Member-only story
“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.”
- Native American saying
The dodo bird and the passenger pigeon are just two I remember. You may have your own; the names of those who have gone before, who are no more.
They were not the first, and certainly won’t be the last, to disappear forever from the face of the planet.
One could build a memorial to them, like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, constructed to commemorate the dead in a war we neither won nor learned from. It might not be the thing of beauty the Memorial is, but no matter. At least it would help us remember. Only there wouldn’t be 58K names on it; instead, millions.
Unlike the names on the Memorial, they won’t be capitalized. Perhaps they should be, if that would help us better remember. Instead, they would likely be in lower case, as how I’ve written the names of the dodo bird and the passenger pigeon here.
We honor only the dead of our own species with capital letters. It is perhaps a measure of the regard in which we hold the lives of other species that we do not capitalize their names.
And we have done it to them.
We have no one to blame but ourselves.
