I don’t see box turtles anymore.
I used to find them all the time when I was a kid. On rainy summer afternoons they’d come wandering out onto the road from the forest, their shells patterned with phoenixes, staring about suspiciously with their orange eyes. They slammed shut and hissed when I picked them up, but eventually I’d coax them out. I kept them for a day or two, fed them a boiled cherry for their trouble and then carried them across the road, where they could continue their methodical wanderings. Knowing that eventually they would come back.
That was a long time ago. I don’t see box turtles anymore. Not living ones, anyway. Now when I see a box turtle, it’s a sad little shell in the middle of the road, cracked open, orange eyes shrunken and dead. Sometimes I see one sitting by the side of the highway, a tiny shape contemplating crossing, and I know I’m looking at an animal that might as well be dead.
I get this feeling a lot these days. I had it when a few straggling red-winged blackbirds limped through Atlanta on their way south, a remnant of the huge traveling flocks of my youth. I had it when the Western black rhino was declared extinct. It’s an intense and visceral sense of loss, an uncertainty that I and everybody I know are walking alongside the edge of a cliff that we can’t see.
The world outside our window is broken. It’s easy to forget. We seal ourselves up in nests built of roads, concrete and glass, and when we see a bird or squirrel hanging on at the edge, we smile and tell ourselves that everything is all right. But when humans came to America, they found a world of unimaginable richness. Rivers choked with silver fish. Skies that thundered with the passage of immense flocks of birds. Fields and forests filled with buffalo, bears and deer.
Where is that now? Nobody living today remembers a time when America wasn’t lashed down by humanity. Nobody alive remembers what real wilderness looks like. We feel the thrill of nature when we see a squirrel on the Quad, forgetting that the very grass it’s foraging through is choking with chemicals. And yet we think we are somehow exempt.
Death comes for everyone and everything in the fullness of time. The drive of life is to spread, to make more of itself, to change and struggle and claw and fight against the end. Genocide, to eradicate a group of people root and branch, is a special horror. But we’re perpetrating genocide upon genocide every day, wiping out not just families, not just ethnic groups, but whole species. Do they not matter because they aren’t human?
Some will say no. That’s their right. But when the world finally collapses around us, it will be from carelessness, not malice.
I don’t see box turtles anymore. When the box turtle goes extinct, it won’t be from hunting or poaching. Nobody sells box turtles for folk remedies or trophies. Nobody thinks of them much at all. The murder weapon will be the road that cuts across their territories, the car that cuts across their backs and the people who built both. And then they will be gone forever and nobody will remember them.
When I ask who will mourn the box turtle when it’s gone, what I’m really wondering is who will mourn for us. We have become death, destroyer of worlds, and when there is nothing left to consume, we will have nothing to consume but ourselves.
This isn’t an argument. It’s a howl of confusion and fear. It’s a terrible vision of a planet where the skies are empty of everything but airplanes, and the fields are empty of everything but cows. A planet with nothing left but the cars on the highway and the old, bleaching skeletons by the side of the road. A planet where people will believe that all of this is normal and right.
My children won’t see box turtles anymore. What won’t their children see?
Asher Elbein is a senior in New College. His column runs biweekly on Thursdays.
