The Lost Lesson of the Dodo

By Gord Miller

The dodo was a flightless bird that was discovered by Europeans on an remote island in the Indian Ocean named Mauritius in the 16th Century. The first written accounts describing the bird were done by the Dutch in 1598. Seventy years later it was completely gone due to human hunting and the introduction of non-native species to the island by humans. 

Despite this rather arcane history the dodo had a major presence in western culture that rose during the Enlightenment and persisted to the end of the Twentieth Century. For example, Lewis Carroll included a dodo as a character in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Its cultural significance has diminished with current generations, but people who were adults before 2000 will be familiar with references to it such as being ‘dumb as a dodo’. 

Why did this obscure species retain notoriety in our culture for four hundred years? Why did it seem important? The answer to those questions is of great significance to our modern perception of endangered species. 

The dodo was not particularly ecologically important in itself other than it was the first species of which European culture documented its discovery and then extinction by human hand. That was the shock. People had not believed until then that extinction as the result of human activities was possible. To their Christian culture God’s creation was perfect and immutable, surely people could not destroy parts of it. But they had! And they had documented it themselves. The guilt about this in cultural form lasted four hundred years and shaped our response to species being at risk in present times. Which ultimately was a good thing until its culmination in Ontario as The Endangered Species Act, 2009. 

But, as has been previously discussed, this government demolished that legislation in 2025. And now we find ourselves collectively in the same moral position as the Europeans in 1700. It is no longer about the extinction of one species, or even 10. We must realize that we now have the capacity with our economy and our lifestyles to destroy our entire biodiversity. We are altering the climate and ravishing the natural landscapes with our agriculture and our industrial development. The ecological fabric of huge portions of our lands and our seas is dismantling. The legislative mechanisms we had assembled, however modest, to mitigate the impact on the biosphere starting with species-at-risk, are gone. We stand naked and disarmed before this impending catastrophe. 

The lesson of the dodo is lost. We may be about to recreate this folly on a grand scale!