Meet inside The Shops at Waterloo Town Square - we will congregate in the indoor seating area next to the Your Independent Grocer with the trees sticking out in the middle of the benches (pic) at 7:00 pm for 20 minutes, and then head over to my nearby apartment's amenity room. If you've been around a few times, feel free to meet up at the front door of the apartment at 7:30 instead.

Discussion

When the last of a species disappears, it usually does so unnoticed, somewhere in the wild. Only later, when repeated searches come up empty, will researchers reluctantly acknowledge that the species must be extinct. But in rare cases like George’s, when people are caring for an animal’s last known representative, extinction—an often abstract concept—becomes painfully concrete. It happens on their watch, in real time. It leaves behind a body. When Sischo rang in the new year, Achatinella apexfulva existed. A day later, it did not. “It is happening right in front of our eyes,” he said.

The topic of this week is extinction, care, and honour. We'll be be reading a piece about some endangered snail species and the people who care for them, and then a piece about that first piece.

Readings

The Last of Its Kind - Ed Yong (2019)

How One Snail Inspired Two Novels on Two Different Continents - Maria Reva, Jasmin Schreiber, Ed Yong (2025)

Question List

• Yong's piece describes caring for Toughie and George as hospice work; the species will go extinct, and all their caretakers can do is keep them comfortable. Is this noble or frivolous or both? What should we owe a being, or a species, that cannot be saved? Is there value in simply not letting something die alone?
• When Jasmin says,  "Go out and rescue a snail from the ground. One life saved. Check. Start small," in what ways does that feel like the same kind of work that's being done by Sischo? In what way does it feel different?
• Sischo says that his rational arguments for saving snails rarely convince people, but when people see the snails, they melt. What happens if we trust the skepticism? What happens if we trust the melting? Which one do you gravitate towards trusting more, in your own life?
• George died in a cage in a trailer. Is that better or worse than dying unwitnessed in its natural habitat? How would you prefer to go, if you had to choose?
• Maria talks about endling ache, the experience of being the last of your kind in some human sense: the last speaker of a language, or last person who holds memories of someone who died. Have you ever felt this? Do you expect to?
• Maria invents snail species for dramatic effect in her work of fiction. Where do you draw the line between acceptable artistic license and something that actually betrays the subject? Does it depend on what the person is writing about?

Supplemental Readings

The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature - William Cronon (1995)

Opinion: The Case for Reviving Extinct Species - Stewart Brand (2013)

Radical Hope Retrospective: An Interview with Jonathan Lear - Karen Blair (2016)

[Poetry] For A Coming Extinction - W. S. Merwin (1967)