(Only a little bit about language.)
From New Scientist on 8/30/14, “Beautiful but doomed: Hubristic humans should heed the tale of the passenger pigeon” by Adrian Barnett, beginning:
This September marks a melancholy anniversary: the first of the month is the centennial of the death of Martha the pigeon in Cincinnati zoo and, with her passing, the extinction of the passenger pigeon. It was an extinction that 100 years earlier would have been inconceivable.
This was a species that moved in flocks of billions of individuals, so dense as to blot out the sun and take days to pass.
… The anniversary has been marked by the publication of three very different books, all focusing on how a species can go from sky-darkening abundance to a single, aged individual in a matter of decades – and what this may tell us about the future.
