Before Charles Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, he spent twenty years sketching out his ideas in a series of journals called the Transmutation Notebooks and the Metaphysical Notebooks, archived now at the University of Cambridge. In one of these journals, called Notebook B, there is an incidental sketch, a few scratched lines like the barren twigs of a winter tree. The branches are labelled with tentative letters, almost apologetically. It is the first moment when he ventured, in writing, the possibility of a branching, eternal tree of life. I am interested in that moment of knowing, that dawning of realization that the world has changed, is changing, and can never be the same again.
My own personal moment of realization, the truest and bitterest revelation of extinction that I have known, came when I was nineteen, an undergraduate student in biology, spending a summer doing field research in Kenya. It was my introduction to both the wonder and monotony of field science. The contemporary scientist is Nature’s actuary. Their job is to reduce the world to a series of numbers that can be punched into increasingly complex statistical equations and published in esoteric journals with high barriers to entry and minuscule readerships. This is how truth is defined in a technocratic society. Anything that can’t be counted simply doesn’t count.
This is not to impugn the nobility of counting, of the close and careful observation of nature, of the rational, ordered efforts to understand it. But a method is not an ethic, or a philosophy. What should be a tool is too often treated as a motive. The approach creates a problem for wildlife conservation. If any other human impulse in a wild place must become subservient to a line in some accountant’s ledger, then the wild will always lose out. Meaning, beauty—existence itself— cannot compete with a banker on the banker’s terms.
We have been too slow to learn this.
In Kenya, this actuarial approach manifested as weeks spent in a Land Rover, counting herds of zebra with a handheld mechanical tally counter in my right hand and binoculars in my left. Thousands of zebras in total, censusing a quadrant of the Serengeti, day after day after day. I dreamed of zebra. I saw their stripes everywhere, in shadows and campfire smoke.
One morning, on our way out to a census site, the CB radio squawked to life in a staccato gunshot of garbled Kiswahili. Hardly decipherable, but the syllables tugged at the corner of my mind. I should know those words, I thought. I’ve heard them before. But there was no time to dwell, as more pressing concerns announced themselves: namely, holding on. The driver wrenched the Jeep to the left, arm over arm churning at the wheel. Roads were rough and rutted that summer.
Their furrows reminded me of Rembrandt’s paintings of old men, brows carved deep by hard use and long years. It was the eighth year of drought. Over fifteen years later the drought remains largely unbroken.
Navigating those roads at speed, dodging potholes and divots in a bad-tempered Jeep, required an unerring sense of rhythm and timing. Since the vehicle was too old for power-steering, diamond-hard triceps helped, too. Our driver had both timing and muscle in abundance. George had a gold molar, a biology degree from the University of Nairobi, and—according to himself—a girlfriend in every town from Eldoret to Mombasa. He wrestled us off the road and onto a rolling stretch of waist-high red oat grass. The plains were a far smoother ride, and both our joints and the Jeep’s suspension settled down to coast over kilometres of unbroken grassland.
The most popular guide to field work suggests updating your will before heading into the field.
Despite its name, only the flowering tuft of red oat grass is actually red. The rest is yellow, the glowing yellow of a dawning light that gives the East
African savannah its characteristic shade. It is a hardy, drought-resistant grass that grows in middling soil, under baking sun, almost as if out of spite. Pulled and dried, the stems are good for thatching or woven fishing nets. Ground down, the seeds make a reasonable flour. Just about every living thing, human or otherwise, makes use of it on the savannah. Herbivores eat it; carnivores lurk in it. Our Jeep was neither. We devoured the plains, cutting down stalks of grass with the grille, only for them to spring back up in our wake. The lasting sign of our passage was a suggestion of movement, a sinuous shape of memory in the grass, like the game trail of some new, mechanical beast burst out of evolutionary time.
Field biologists are generally dutiful and duty-bound. They live in a continuous state of anxiety and curiosity. Curious to see what parts of nature might be revealed to the observant watcher; anxious if they sleep in a little bit or take a day off that the revelation might be missed—and with it gone too the grants, publications, and tenure track job at a tier-one research university. Even worse, that missed revelation might reveal itself to a rival researcher instead: Being scooped, in academic parlance, is worse than death.
In summer, biologists scatter from their fusty university hives into the world to gather tidbits of knowledge and observation, which they bring back in the fall to sustain themselves through the long, cruel winter of teaching undergraduates. Field work is work.
The hours are long, often spent in remote places, under physical duress, for months at a time. The most popular guide to field work suggests updating your will before heading into the field.
It is a doomed species.
