Utter extinction, the fate that befell the passenger pigeon and the Carolina parakeet, is a concept universally understood, as clean as a broken bone. A species existed; now it’s gone. But the gradual ebbing of abundance strains language. Some researchers have called such losses defaunation; others know it as biological annihilation. The biologist E. O. Wilson favored Eremocene: the age of loneliness, a near and desolate future in which humankind bestrides an empty world, or perhaps drives over it.
