A waltz of desperation is a term anyone can use here; just means a struggle to X Y or Z.
This song just states we are like the dodo getting this desperation of going extinct ingrained in us. I'm not sure who they are referring to on the white haired man, but I think its either towards humans again, but then it might be someone specific.

Basically this song means that we are heading down the road to extinction, like the Dodo is extinct now. "And he's come to a fork in the road
And there is only one direction to go" That direction is the way to extinction, we are destroying ourselves.

While it seems complex, the underlying message of this song is amazingly simple: we as a species are going to destroy ourselves. The Dodo was a bird that went extinct partly because of the ineptity of explorers who found it, and partly because it was a stupid bird. It was complacent and docile, and approached any potential threat as if it really wasn't a threat at all. The human race is the Dodo. We don't fear anything because we can control almost everything that wants to destroy us. Which means that someday we are going to stumble onto something that we aren't going to be expecting, and that complacency and lack of fear is going to be what destroys us.

I think the dodo's 'noble destiny' is being destroyed by a superior(?) race. 'As we watch our foundations erode' would it not be less embarrassing if we were destroyed by something stronger than us as opposed to destroying ourselves.

The Dodo was a large flightless bird, like the Ostrich, found around Australia. It had no predators thus it knew no fear. When Europeans colonized New Zealand, Australia, and the surrounding areas, they discovered this bird. They also discovered a new source of meat. The fearless bird would walk right up to the hunters, and investigate what they were. THUNK! The hunters resorted to using clubs to kill these stupid animals, as not to waste ammunition on something as easy to hunt as Jello. The Human Race has no predators. We sit around on our haunches and waste. Waste the Environment, our lives, our brains. Everything. No one acts on the problems of our society, worse yet, no one listens to anything anyone has to say. What happened to the Rainforest? Save this Save that...the only thing we have ever carried out is recycling, and even that we don't do well. When will we die? When will we become extinct like the Dodo?

This song to me is pretty straightforward. I think the message here is that the human race has advanced so far technologically, yet we are continually using that sophistication to gradually destroy the human race. We've come to a "fork in the road" where we have to either decide to go one way (start making the world a better place to live), or the other (destruction of the human species). The song uses the analogy of the dodo bird, which is obviously now extinct, compared to the eventual destiny of mankind if current trends persist.