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A radio "opera" about extinction, and the conditions of loss and denial endemic to industrial and post-industrial society. It is a dirge for the exterminated species of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a grieving. It raises questions about the terms of human survival in a social order that defines us as "separate," and reveals how those values are manifested in our socio-economic and political relations -- i.e., conquest vs. cohabitation, consumption without regeneration. We eradicate cultural memory just as we eliminate species. The sung "mass" of names of the dead from insects to languages is sometimes obliterated by the relentless pounding of machinery. Embedded in the litany are anecdotes of annihilation.