Most long-term biologists I know carry a litany of injuries. My own, incurred by my mid-thirties, include a couple of slipped discs, a bad knee, a series of gnarly scars, and a recurrent illness—after-effects of a parasitic infection picked up on a Honduran mountainside. These are the physical costs, but there are others. Maintaining stable relationships is difficult when you’re swanning off blissfully beyond the reach of a cell-phone signal for a quarter of every year. A girlfriend broke up with me in the middle of a field season once, by email because she could reach me no other way. I didn’t find out about my newly single status for another five weeks.
“The effort is the sacrifice,” writes the ethnobotanist Wade Davis, “a term that does not mean to give but rather to make sacred.” The wages are paid in wonder.
The radio squawked again. We were already running late that morning. The Jeep had a flat. The spare was also flat, and the patch kit had grown legs and walked away. Someone had to volunteer to cycle to the nearest village and cadge a replacement, fifteen kilometres each way, some of it on a narrow lane through tall hacks of dense grass. Good lion territory. I affected a sudden scientific interest in the goings-on of a family of vervet monkeys in a nearby tree until another volunteer had been nominated. I’ve never been much of a cyclist.
Eventually, we hit the road again, gunning for our assigned quadrant of the park. Given our lateness, only a few things would be deemed worthy enough to delay getting to the census site. George kept mum. He liked to surprise us. In the Jeep, we speculated. Number one: blood. A fresh kill triggers the atavistic voyeur in even the gentlest heart. Two: babies—wild dogs nursing pups or a hyena den springing with kits. The third possibility was something rare, something we might not live to see again.
George slowed the Jeep to a crawl, and we crested a minor rise in the grass. In the near distance a great grey boulder rose above the red tufts. It looked like a glacial erratic, a massive stony deposition millions of years in the making. Then it moved, shuffling its bulk awkwardly with the heavy weight of prehistory. It cropped the savannah with wide, mobile lips, tasting the air like a sommelier. I understood then the word that I hadn’t been able to make out on the radio: kifaru—rhinoceros. Specifically, a northern white rhinoceros, one of the rarest animals in the world.
It wasn’t always so. In the Eocene epoch of Earth’s history—fifty-five million years ago, or just yesterday in geologic time—ours was a planet of rhinos. Dozens of species roamed and rutted on a tropical Earth, from the pig-sized Menoceras to the significantly larger Paraceratherium linxiaense, an animal almost as large as one of London’s red double-decker buses. The Eocene, Greek for “dawn,” was when mammals first evolved. Evolution was experimenting and became a little overfond of rhinos. Who can blame it? They have a certain charm, like a grumpy, nearsighted great uncle who always keeps candy in his pockets.
Of the twenty-six genera and perhaps a hundred species of rhinoceros living in the Eocene, six species survived to encounter humans. Of those six, five still exist. Three of them (the Sumatran, the Javan, and the black rhino) are critically endangered. The fourth, the Indian rhinoceros, is vulnerable, its habitat shrinking rapidly as fragmented and isolated population groups spread across a shattered landscape littered with invasive plant species poisonous to the animals. The fifth is the white rhinoceros, which is divided into two subspecies: The southern white rhino is relatively abundant, the only rhinoceros species currently considered unthreatened by extinction. The continued existence of the northern white rhino, on the other hand, will be measured not in centuries, not in decades, but in years. It is a doomed species.
What is lost when a species is driven extinct? We evolved alongside rhinoceroses, and though our trajectories as species have been wildly different, they are a part of our nature, a part of our histories, our cultures, our geographies. Some of the earliest-known cave art is of the woolly rhinoceros. The Paleolithic cave paintings of Chauvet depict vivid herds of rhinos at rest and at play. They are the paintings of a skilled artist and a careful observer. Some are painted with a stuttering distortion, like a computer image that’s failed to fully download. To a modern eye they can look amateurish, like rough sketches begun and abandoned, but that’s a judgment that fails to take their context into account. In the flickering flame of firelight, the stutters take on a zoetrope effect, creating the illusion of rhinos in motion. The first animated film, and the first nature documentary, invented thirty-one thousand years ago on the walls of a mountain cave in southern France.
How easy it is to fold time in on itself and see an early human, a young woman with brown skin and brown hair lying in the sun on the grassy slope of a warm, green valley. She is watching herds of rhino graze, the same way we might’ve once watched bison on the Great Plains, or herds of reindeer on their silent fields of golden moss. The same way we might now watch domestic cows, while dreaming of something wilder.
Woolly rhinos are dead and gone. Those valleys now are vineyards. Only the cave paintings remain, flickering, filled with purple and brown rhinos, running on and on and running nowhere.
Another small piece of the tapestry of life will fall away, leaving a world that is flatter, uglier, and emptier.
