Forms of Lonely

#31.  Seek You - A Journey Through American Loneliness - Kristen Radtke

Science, personal experience, and stories about loneliness, distilled into graphic novel form.  Well written, and intelligent.  Another book I'd recommend to everyone.

#32.  Last Chance to See - Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine

This is another book I've had around for a couple of decades, bought it from an old used bookstore.  I started reading it a month or so ago, and then it got buried by other books and papers when I recently had to rearrange to figure out how to fit an air conditioner in here.  Uncovered it today, and read the last chapter. 

Adams is best known for his irreverent, comic, science fiction writing, and Carwardine is a zoologist, at the time working with the World Wildlife Fund.  Initially, they were paired to go to Madagascar and search for an endangered lemur called the "aye-aye," by the Observer Color Magazine.  The pairing was a success and they ended up travelling across the globe to search for other endangered species for BBC Radio.  It's both funny and heartbreaking.  Adams will write with irreverence, and then drop in a thought deeply insightful, such as (when inches from a mountain gorilla): I began to feel how patronizing it was of us to presume to judge their intelligence, as if ours was any kind of standard by which to measure.  I tried to imagine instead how he saw us, but of course that's almost impossible to do, because assumptions you end up making as you try to bridge the imaginative gap are, of course, your own, and the most misleading assumptions are the ones you don't even know you're making...But somewhere in the genetic history that we each carry with us in every cell of our body was a deep connection with this creature, as inaccessible to us now as last year's dreams, always invisibly and unfathomably present. (From the chapter, Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat.)

In the epilogue, Adams tells the fable (?) of a prosperous village visited by an old woman who wishes to sell them a volume of 12 books which contain all the world's wisdom, they laugh at her, and she burns half of them.  Each year she returns with the remaining volumes, increasing the price, they continue to rebuff her, and each year she destroys a portion of what remains.  The village falls on hard times, the price too steep to pay when it comes down to the final remaining book, as she moves to destroy it, they finally pay the price, all that they have.  But what was lost that can never be restored in the eleven that were destroyed?  Every time we willfully, or passively, allow the destruction of a species, or even an ecosystem (we want it to be more like where we came from, or we want to extract as much wealth as we can before someone else gets there) we lost a collective memory, a collective wisdom, a collective story that we cannot restore.  We don't know what holds the fabric of life together, which once removed will cause an unravelling we cannot stop.  Sure, it might be possible to collect DNA from a piece of amber, but we don't have the environment, other species, or open spaces for that species to thrive.  We hold possibilities and shadows of what once was even as we continue to destroy what is. (And the same could be said for the loss of languages and cultures, we lose an understanding of the universe that can't be translated.)

Two of the species in this book have since gone extinct in the wild: the northern white rhino, and the Yangtze River dolphin.  And countless others not covered in this book.  As Carwardine says in his epilogue, There is one last reason for caring, and I believe that no other is necessary...And it is simply this: the world would be a poorer, darker, lonelier place without them.