Consummation

The New Yorker, August 6, 2007

Consummated. My final paper, essentially the culmination of what I’ve learned over the course of this project, is finished (a little late, but much the better for it). It covers a slew of topics from my notebook and readings. Among them:

Frogs, Bd and habitat Loss; Bats, WNS and habitat loss; Bees and CCS; Holocene Extinction and the 5 Big Extinctions; language death and ethnocide; Oryx and Crake; Arks, Svalbard Seed Vault, El Valle and Zoos; megafauna; post-apocalyptic novels; man-made extinction; partulid land snails; modern technology and exploration; the internet; new species; old species; the hydrosphere; anthropology and Mark Twain; epibatidine; immortality; mortality; “The March of Time” a la Tom Stoppard's Arcadia; impermanence; “Benjamin”; the Golden Toad; and Kermit the Frog.