November 14, 2014 - 16:57
- Definitions of Loss by Merriam Webster Dictionary:
- “failure to keep or to continue to have something”
- “the experience of having something taken from you or destroyed”
- “the condition of being deprived or bereaved of something or someone”
- “The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, ‘eh-haa, eh-haa,’ and it speaks less and less often” (Guin 5).
- The child experiences a loss of hope. He experiences a physical loss of his mother’s warmth and comfort, but also an emotional loss of what all the other citizens experience in Omelas.
- Extreme loss, especially over time allows people to accept injustices- People become accustomed to this lack of fulfillment
Solutions are complex and difficult to find and understand
- Unexplainable
- Misunderstood
- People do not nor will ever understand the level of biodiversity that exists and existed
- People can not keep track of all the extinctions
- Significance of Loss
- “I don’t know whether you care or not, but some of these seeds could be the last specimens of their kind left on the planet!... They’re saving these plants from extinction. It’s such crucial work! We’ve got to help stop the genetic erosion of the earth’s ecosystem. We’ve got to act now!” (Ozeki 162).
- Erase history/past/ knowledge/ memory
- No sense of what happened- how others overcame obstacles
- Identity/legacy- connection
- “I was shaped by what I didn’t see, or didn’t notice, on those streets” (Pratt 17)
- Not seeing the full picture- loss distorts the truth/ perception of reality
- Untold stories/ truths
- “Miscomprehension, incomprehension, dead letters unread masterpieces, absolute heterogeneity of meaning-these are some of the perils of writing in the contact zone” (Pratt 37).
- Results/Effects- Repeat Mistakes
- No one can have a grasp on its extent
- “In an unusual, perhaps even unique arrangement, the male frogs cared for the tadpoles by allowing their young, quite literally to eat the skin off their backs. Griffith said that he thought there were probably many other amphibian species that had been missed in the initial collecting rush for EVACC and had since vanished; it was hard to say how many, since most of them were probably unknown to science. ‘Unfortunately,’ he told me, ‘we are losing all these amphibians before we even know they exist.” (Kolbert 10)
- People do not nor will ever understand the level of biodiversity that exists and existed
- “Nature’s own varieties are slowly dying out. Soon all we’ll have are genetically modified mutants” (Ozeki 173).
- Loss of what’s “real”- where things came from- the most natural state
- Lack of conscientiousness/ awareness/ concern
- Reaching beyond places where the disturbance is easily noticeable
- “Part of what made the situation so mystifying was the geography; frogs seemed to be vanishing not only from populated and disturbed areas but also from relatively pristine places, like the Sierras and the mountains of Central America” (Kolbert 12).
- People are unaware of their impact on nature and the biodiversity on the planet
- Animals and plants can no longer exist in places where they have resided for thousands of years
- Mass extinction- Occurring almost everywhere
- “a profound loss of biodiversity” (Kolbert 6)
- People do not know what existed- no knowledge of some previous species
- Less diversity therefore more uniformity based on what can survive
- Monocultural understanding- “We wait long years for you and teach you and join our families to yours.’ She moved restlessly. ‘You know you aren’t animals to us” (Butler 15).
- "Bloodchild," by Octavia E Butler, takes place in an utopian world where humans are used as vessels to carry the offspring of the Tlic.
- Erasure of Species in order for another species to survive
- Loss of individual purpose/ meaning to life
- Loss involves surrendering
- No righteous justification for loss
- “In times of panic, whole groups of once-dominated organisms can disappear or be relegated to secondary roles, almost as if the globe has undergone a cast change. Such wholesale losses have led paleontologists to surmise that during mass extinction events-in addition to the so-called Big Five, there have been many lesser such events-the usual rules of survival are suspended. Conditions change so drastically or so suddenly (or so drastically and so suddenly) that evolutionary history counts for little. Indeed, the very traits that have been most useful for dealing with ordinary threats may turn out, under such extraordinary circumstances, to be fatal” (Kolbert 7).
- Surprise/Shock/Misunderstanding/Confusion
- When one does not understand the whole picture, there is a separation between perception and truth
- “She spent tow field seasons looking; where once the toads had mated in writhing masses, a single male was sighted.”( Kolbert 12)
- Stealing/ Being stolen from
- “It occurred to me that the frogs and their progeny, if they had any, would never again touch the floor of the rainforest but would live out their days in disinfected glass tanks” (Kolbert 22)
- Irreversible
- “Though its victims are nowhere near as charismatic as those taken out at the end of the Cretaceous, it, too, marks a turning point in life’s history-a moment when the rules of the game suddenly flipped, with consequences that, for all intents and purposes, will last forever” (Kolbert 97)
- Perspective
Responsibility/Cause