I suppose this song is an epilogue to The Sibylline Books.
I was thinking a about all the expressions in the English language using animals as a metaphor. Wolves at the door, elephant's memory, eagle eyes, busy as a bee... When you think about it, there are a lot of them. And now we're approaching a time when these expressions will be referring to things that no longer exist.
They'll all be dead as the dodo.
People try to argue for the preservation of wildlife by seeing its direct value to humans. 'Don't cut down the rain forests because they might contain cures for human diseases'. 'Don't kill all the bees because they pollinate many of our crops'.
Absolutely true. But to me, the destruction of the planet's biodiversity is also an aesthetic crime worse than demolishing every art gallery in the world. Every plant, animal, fungus and microbe alive today has an unbroken evolutionary history all the way back to the first emergence of life nearly four billion years ago. And we're mindlessly erasing it all.
Mother Earth kindly stepped in to do the vocals for this one. Maybe we should listen before it's too late?
Listen here.