Was (a short story)

I don’t know why I went. I knew it would be depressing. Maybe it was the same tendency towards self-torture which has kept me striving towards green behavior despite the belief it’s futile, even past having been proven right. Whatever it was, now I was there. The Zoo’s Hall of Climate Change, soon to be no more, though the announcements only mentioned that obliquely.

Maybe that’s why I went. Because I noticed to footnote in the grand announcement of the new Hall of Conservation Efforts and thought I might be one of the few noticing or caring. “*the Hall of Conservation Efforts will replace the Hall of Climate Change.”

I hadn’t been there before. I’d found zoos a bit depressing even before they became a small band aid on the massive wound of human influenced extinction. But this total lack of “last chance to see” promotion that usually accompany changes in visitor based endavors made me want to go. I could see why “see it before it is gone” wasn’t happening for this exhibit though. It was not a good exhibit and replacing it was obviously just the last step in a process of not including off putting information about the rapid degradation of most known ecosystem, so “see it before it is gone” would have gone contrary to that whole endeavor.

It mainly consisted of sequences of plaques showing animal habitats and ranges shrinking. The World’s rainforests, almost gone, Arctic sea ice, no longer consistent enough to sustain the species that depended on it, or no longer part of their range after the collapse of the Arctic Ocean food chains. The speed of destruction readable in how many or few different plaques existed.

The plaques I’d seen on my way here to the hinterlands of the gardens no longer showed maps, or spoke of threats. If they mentioned a species status at all it was only in relation to the efforts to improve it, and even then it never mentioned specifics. “The Zoo’s breeding program is in important step in maintaining and increasing the number of Jaguars.” Yes. Very good. How many are there though? I tried looking it up, but it was impossible to find anything other than the number in conservation programs. I’m sure there is still someone monitoring them in the wild, but if they publish their information online they are drowned out by all the businesses touting their contributions to keeping the 75 in captivity alive and scammers and scrapers posting “AI” generated pages full of scammy ads about popular topics.

I searched for old jaguar plaques in the Hall of Climate Change and did not find any. I’m not sure why. Perhaps the jaguar program is new, or perhaps it’s that I was not searching very carefully. Every sequence of plaques was a depressing tale of progressive habit destruction and the journey from Threatened to Near Extinct, and when I reached one on the failure of the Paris Agreement, apparently created on its 25th anniversary, I skipped a whole section out of self preservation.

Instead I was drawn in by a series of small plaques describing the shrinking numbers of Rio Grande Silvery Minnows, and the shrinking Rio Grande. The last one began “The Rio Grande was a river in the southwestern United States and Northern Mexico”. It reminded me of the first time reading the word “was” about large biotopes.

That was in regard to the Aral Sea. Once it was the fourth largest large in the world. When I was a child it was still a clear feature of a map of the entire world, then all of a sudden it wasn’t. It was a shock to me, though I learned that it had been shrinking since the 1960s. Like with the Rio Grande its waters diverted to agriculture to such an extent that it baffles the mind. From 68 thousand square kilometers to a tenth of that. And this only because by a quirk of geography a northern part could be revived with a dam.

To me that was an inspiration, but also portended doom. Knowing that something this prominent could go from “is the fourth largest lake in the world” to “was a lake” made me fervent about doing what I could. Knowing that people knew about this for decades and let it happen made me despair that any human society was capable of dealing with such challenges.

For the people weighing rescuing the Aral sea the disaster lay in the future and would happen to other people. The costs, both in money, time and loss of production, lay in the presence. The benefits were concrete, the consequences diffuse. Still in my mind I yelled at them, “Why didn’t you do something?!”

In the Hall of Climate Change though my mental shout echoed back to me from every wall and I turned around and left. I left the Hall of Climate Change, soon to be a self congratulatory hall of Conservation efforts sponsored by one multinational or the other. I left the carefully crafted mini-habitats, that, for some species, is the last home they have on this planet. I make a donation on my way out for the zoo’s conservation efforts, despite knowing that they’ll be presented without any context about why they are needed.

I got on a bus at the edge of the huge parking lot. As we pulled out of the bus stop two small children small enough to stand side by side on a bus seat turned around and stared at me for one of the many possible reasons small children have for doing anything. It likely wasn’t to accuse me of not doing anything about the destruction of jaguar habitat, but the “Why didn’t you do something?” was still echoing in my mind. These children would never experience the Aral Sea, or the Rio Grande, or the Amazon rainforest being the geography of the present. They were all in the past to them. But whether they will notice when what is now slips into was then or not, that process will go on. Then I’ll just be one of the faceless crowd of humans past who didn’t “do something”. And as one of them I failed. As one of them I didn’t do enough.