Dear Followers, Today I Offer You Pingu With Simone De Beauvoir Quote

on endlings, and despair

Hey, y'all. It's...been a rough couple of weeks. So, I thought--better to light a single candle, right?

If you're familiar with wildlife conservation success stories, then you're likely also familiar with their exact polar opposite. The Northern White Rhino. Conservation's poster child for despair. Our greatest and most high-profile utter failure. We slaughtered them for wealth and status, and applied the brakes too slow. Changed course too late.

We poured everything we had into trying to save them, and we failed.

We lost them. They died. The last surviving male was named Sudan. He died in 2018, elderly and sick. His genetic material is preserved, along with frozen semen from other long-dead males, but only as an exercise in futility. Only two females survive--a mother and daughter, Najin and Fatu.

Both of them are infertile. They still live; but the Northern White Rhinoceros is extinct. Gone forever.

In 2023, an experimental procedure was attempted, a hail-mary desperation play to extract healthy eggs from the surviving females.

It worked.

The extracted eggs were flown to a genetics lab, and artificially fertilized using the sperm of lost Northern males. The frozen semen that we kept, all this time, even after we knew that the only living females were incapable of becoming pregnant.

It worked.

Thirty northern white rhino embryos were created and cryogenically preserved, but with no ability to do anything with them, it was a thin hope at best. In 2024, for the first time, an extremely experimental IVF treatment was attempted on a SOUTHERN white rhino--a related subspecies.

It worked.

The embryo transplanted as part of the experiment had no northern blood--but the pregnancy took. The surgery was safe for the mother. The fetus was healthy. The procedure is viable. Surrogate Southern candidates have already been identified to carry the Northern embryos. Rhinoceros pregnancies are sixteen months long, and the implantation hasn't happened yet. It will take time, before we know. Despair is fast and loud. Hope is slower, softer. Stronger, in the end.

The first round may not take. We'll learn from it. It's what we do. We'll try again. Do better, the next time. Fail again, maybe. Learn more. Try harder.

This will not save the species. Not overnight. The numbers will be very low, with no genetic diversity to speak of. It's a holding action, nothing more.

Nothing less.

One generation won't save a species. But even a single calf will buy us time. Not quite gone, not yet. One more generation. One more endling. One more chance. And if we seize it, we might just get another after that. We're getting damn good at gene editing. At stem-cell research. In the length of a single rhino lifetime, we'll get even better.

For decades, we have been in a holding action with no hope in sight. Researchers, geneticists, environmentalists, wildlife rehabbers. Dedicated and heroic Kenyan rangers have kept the last surviving NWRs under 24/7 armed guard, line-of-sight, eyes-on, never resting, never relaxing their guard. Knowing, all the while, that their vigilance was for nothing. Would save nothing. This is a dead species--an elderly male, two females so closely related that their offspring couldn't interbreed even if they could produce any--and they can't.

Northern white rhino conservation was the most devastatingly hopeless cause in the world.

Two years from now, that dead species may welcome a whole new generation.

It's a holding action, just a holding action, but not "just". There is a monument, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where the last white rhinos have lived and will die. It was created at the point where we knew--not believed, knew--that the species was past all hope. It memorializes, by name there were so few, the last of the northern white rhinos. Most of the markers have brief descriptions--where the endling rhino lived, how it was rescued, how it died.

One marker bears only these words: SUDAN | Last male Northern White Rhino.

If even a single surrogate someday bears a son, we have erased the writing on that plaque forever.

All we can manage is a holding action? Then we hold. We hold hard and fast and long, use our fingernails if we have to. But hold. Even and perhaps especially when we are past all hope.