Out on the oat grass, the white rhino snuffled and snorted, shifting its bulk from one armour-clad leg to another. An oxpecker in dark plumage and a bright orange bill perched on the crown of the rhino’s head like the king’s fool. White rhinos aren’t white, of course, but the slate grey of a northern sea in winter. The reason for their name is a matter of debate. Possibly it’s a sloppy transliteration of the Dutch word wijd, meaning “wide,” to describe their broad, square mouths. Like any animal with an extensive geographic range, though, it has as many names as nations it has inhabited. Kifaru in Swahili, imikhombe in Xhosa. In Zulu they are ubhejame, and in Kinyerwanda, inkura. Along with names comes a geography of stories, legends, and myths, sewn into the culture and history of the many people who have lived and live—for now—alongside them.
In the Jeep, George, a Maasai warrior along with all his other accomplishments, shared folk-knowledge he’d heard about rhinos while growing up on the edges of the Maasai Mara Reserve. They are, he said, cantankerous animals, apt to charge at any imagined slight. But their eyesight is poor and their memories short. If charged by a rhino, the wise thing to do is simply step to the right, like a matador. The rhino will pass you by. It will lose sight of you, and then, no longer able to see you, it will forget.
In his short story “Encyclopedia of the Dead,” the Yugoslav writer Danilo Kis creates a space to remember the unmemorable. In the cobwebbed sub-basement of a Swedish library, an unnamed narrator discovers a labyrinth of twenty-six rooms. Each room is labelled with a letter of the alphabet and filled with books recounting every human life. The catch is that they are the lives of the conventionally unmemorable: individuals who find no place in a typical history book. What amazes Kis’s narrator is the encyclopedists’ felicity. Whole lives are neatly bound in tidy language, conveyed within the confines of a page or two. As the narrator reads, he realizes the compilers’ aim, to recognize that despite appearances history never truly repeats itself: that even the idea of similarity is perhaps a lie, and that the world is made of infinite variation.
The kifaru is not the same as the inkura, and both are different from imikhombe, and different again from what we call the northern white rhinoceros. Although they are all the same species, according to our labelling of species (itself a constantly changing system of categorizations), they exist in different spaces, as part of different histories and mythologies. Their thereness is inseparable from the places they lived, contributing to the complex, wondrous tapestry of ecological and cultural life in that area. This is what philosopher Arne Næss calls the gestalt of being: the complete, total polyphony of ecological, cultural, and historical life that undergirds everything that it might mean to be human. This is what extinction threatens, piece by piece, thread by thread, species by species.
We stayed with the rhino for a long time, but now I realize not nearly long enough. I was naive—I was just nineteen—and I assumed that this rhinoceros would be the first of many that I would see in my life. The brambly Scottish ecologist I was with knew better. He cried when we saw the rhino. He’d been hoping to see one in the wild for nine years. He will never see another. Neither will I. Neither will you. Only two northern white rhinos remain. Both are female. When they die, the species will end, and with it too will go, in time, its names and the stories associated with it. Another small piece of the tapestry of life will fall away, leaving a world that is flatter, uglier, and emptier.
But if we over-compartmentalize our every encounter with the world, we stunt the ability to wonder.
That was my first bitter taste of real knowledge of extinction, one I’ve tried to cling to. I know that in my own short human life I will straddle the boundary of the rhino’s many-million-year existence. I know that I have seen something that my children and grandchildren will never see, and that their children may one day consider only legend. In Lois Lowry’s dystopian novel The Giver, a world of human complexity has been flattened deliberately to remove the inconvenient excesses of emotion and feeling. No love or lust; no anger or sadness. No colour, either, or art. No animals that might cause people to wonder, or to feel wonder, at their own place in the universe.
One member of the community from each generation is nominated to hold all the collective memories of the former time: all the knowledge and all the pain, but all the beauty, too. The novel focuses on Jonas, the twelve-year-old boy designated as the one who will inherit the entire weight of the past. It is an alienating role. He is treated with distrust and fear, coupled with a kind of envy, by the other members of the community. In one scene, he tries to explain to his kid sister that the silly stuffed animal she plays with was once a real animal called a hippopotamus. She doesn’t believe him, of course. Who would? They’re absurd.
Have you ever looked at a hippo? I’m sure you have on TV, or in pictures, at the zoo, or perhaps in the wild. Maybe you know one of several popular hippo bar trivia facts. They can run as fast as a horse. They kill more people in Africa every year than any other animal.
