Encounters with Extinction
with Neil Griffin
Fall Festival In Person Streaming Non-Fict Science
Brilliant, funny, and wholly original, this is both a page-turning adventure and a profound meditation on what happens when a clever but reckless ape runs the world. Fans of Annie Dillard and Robert Macfarlane will be delighted.
Join us for a conversation on extinction as it occurs and reoccurs in natural history, myth, and science, with Neil Griffin, the author of Endings: Encounters with Extinction. It’s no secret we live in an age of extinction: our daily newsfeeds and disappearing wildlife make that abundantly clear. But what does extinction really mean for humanity? Naturalist and poet Neil Griffin seeks to answer that question.
The result is a globe-spanning, personal history of extinction: a grand tour of the dead, the nearly dead, and—against all odds—the still living. Griffin catches crocodiles in Belize, tracks bats on the Western plains, meets jaguars in Honduras, and, in Kenya, comes face to face with the northern white rhinoceros, the rarest mammal on Earth. Along the way, he connects our current moment to Earth’s deep history, exploring how mass extinctions occur and irreversibly shape life on our planet.
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