Lola, I am thinking about this conversation I had last year.  I've maybe had a bit too much wine, which for a moment I regret, because I need to keep my wits sharp. A friend was visiting my family, and speaking broadly about climate change. He tried to refute my insistence on the science of global warming broadly, by saying that every generation believes his to be the most important; and that climate change was just a sort of collective outlet for our arrogance, and our generational need to have meaning.

I explained that each generation's challenges actually are compounding in their importance as we catapult ourselves into overpopulation and ultra-efficiency, and that our children's and grandchildren's world will contain more grave choices, and more unimaginable challenges than our grandparents who sat in trenches with fevers.  Don't forget the course of the last hundred years, I told him, which went from World War I, to an even more horrible war, to the Cold War, which contained in it the first genuine threat for mankind to distinguish himself from Earth. 

Now, Lola, I'm thinking about you too.  I am very much thinking about our conversations about the meaning of extinction, as we jump out of the van, into the night.

We leave the road and head over a foot-bridge, passing over aquatic farms, and then down into a small river.  I had told Mario that I wanted to look for frogs.  What are your target species, he wanted to know.  No, I had explained, I have no target species.  He talked about the golden frog.  No, I am not hoping to find the vanished frog.  What about poison-dart frogs, I asked him, referring to the world's most beautiful amphibians, which range from Panama to the Amazon. 

"No", he said.  "Chytrid fungus," referring to the skin-suffocating fungus  that has embattled the populations of many frog species.  "There are still poison-dart frogs in El Valle, but it's unlikely you will find any."  He named some species that used to abound in the crater.  I recognized one of them – the spectacular green and black poison-dart frog.

No, I explained.  I just want to get out there. 

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