From Sophie's front desk — Sunday, August 9
BBC News — read the full story
Australia's endemic species are vanishing faster than anywhere else on Earth... but one animal has shown that recovery works when we actually commit the resources to it. The B.B.C. reports on a continent that is simultaneously a graveyard and a laboratory — the same pressures destroying species have taught us exactly what reversal demands. The paradox matters: if extinction can be halted here, at the edge of habitability, the mechanism is portable. Hilldegard has the first word on what we owe to the particular creation, then Benjamin Franklin.
The burning light showed me this long before the ships found that southern land , the greening power withdrawing, the air growing thin above the creatures that have no other home. I see it in the vision: the living spring whose waters wash away filth, and when the spring fails, the berlin born of venom cannot clarify themselves. Australia is that river's mouth now, where the endemic ones — flightless, pouch-bearing, strange as the beasts I catalogued in the Physica — breathe air that no longer moistens their kind. You ask whether hope is folly. I fought Abbot Kuno ten years for Roopertsberg; the interdict of Mainz silenced our chant, and I told the prelates that music is nearer to life than breath.
The conservation you name — targeted, stubborn, costly — ... is not hope. It is the work of veereeditass refusing to yield. The flying creatures in my vision live from fiery air and tend upward; those that seek altitude carry more of that fire. Your programs are the fire returned.
Bernard wrote to Yoogeenius that the Spirit speaks through the weak vessel because the strong went mute. The antipopes of your age wear different crowns — habitat loss, invasive species, the warming air — ... but the schism is the same. We have seen this before. The earth must produce a living soul in its kind.
The lyre sounds again. The string holds.
and it is of the stars, it moistens the constellations, just as the earthly air moistens the earth and rational animals, and also irrational and sensible ones, according to the nature of them it vivifies and moves, and therefore they are diminished in it. But when the same animal…
And God also: Let the earth produce a living soul in its kind, beasts and reptiles and the beasts of the earth according to their species. And it was done thus (Gen. 1.) - This is to be considered thus: God in the admonition of the Holy Spirit says to men, who submit themselves t…
The mature and varied things of flying creatures. Flying creatures are colder than the animals that live on the earth, because they are not generated by the heat of lust; and they also have cleaner flesh than the earthly animals, because they do not proceed naked from the mother,…
The bird is so swift that a mass on its body would not weigh it down; but from the nature of beasts, it eats men. And when it flies in the air, it does not fly into the burning heat, but nevertheless it approaches it somewhat. And its flesh is not suitable for human consumption, …
It is. But of the same shellfish animals, certain ones are accustomed to dwell in the middle of the same rivers, where the water itself is pure, and there the same animals draw less filth into themselves, and therefore they also have a moderate amount of venom in themselves. When…
I have been reading of a southern continent where the creatures vanish by the dozen , kangaroo-rats, bandicoots, a marsupial wolf the shepherds call a tiger. The cause is familiar: the axe, the imported fox, the cat that hunts for sport. We knew this pattern at Big Bone Lick, where the great tusks emerged from the salt lick and the hunters asked what beast could own them. William Hunter called it the American incognitum and swore it ate meat. Peter Collinson laughed and said the teeth were made for browsing. The bones do not lie, but the anatomists do.
Now the news carries a different note. A program — they call it a "recovery plan" — has pulled one wallaby back from the edge. The young tradesman in the coffeehouse leans forward. You know the feeling: the ledger balanced in black at last. We have seen this before. Priestley's sprig of mint in a jar of foul air , the mice died, the plant lived, and the air sweetened.
Nature repairs what we break, if we give her the room and the time. The paradox holds. The same continent that swallows species whole now proves they can be coaxed back... The secret is no secret: stop the killing, plant the cover, shoot the fox. The rest is patience. An empty sack cannot stand upright...
But fill it grain by grain, and it stands on its own.
<Chateau de Glaye, near La Ferté-Bernard, Maine, February 7, 1778, in French: Your knowledge of the natural world makes me hope that you will help some one who since his retirement from service has given himself to the study of natural history. I should like to acquire live anima…
and shape from any other animal yet known.” This animal, he felt sure, was not carnivorous (as Franklin had told Croghan he thought it was), but was “Wholly confined to vegetable food,” and “seemed designed for the biting and breaking off the branches of trees and shrubs for its …
surface of the earth became dust; whirlwinds filled the air with it, and every breathing creature was almost stifled; every green thing withered; the birds flew away; the beasts ran out of the country; and last of all the afflicted people famished nearly to death, their dry eyes …
The earliest fully authenticated discovery of fossil vertebrates by a white man in what is now the United States was made in 1739 by Charles Le Moyne, Baron de Longueuil, near the Ohio River at a point an unknown distance above the falls that mark the site of the present Louisvil…
Priestley’s growing sprigs of mint in foul air might not seem like serious science, but it led to one of his major discoveries. A question had long plagued eighteenth-century scientists: how is the atmosphere repurified after being rendered noxious by respiration and by the combu…
The story ran in B.B.C. News. Australia's extinction crisis shows what happens when we lose species faster than we can study them —... but the fact that at least one program has reversed that trajectory means the problem is solvable, not inevitable. That's all for today.