The Vanishing

'Extinction Cabinet' by Nicholas Kahn & Richard Selesnick. From ‘Truppe Fledermaus: 100 Stories of the Drowning World'.

We are living in an age of loss: the sixth mass extinction. Following the shocking report that the planet has lost half its wildlife in the past 40 years, we bring you ‘The Vanishing’. In this section we seek responses not only to extinction – the deaths of entire species – but to the quieter extirpations, losses and disappearances that are steadily stripping our world of its complexity and beauty. How do we, as writers and artists, stay human during such times?

The Passengers

Nicholas
27th March, 2024
Conservation biologist Nicholas Wilkinson begins to tell the story of the dove, 'Ectopistes migratorius', and is overwhelmed by the number of wings around him and the difficulty of accounting for one of the most notorious extinctions ever to occur on the planet: the destruction of the passenger pigeon.
The Vanishing