JPG

This giant tortoise is over one hundred years old. She spends her days at the Charles Darwin Research Center in the Galapagos, Ecuador. Think of a hundred years gone by: a solitary tortoise experiences all of the abuses of land and animal, the burning of thousands of tortoises just like her for their oil, the destruction of their land by domesticated goats -- and then the backlash efforts of natives and world naturalists to conserve the land, successfully, and give a home to a dying species whose only chance for survival relies on the same humans that once nearly caused their extinction.

...All in time. This face is time. A slow heat swims within its giant shell, life spilling out, exhausted, understanding. The earth has its own plan and the tortoise is listening in. Humans think we have the world in our palms, wrestled under control. But we don't. We are elastic playthings, we humans. But the reptiles know. They have seen it, before and after. And when the age of elastic playthings destroys itself, the reptiles will lumber on.