On December 26, 2021, near the close of the second year of the pandemic, the renowned biologist, E.O. Wilson, passed away. Three days later comments were closed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and twenty-three species were removed from the endangered species list and declared extinct.

During the course of his illustrious career Wilson became a champion of biodiversity and the protection of wildlife. As a geobiologist, he discovered that smaller islands host fewer species, and the smaller the island, the more likely it is that a species on it will go extinct. At this point in human history, our earth’s wild places have been chopped up into fragmentary islands of wildlife preserves and parks. Realizing the likelihood of extinction in such fragments of habitat, Wilson wrote Half Earth in 2017 and formed the Half Earth Foundation https://www.half-earthproject.org/.

For this work I have painted several of the twenty-three species that were recently delisted due to extinction by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, many of them island birds, all as close to actual size as possible. The background alludes to habitat fragmentation and loss and ecosystem decay that led to this. In the first paintings I added the reason for extinction: the brown tree snake, the European rat, invasive raspberries, a malarial mosquito. But I began to realize these were all the symptoms, not the cause. 

The cause was us, humans, disrupting native fauna and flora, bringing our ills along with us in our endless restlessness. So, in the later paintings I simply added a human hand. A famous hand, Adam’s from the Creation of Man in the Sistine Chapel. It is a hand lacking in agency, suggesting our lack of will to tackle the overwhelming environmental catastrophe, climate change and mass extinctions, that we have precipitated.

That said, if everything goes extinct (and that will include us) something else will arise. At the microbial level we are all fundamentally connected. Of our body’s total cell count, human cells make up only 43 percent. The microbial colonists that make up the rest can alter our mood and behavior. Who exactly are we then? At a deeper level, thirty percent of the human genome consists of bacterial DNA and approximately eight percent of human genetic material comes from viruses and not from our ancestors. I have come to believe that the Buddha got it right, we are simply a collection of “heaps” skandhas. The “cells” in the paintings suggest this microbial underpinning that joins all that share the planet.

My interest in Zen Buddhism, and master Thich Nhat Hanh’s concept of interbeing, has led to me to explore in my work of the notion of figure/ground, which can be rephrased as the question of self/other.   Can we hold these two 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 and hope for a biodiverse planet. But, that is likely a fantasy. The world is in a constant process of becoming and unbecoming. Creation abhors stasis.