How to Live Better, According to the Dodo. (No, Seriously.)
Extinction troubled us long before we had a name for it. The original mascot for the loss of species, even before the concept was understood, was the dodo. The bird — fat and flightless, found by 17th-century European sailors on the island of Mauritius — fell victim to one of the earliest known extinctions caused by Western humans. For four centuries, it’s been a symbol in our art and arguments.
What the dodo symbolizes has changed over time. It has been, variously, a parable, a joke and a warning. When we see it as an emblem for the destructive greed of our own species, there is no way to avoid regret and sorrow. But the morphing message of the dodo might also call us toward hope. Although we cannot undo the blunders of our ancestors, we can emerge from ecological grief with new determination to protect and enjoy the species we have left. It is possible to imagine building connections with the natural world that lead toward growth.
At first, dodos were emblems of gluttony and stupidity. Without much evidence, Europeans imagined that the dodos themselves were greedy. Painters used dodos to represent sin, as in Franz Rösel von Rosenhof’s “After the Fall,” in which a peaceful ox from a prelapsarian image became an ominous, exotic dodo in another painting. The birds’ girth — a dodo could easily weigh 50 pounds — helped foster that image. A single one could feed 25 sailors, even though dodo meat was greasy and unappetizing; in French, the dodo was known as l’oiseau de nausée, or “the bird of queasiness.” Between being hunted by sailors — an easy task, since the birds lacked natural predators — and having their eggs and habitat destroyed by rats and pigs the Europeans brought with them, the dodos didn’t last long.
The last dodos were killed before 1700. At that time, humanity could not easily conceive of the extinction of a species, let alone an extinction caused by humans. Most people presumed God could create animals at will. After the dodos vanished, many thought that their disappearance was a divine message aimed at humans. Their symbolism slowly changed, transforming them from greedy birds to emblems of European avarice.
It would take more than a hundred years for Georges Cuvier, a French paleontologist, to convince people that species could be permanently eradicated from the planet. Using fossils, he argued in 1796 that many species had become extinct in the wake of natural catastrophes. Humans had been causing extinctions at least since the Ice Age. Polynesian expansion, particularly into New Zealand, was responsible for large-scale species loss, which initially vexed European explorers. But the idea of it was almost entirely new to the same Europeans. Romantic poets and novelists, including Mary Shelley and Lord Byron, began to envision human extinction as the natural endpoint of geology and wrote dystopian works in which the earth was eventually reduced to nothing more than “a lump of death.”
Fifty years after Cuvier, when hunters killed the last of the great auks in 1844, the fact that humans could directly cause extinction came as another shock. A new understanding of the dodo’s demise arose, though it didn’t always involve mourning. Some 19th-century thinkers lauded human power — so great that it could wipe out entire species. Others, like Lewis Carroll, portrayed the dodo as a symbol of otiose silliness, a usage we echo today: When we call one another dodos, we play not for tears but for laughs.
