"Of course, a bumper sticker reading “Save the White Wonder Cucumbers” sounds a bit silly. And as long as we haven’t lost pears altogether, the loss of a particular variety, no matter how good, isn’t cataclysmic. We have a lot of other worries. How many years of clean air do we have left? How much clean water? But when we lose a variety of pear or cucumber, even one we’re not likely to taste, or, in an analogous situation, when we lose a language, even one we’re not likely to hear, we’re losing a lot more than we think. We’re losing sources of information that could help us solve our big questions, like who we are and what we’re doing here on earth."
— Beth Ann Fennelly, “Fruits We’ll Never Taste,” from Michigan Quarterly Review. Reprinted in Utne Reader, March/April 2002
