talk about extinction.

Because there's a shift in the way we think about permanence and nature and animals and the planet, somewhere in the way we think about permanence and nature and animals and the planet somewhere in the late

18th, early 19th century. And that shift is what we call extinction. Extinction, the disappearance of a

species, the dwindling of it from our sight, the desperate attempt to recuperate it, to hold

onto it, and then one by one watching the animal disappear. And this is a narrative held in place

with guilt and sorrow and shame and regret, anger. It's held in place with anger, and now protest

and symbols and signs.

Extinction marks an anger at human activity, which also must at the same time mark a recognition

of the power of the human being to destroy utterly. Rather than sort of talk about all those feelings, there's this poem called

For a Coming Extinction by W.S. Merwin, which I'll read to you, that I think sums it up pretty

well. Gray whale, now that we are sending you to the end, that great God, tell him that we who follow you

invented forgiveness and forgive nothing. I write as though you could understand, and I could say it,

one must always pretend something among the dying when you have left the seas nodding on their

stalks empty of you. Tell him that we were made

on another day. The bewilderment will diminish like an echo, winding along your inner mountains

unheard by us, and find its way out, leaving behind it the future, dead, and ours. When you will not see again the whale calves trying the light, consider what you will find

in the Black Garden and its court.

The sea cows, the great ox, the gorillas, the irreplaceable hosts ranged countless and

foreordaining as stars are sacrifices.

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