(They’re territorial, aggressively guarding riverbanks and watering holes. Once, in Tanzania, I was out early in the morning birdwatching on a small lake. Our little aluminum dinghy drifted too close to a herd of hippos, and the dominant male glowered at us before disappearing menacingly below the surface. A stream of disconcerting bubbles began to move in our direction. We hurriedly restarted the motor and retreated to a safer distance.)
If you had to explain a hippo to an alien, how would you do it? Sonorous jaws bristled with the thick chin hairs of your least-favourite grandmother. Round, glabrous body like a naked and freshly scrubbed Emperor Nero, with a shared bad temper to boot. Squat legs and the stubby, overactive tail of a lapdog. The sight of a hippo should stun a person into dumbness. What a strange looking thing to exist. The same is true of elephants, mule deer, and sea lions. Of any living thing. That we don’t react like that is to the benefit of our ability to function in the world. Instead, like instinctive Aristotles, we compartmentalize: four legs, smooth body, big head—hippo. Best to avoid.
But if we over-compartmentalize our every encounter with the world, we stunt the ability to wonder. We drift instead toward an all-consuming abstraction, a life where nothing really exists to us, where everything becomes an abstract sign without physical, concrete signifiers.
What’s the alternative? To be so paralyzed by wonder at the way a single ant clings to the underside of a blade of grass that you are hardly capable of getting out the front door every day? Well, why not? I can think of many worse ways to live. In 2002, Qiqi, the last Yangtze River dolphin, died. The baiji, as the dolphins were known, were killed by the usual suspects: entanglement in fishing gear, collisions with ships, hunting, and habitat loss (in particular, the construction of the Three Gorges Dam). But they were also the victims of a kind of forgetting. In traditional Han folklore, the baiji was the Goddess of the Yangtze. Sighting her was a good omen, a sign of prosperity to come. In a form of cultural protection, stories about her functioned as a taboo against hunting. Don’t throttle the goose who lays the golden eggs, don’t blast from the skies the albatross who guarantees fair winds. Don’t drown the dolphin that promises a good harvest.
Every culture has its cautionary tales, and most cultures ignore them eventually, or see them deliberately ignored by industrial forces of progress. The goose is killed by her greedy owners. The Mariner shoots the albatross. China’s Great Leap Forward sought to quash old folk stories. That deliberate forgetting, combined with famine, stripped the baiji of protection. The dolphins were hunted to extinction.
The still living standing next to the nearly dead, and what’s next to die.
When Qiqi died, he was given a state funeral, televised across China. I have tried for years to find a copy of the funeral, or still photos at least. The only mentions I’ve found are in books, but I want to see. I want to know who attended and how they dressed and how they composed their faces. I want to know if the Goddess of the Yangtze was there, lurking in a water feature, witnessing her own end. But I have had no luck.
In a few years’ time, the northern white rhinoceros will be extinct. There will be a New York Times article and a few op-eds in The Guardian. The bbc will cover it, cnn might. Fox News probably won’t. It will be presented as a tragedy, but mostly as a quietly inevitable one. The subtext will be: This is the price of progress. There will probably be commemorative stamƒps. But who sends letters anymore, anyway?
For much of his adult life, Irish poet Seamus Heaney taught at Harvard. While there, he wrote the poem “Bogland,” in which he recalls seeing the skeleton of the Great Irish elk at the Harvard University Museum and reflects on the strangeness of its absence in Ireland. The Great Irish elk stood over two metres tall and weighed up to seven hundred kilograms. It was the largest deer species ever to exist in Europe or Asia. Like the woolly rhino, the Irish elk is depicted on the cave walls of Chauvet in France. Like the woolly rhino, it was also a casualty of human expansion, driven to extinction some eight thousand years ago. I’ve seen its remnants in the houses of some Irish friends, fragments of antler and bone browned by bog water, mucked up from the fens and polished to sit on fireplace mantles alongside other family heirlooms.
A few years ago, I visited the Harvard Museum of Natural History to see Heaney’s elk. Alongside it stood skeletons of other extinct animals: a giant ground sloth, a dodo, an aurochs, a thylacine. Each extinction a step closer in time to the present day. Each extinction more preventable. It’s easy to imagine a place for the northern white rhino near the end of the line. The still living standing next to the nearly dead, and what’s next to die.
Amur leopards, saolas, the orangutang. To walk among them was to feel the shadow of the future cast backward onto me: stuffed and glass-eyed mountings of species congregating at the shores of the Lethe, gazing into oblivion. The future of the museum is this: an elderly curator, shuffling around after hours, updating the placards in front of each exhibit, changing them from endangered to extinct.
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From Endings: Encounters with Extinction. Used with the permission of the publisher, House of Anansi Press. Copyright © 2026 by Neil Griffin
