Over the course of the next several centuries, crews of whaling ships and natural scientific expeditions (notably Charles Darwin’s visit on the HMS Beagle in 1835, which included the consumption of tortoises in all manner of soups and stews) also decimated tortoise populations. From this point forward, the story of tortoise extinction is accelerated by the introduction of invasive species, including blackberry bushes, giant African snails, parasitic flies, rats, and goats that wiped out native habitats. The Charles Darwin Research Station’s Path of the Tortoise (pictured below) briefly outlines this environmental history, which begins with the arrival of sailors and buccaneers in the seventeenth century. This project, which began with two weeks of field work in the Galápagos during the summer of 2018, offered me the opportunity to consider how the endling taxidermy of Lonesome George might enrich (and potentially complicate) our understanding of the environmental histories and futures of the Galápagos Islands, and in particular the role of human activity in creating the conditions for species extinction. An Environmental History of the Galápagos: The Pinta Island TortoiseĬontextualizing the taxidermic preservation and display of Lonesome George within nautical and natural histories of the Galápagos, my approach to endling taxidermy has focused on how conservation scientists and museum curators at the Charles Darwin Research Station construct visual narratives of species loss. Following his death on 24 June 2012, the post-mortem presence of Lonesome George at the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz Island in the Galápagos offers us a unique case study for the emerging phenomenon of endling taxidermy, in turn widening the scope of our analysis of endling representations and their relationship to conservation science programmes that aim to mobilize a call for the protection of species across the globe. While taxidermy forms like Martha are no longer on display (the specimen now lies in storage at the Smithsonian Institution Archives), other endlings, notably Lonesome George - the last Pinta Island tortoise - are available to the public for viewing. Artists and authors, as Jørgensen explains, are creatively engaging with the endling in order to grapple with the meaning of anthropogenic (or human-influenced) extinction.īut despite this visibility of the endling, scientists and cultural theorists alike have not yet fully explored or elucidated the role of taxidermy in preserving endling bodies.
An article by Michelle Nijhuis in The New Yorker (2017) catalogues this emergence of the endling through a visual illustration by artist Bjørn Lie that features well-known endlings like Celia (the last Pyrenean Ibex), Toughie (the last Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrog), and Orange Band (the last Dusky Seaside sparrow). Defined by historian Dolly Jørgensen (University of Stavanger) as the “last individual of a species,” the endling has infiltrated our field of vision in recent years. But what if this process could be made tangible and visible, at least in part? What would it mean to preserve and monumentalize an extinct species?Įnter the endling.
Scientists at The Center for Biological Diversity, for instance, estimate that “we’re now losing species at 1,000 to 10,000 times the background rate, with literally dozens going extinct every day.” Beyond the precincts of conservation science, these background extinctions often persist without being registered, and therefore properly accounted for, by the rest of human society.
#Pinta island full
What is it that we see, or fail to see, of the mass extinction of species? In the present era, species loss often evades full comprehension due to its global scale and complexity.
0 kommentar(er)
