Lost in Always

The mind blanks at the glare,” wrote Philip Larkin “Not in remorse — The good not done, the love not given, time Torn off unused — nor wretchedly because An only life can take so long to climbClear of its wrong beginnings, and may never; But at the total emptiness for ever,The sure extinction that we travel toAnd shall be lost in always. Not to be here, Not to be anywhere,And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.” Larkin’s poem Aubade counts the cost of personal extension. But as Descartes might have gone onto conclude, with the value of hindsight, “If I don’t exist then everything else probably can.” For it is by being human that we are triggering the party to which no one desires an invitation, the Earth's most extraordinary extinction event. We were, of course, not responsible for the earlier ones, but anyone fond of models will find they all offer scenarios that even Hollywood would baulk at. The first of these events, the Late Devonian extinction (383-359 million years ago), killed off about 75 per cent of all living species. One hundred million years later came the worst of all – the Permian-Triassic extinction, or Great Dying. This event dispatched 96% of all marine animals and 3 out of every four land animals that had managed to survive since the previous extinction. After 51 million years of exhaustive recovery, the Triassic-Jurassic extinction swept across the Earth, exterminating 80% of all living species. All three, it seems, were caused by the climate change sparked by volcanic eruptions and shifting plate tectonics. The last, and most famous, mass extinction, the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, 66 million years ago, was the one that claimed the lives of the dinosaurs – and with them 76% of all Earth’s species. For this, a wandering asteroid was probably to blame. The credit for the next one is one we, as a race, must step up to take: the winner of the Oscars from Hell. Already, the stage is being set: the tables for the Oscars ceremony, the red carpet laid out, invitations being sent for the pre- and post-ceremony parties, the Governors Ball, the Vanity Fair Party, cocktails in the Diamond 25 Lounge. Invitations have already reached many in Sri Lanka. Anteaters, jackets, bears, otters, fishing cats, civets, axis deer, lorises and Toque Macaque have already propped up their gold embossed cards on their jungle mantelpieces as have the Ceylon Highland Long Tailed Tree and Spiny Mice, the tiny Serendib Scops Owl, the Nillu and Ohiya Rats, the Dusky Striped Squirrel and the Ceylon Highland, Pigmy and Long-Tailed Shrews. Even the Ceylon Tree Skink had received an invitation to this perdition party. The big beasts are, of course, especially invited, and the island’s elephants are the guest of honour. Before the British arrived, there were over 15,000 elephants in Sri Lanka, but that was when big-game hunting became fashionable. Its most notorious celebrity was a government agent, a Major Thomas Rogers, who managed to kill 1400 elephants in just 11 years. “His whole house,” recalled one appalled guest in the 1840s, “was filled with ivory, for amongst the hosts of the slain more than sixty were tusked elephants… At each door of his veranda stood huge tusks, while in his dining room every corner was adorned with similar trophies…” Mercifully killed at just 41 years, Rogers’ grave, still to be found beside the gold course in Nuwara Eliya, offered him little by way of eternal rest as it has been struck by lightning over 100 times, indicating one of the silver linings of climate change. Today, the island lays claim to less than half that pre-colonial number of elephants, with the BBC recently reporting that nearly 500 are dying annually, half of them at the hands of humans. The maths for continued survival looks a little better for the equally famous Sri Lankan leopard, now reduced to around 800 adults and desperately trying to recover from a 75% population decline during the 20th century. All across the globe, the more modest number crunchers calculate that a million species of plants and animals are facing total extinction. This seems especially impossible to be true in the fecund space of this island, which is so full of life, it appears as if nothing can ever end. Yet it can. It does. It has. From shore to shore lurk the traces of previous extinctions, their wrath like an imprint plotting a course as much forwards as it does back. Even so, despite being composed of pre-Cambrian rocks of such antiquity, they were old when Gondwana was young and produced the most unmistakable evidence across the whole of South Asia for the first Homo sapiens. Planetology is still a science that has far more to yield. Much of what little we know about the island’s earliest history and its extinct animals dates back to the remarkable work carried out between the 1930s and 1963 by P. E. P. Deraniyagala, ...