interesting post from Down Syndrome father when he realizes he no longer sees kids with it. he uses the example of missing species.
this experience of missingness, when you realize that something that used to be is no longer, and what that implies, can be very chilling in the environmental context as well the human one.
it used to be, when i was a child, that if you went for a summer road trip, your car would be absolutely plastered with bugs. You'd struggle to clean them off. Now there's essentially none, i recently realized. Are there that many fewer insects?
I can think of others. Sandpipers at the beach. Where did they go? This gives me a very particular kind of bad feeling, part despair, part denial, and tied into my childhood memories. Wonder if this feeling has a name, if not it should cc: @extinctsymbol
