If you take the bicycle path from West Tisbury to Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard, you will at one point zip down a short steep incline, turn sharply to your left and see a massive statue of a dark bird.
It’s on a raised pedestal, five or six feet tall, sleek, cast in bronze. You can’t miss it unless you have your eyes closed, in which case you probably shouldn’t be riding your bike.
It’s a statue of Booming Ben, the last-ever heath hen. In fact, for the final three and a half years of his life, Ben was all that remained of his once-thriving subspecies. That is a lonely planet.
On March 11, 1932, Ben was spotted pretty much where sculptor Todd McGrain’s statue now stands. He was never seen again, and neither was the heath hen. Like the dodo, the passenger pigeon and the pterodactyl, this industrious little bird with the lovely brown-and-white speckled feathers had flown into ornithological history.
Over the last few days I’ve been wondering if we will get that kind of closure for chocolate.
Business Insider ruined what was left of 2017, which already hadn’t been a great year, by publishing a story on New Year’s Eve about how climate change may render the cacao plant ungrowable by the year 2050.
Since chocolate is made from the cacao plant, and only the cacao plant, its demise could render chocolate extinct.
The problem, apparently, lies with the plant’s inability to compromise on its growing environment. It has to be in a particular kind of stable rainforest near the equator, which is why half the world’s chocolate is grown in Ghana or Cote d’Ivoire.
Both those already warm countries are getting warmer, like the rest of the planet, and scientists fear that by 2050, cacao’s current growing fields may become too hot. The plant could conceivably be relocated to a cooler spot 1,000 feet higher in the nearby mountains, but most of that land has already been set aside in preservation programs to protect endangered species.
In what kind of world would we have to choose between Diana monkeys and a Dove Bar?
Now it should be noted that Business Insider’s real point was not to induce worldwide depression, but to report on how corporations like the candy giant Mars, for whom chocolate is lifeblood, are trying to keep the cacao plant viable. Scientists are working on genetic modification, for instance, news that raises its own set of questions.
Truth is, if these warnings are correct, chocolate as we know it may be the maiden on the raft at the brink of the falls. If she goes over, no amount of climate change can mitigate the chill it will cast over the world.
Personally, I could say it’s not my problem. By 2050 I expect to be extinct myself. But people I care about will remain, and a world without chocolate is not the kind of world you work all your life to help leave them.
How would you explain chocolate to generations that had never known it? It’s like asking how you’d explain a rainbow or a rose. You had to be there.
Booming Ben.
A bronze sculpture of Booming Ben, along with preserved specimens, gives me a good sense of what a heath hen once was. I’m not sure a bronze sculpture of a Hershey Bar in central Pennsylvania would give me the same appreciation of chocolate.
And what will the end look like? Will there come a day in late 2049 when only one bag of M&Ms remains in the world? Will it be plain or peanut? Will blue still be a color? Who decides who gets the last one?
Will bags of Oreos suddenly one day contain only filling? Will a woman in Nebraska, making brownies for the church bake sale, use her last package of chocolate chips, sigh and tell the bake sale coordinator from now on to expect macaroons?
Will Neapolitan ice cream be retired or will vanilla and strawberry be repartnered with rum raisin?
And someday many years from now, will there be a chocolate exhibition in the Museum of Natural History, adjacent to cave paintings and pottery from Pompeii? Will some enterprising archeologist have found a slice of chocolate mousse miraculously preserved in amber?
It’s all too depressing to contemplate. Maybe next time I pass Booming Ben, I’ll tuck a Mallomar under his wing.