Laure Stevens-Lubin    

          Delisted

     due to extinction

On December 26, 2021, near the close of the second year of the pandemic, the renowned biologist, E.O.Wilson, author of Half Earth and founder of the Half Earth Foundation, passed away. 
Three days later, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed twenty-three species from the endangered species list and declared them extinct.

These creatures are in all likelihood gone from our planet, and thus, our human world is diminished.  But the scaffolding that made them, the cosmic dust, the impregnating comets, remains. It has absorbed them back into itself and they are not really gone.  Just as “we” are perhaps not really “here.”

Since 2008, my work has explored the concept of figure/ground, which can be translated to the question of self/other.  Can we hold these concepts simultaneously: self/other, no-self/no-other?  If we can let go of the primacy of the self, and beyond that, the primacy of the human, and embrace interbeing, perhaps there will be fewer extinctions.  But of course, that is a fantasy.  The world is constantly becoming and unbecoming.  Creation abhors stasis.  Perhaps we are in a moment of creative destruction at the heart of which is the destruction of ourselves.

Bachman's Warbler