We never know what miracle we might be buying time for.

catch 22 by joseph heller // mash (peace on us)

lullaby at 102º by Traci Brimhall

Ada Limón, from "The Widening Road", Sharks in the Rivers

my uncle was somewhat of a rascal. we were hanging out on the roof of his barn when i was ten, and we saw some shooting stars. he told me they were angels carrying messages from god. then he handed me his old hunting rifle and taught me how to nick one out of the sky, even when it was travelling all fast like that, and how to triangulate its location — taking me out in his rusty truck down dirt roads, unerring and unceasing, until we saw that gleaming lantern. he pocketed the note from god and took me down to a pinboard where he was working on deciphering the language with his friend who was a linguistics major but got kicked out of grad school. after they shook hands, they held on for just a bit too long and i started wondering why my aunt doesn’t live with my uncle anymore, but then my uncle took me back up stairs and taught me how to fry the angel up real nice, halo and all. it was tasty

realizing that sticking to the "do it bad" "do it scared" mentality implies theres also a "do it bored"

I don't quite- I. Okay. Hm. Hmmm.

hello. you left a neon pink post-it with pgs 194-359 due 9/12 in the book, by the way. it is now May 23rd and the library's printer is running out of ink. it jammed and tore my passport application. one of the librarians dutifully blacked out all my information (front and back!) before proceeding to use every unmarred inch as scrap paper.

i think maybe our (plural, inclusive) lives are connected. all of them. i have been thinking a lot about borrowing. about how people move through the world in waves, filling in the same spaces. i have probably stood on the same subway platform as you. we held the same book. all of us stand in the same line at the grocery, at the gas station. how many feet have stood washing dishes in my kitchen?

i hope you are doing well. the pen you used was a nice red, maybe a glitter pen? you have loopy, curling handwriting. i sometimes wonder if it is true that you can tell a personality by the shape of our letters. i'm borrowing my brother's car. he's got scrangly engineer handwriting (you know the one). it's a yellow-orange ford mustang boss. when i got out of the building, some kids were posing with it for a selfie. i felt a little bird grow in me and had to pause and pretend to be busy with my phone to give them more time for their laughing.

i have a habit of asking people what's the last good book you read? the librarian's handwriting on the back of my smeared-and-chewed passport application says the glass house in small undercase. i usually go for fantasy/sci fi, but she was glowing when she suggested it. i found your post-it on page 26, so i really hope you didn't have to read up to 359 in that particular book. i hope you're like me and just have a weird "random piece of trash" "bookmark" that somehow makes it through like, 58 books.

i wish the concept of soul mates was bigger. i wish it was about how my soul and your soul are reading the same work. how i actually put down that book at the same time you did - page 26 was like, all exposition. i wish we were soul mates with every person on the same train. how magical to exist and borrow the same space together. i like the idea that somewhere, someone is using the shirts i donated. i like the idea that every time i see a nice view and say oh gosh look at the view, you (plural, inclusive) said that too.

the kids hollered when i beeped the car. oh dude you set off the alarm, oh shit is she - dude that's her car!! one was extremely polite. "i like your car, Miss. i'm sorry we touched it." i said i wasn't busy, finish up the pictures. i folded your post-it into a paper crane while i waited. i thought about how my brother's a kind person but his handwriting looks angry. i thought about how for an entire year i drove someone to work every day - and i didn't even think to ask for gas money. my handwriting is straight capital letters.

i thought about how i can make a paper crane because i was taught by someone who was taught by someone else.

the kids asked me to rev the engine and you know i did. the way they reacted? you would have thought i brought the sun from the sky and poured it into a waterglass. i went home smiling about it. i later gave your post it-turned-bird to a tiny child on the bus. she put it in her mouth immediately.

how easy, standing in your shadow, casting my own. how our hands pass over each other in the same minor folds. i wonder how many of the same books you and i have read. i wonder how many people have the same favorite six songs or have been in the same restaurant or have attended the same movie premier. the other day i mentioned the Book Mill from a small town in western massachusetts - a lot of people knew of it. i wonder if i've ever passed you - and didn't even notice it.

i hope whatever i leave behind makes you happy. i hope my hands only leave gentle prints. i hope you and i get the same feeling when the sun comes out. soulmates across all of it.

Giuseppe Pennasilico (detail)

silent lake

Hi. I finally finished the Spirk comic set to Johnny Cash's Hurt I have been working on for a month. If you want to, please enjoy and leave some nice words :) thank you.

CW for: blood, self-harm, spoilers for anything TOS, death

HURT

There is a part 2! Please consider reblogging and reading the whole comic :)