The Endangered Species Act of 1973 sorts the living world into three categories, ranging from "threatened" to "endangered" to "extinct," according to the likelihood of disappearance. Fourteen animals have dropped off this list due to extinction; nine have recovered enough to be delisted.
Threats to elephants, honeybees and bats have been getting a lot of press lately. But the hippopotamus is also threatened. These two in the Fort Worth zoo—are they treading water, or going down for the count?
Too many things, whether alive or not alive, in our world are threatened, and some have crossed over the line into extinction. In this essay, I present portraits of five things on the slippery slope. (One is actually not with us anymore.)
I wanted to present these five in three dimensions (3D) on your monitor, but that is not possible without either sending you a pair of special glasses, having you watch the image wiggle in a prescribed way (which really doesn’t work, in my view), or teaching you how to cross your eyes and relax your vision simultaneously (like wow, man). I thought if these five things were presented in three dimensions, they would attain a like of super reality—they would feel more palpable, before, alas, they might be history.
But you can nonetheless look at them closely in 2D and ponder how sad it might be if they were indeed no more. Enjoy 'em while we got 'em.
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