TICK TOCK THE CLIMATE CLOCK – PART THIRTY-SIX: EXTINCTION STUDIES IN HOBART

We can argue about whether and to what extent this February's freeze in Texas or last year’s wildfires in Australia and the U.S. were influenced by climate change.  But we cannot argue that these events have had a devastating impact on animals, some of them species already in peril.  Here is the data:

Volunteers rescued more than 4,000 “cold-stunned” sea turtles, an endangered species, from San Padre Island.  When water temperatures drop below about 50° F, these animals become lethargic and do not swim or feed, causing them to wash up on shore.  Euronews

Twelve primates have died so far at Primate Rescue, a non-profit sanctuary for monkeys, chimpanzees, and lemurs in Bexar County, Texas. ABC

Home to 13 million cattle, Texas ranchers have scrambled to keep newborn calves, lambs, and chicks alive.  The cold will also kill oats recently planted for grazing, further threatening the animals’ survival and increasing consumer prices. Yahoo News

The World Wildlife Federation estimates that nearly three billion animals – mammals, reptiles, birds, and frogs – were killed or displaced by Australia’s 2019-20 bush fires.  WWF

It’s unknown how many animals were either smoked out of their homes or burned alive in California’s wildfires last year, because data are not consistently tracked.  But when fire burns so fast that animals cannot out run it, or when temperatures reach as high as 1,292° F beneath burning logs and 212° F two inches below the surface of the forest floor, such that animals cannot burrow into the ground to escape it, the inescapable conclusion is that millions of animals did not survive.  National Geographic

As we witness these vividly documented recent disasters, we are not witnessing the unseen, even greater disaster, the one that cannot be filmed and which does not show up on the six-o’clock TV news or in our daily online news feed.  That unseen but nevertheless real, rolling disaster is the Sixth Mass Extinction, which continues to unfold even if we are not conscious of it, and even if some of us consciously deny it.  This “none-so-blind-as-those-who-will-not- see” behavior has been called “extinction denial,” the cousin of climate denial. 

But just as some fight against climate denial with climate mitigation efforts, others fight against extinction denial with conservation efforts.  For example, bird extinction rates were reduced by 40% in 2019, and some species moved from the “critically endangered” list to the “near threatened” category.  This success has everything to do with awareness, including recognition of what we have lost.  To gain an understanding of that loss, which includes the adorable Tasmanian smooth hand fish above, here is the 2019 data from Ecowatch.

Awareness being key, one artist made it her mission to increase consciousness of species loss by making the invisible visible, and the visible invisible once again.  Lucienne Rickard, pictured above, is a Tasmanian artist who spent 16 months in a gallery in Hobart creating Extinction Studies, an exhibition described in an interview with the artist in Open Journal:

Extinction Studies is a twelve-month investigative art performance that Lucienne began in September 2019 at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG). Intended to last 12 months (the project is currently on hold due to the forced closure of the gallery as COVID-19 re-writes life as we know it), Lucienne draws an intricate and laboured image every day of a recently extinct plant or animals species. Her beautiful and time consuming work is then erased the following day ahead of a new drawing beginning in the imprint of those that came before. This process of drawing and erasure, or evolution and extinction, is repeated in full knowledge that the paper will deteriorate and eraser shavings will accumulate. [Note:  the gallery re-opened and the project was completed in January.]

Rickard used 187 pencils and 25 erasers to create and then destroy the 38 works of art in the exhibit.  By meticulously drawing and then methodically erasing the critically endangered or extinct species before the eyes of rapt gallery visitors, Rickard hoped to trigger their empathy and rouse them to action.  As she said in the interview,

Everyone can understand a realistic drawing, and they can understand and feel the loss in me erasing it. If they can then go on to think about the loss of extinction then I’m doing my job.

The Guardian explains Rickard’s approach to her project this way:

Most resonant for her was the birth and death of Rickard’s Xerces blue butterfly [below]. She’d viewed a wing under a museum microscope and found its detail “mind-blowing … like an endless forest or landscape.”

Informed by science, Rickard drew wings with an estimated 113,000 scales – a three-month process she describes as “torturous”, and which she documented in a series of posts on Instagram.

“I’m investing so much in this one drawing, this one species, because I’m getting frustrated,” she wrote in one. “There is infinite exquisite detail all around us, but we’ve become used to seeing ourselves as removed from the natural world ... I want to shake people. I want to yell, ‘Look!’ But I’m drawing every last scale instead.”

People following her progress pleaded with her to cancel the butterfly’s erasure; to make an exception for the butterfly living on the page. Her parents applied similar pressure, lamenting their daughter’s efforts with the wings.

“There was a heightened atmosphere in the room when I erased it, and I almost cracked,” Rickard remembers. It was the “sting” of this erasure that gave it power.

In her Extinction Studies, Rickard has created a kind of penitimento for the penitent.  She has brought the dead to life and then buried them again, but not without first giving them a voice that rings out as a desperate plea for action.  Her concept is brilliant in its simplicity and powerful in its pedagogy.  Seeing, and then not seeing, is believing.

Keep it real!  And wear your damn mask!

Marilyn