The Things We've Lost

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

It is really more of a prologue, an appetizer. I lay out the first of the many pictures on archival stock. The tiger - "This was a tiger, kids, because we were afraid of its ferocity and some believed that it had medicinal value, we hunted it into extinction in the wild by the 2020s. A feline influenza in 2033 jumped into other cat species and killed off the rest in captivity by 2035."

I put down a picture of the river Ganges with thousands of worshipers bathing at its edge - "Holy Ganges, Mother Ganges, a goddess to the Hindu believers died in 2039. Fed by the Himalayan glaciers that had melted away with global warming, the Ganges ran dry. Fortunately, it could have been worse. A sect of fundamentalist Hindus were pushing for nuclear war with Pakistan, but they were narrowly kept from office largely because of the 2035 Conference on Geoengineering. A hundred years from now if we are lucky and wise, Mother Ganges may flow again."

And the pictures and descriptions continued, islands disappearing with the collapse of the west Antarctic ice shelf, indigenous cultures driven from traditional lands by climate change, plants and animals hunted, harvested, diseased to extinction, and many more. It is hours later and the kids are waning. I am tired and sad speaking of a world that they will not experience. I look at the archival prints and know that in time they too will yellow and vanish.