The Life Cairn - a memorial for life lost
at least we must pay attention
A reflection between International Day of Biodiversity (May 22) and World Environment Day (June 5).
A group of people are standing in the evening sun around a mound of stones. The view from the little hill just outside central Stockholm is delightful: the intensive early-summer-green grass, the leaves interspersed with pink and white flowers of cherry trees and blackthorn. People walking and jogging with or without dogs, some on horseback, in the yellowish evening light. The skylarch singing its heart out from high up in the blue sky.
Surrounded by all this beauty and aliveness, it is difficult to hold the awareness of what is sometimes called the biodiversity crisis, sometimes the sixth mass extinction. But we are gathered here, around these of stones, for a remembrance ceremony in honor of the species threatened with extinction. It is the International Day of Biological Diversity, May 22, and this Life Cairn is a designated public space for the attention and the grief that the extermination of life demands.
The word “biodiversity” feels less and less palatable to me. I remember when I first heard it. I was a (very young) teacher at an upper secondary school, and read about the development of the concept biodiversity in the context of entomologist Terry Erwin’s work on establishing the number of species on Earth. Little did I know that a decade later, I would join him collecting insects before dawn in Yasuní, Ecuador. (Life is indeed miraculous.). I was very excited about the idea of biodiversity, I remember making an energised presentation to the students in my class. It seemed to make a lot of sense as a term to describe something that needed to be understood. Now, after living with it for 3 decades, during which time the “biodiversity” has been steadily diminishing, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
“Biodiversity” - what it means is nothing less than life on Earth. Using this technical term, describing and dividing it into genetic diversity, functional diversity, taxonomic diversity, etcetera is obscuring more than enlightening. Somehow it feels like a sign of poverty for a culture to speak about life – Life! – in these terms. It becomes something for experts. Impenetrable, abstract, distanced from people who live their lives isolated from the effects of the sixth mass extinction, while all the time totally dependent on the web of life that is increasingly having big holes torn into it.
Despite the special days designated by the UN for “biodiversity” and “the environment” (with the International Day of Potato in between) We. Just. Don’t. Get. It.
There are now just two individuals left of the Northern white rhino, since the last male, Sudan, died in 2018. He spent the the final years of his life with his daughter Najin and granddaughter Fatu. This particular embodiment of life is soon inevitably gone forever. (Even if the culture that needs a term like “biodiversity” keeps focusing on how it would be technically possible to create new northern white rhinoceruses by IVF). Photographer Ami Vitale writes about Sudan the rhino in the article The Last Goodbye in National Geographic: “He was gentle, hulking, otherworldly. I knew I was in the presence of an ancient being, millions of years in the making (fossil records suggest that the lineage is over 50 million years old), whose kind had roamed around much of our world.
…
Sudan’s death was not unexpected, yet it resonated with so many. When I arrived, he was surrounded by the people who had loved him and protected him. …Those final moments were quiet—the rain falling, a single goaway bird scolding, and the muffled sorrow of Sudan’s caretakers. These keepers spend more time protecting the northern white rhinos than they do with their own children. Watching a creature die—one who is the last of its kind—is something I hope never to experience again. It felt like watching our own demise.“
. . .
Last week, members of the Swedish Moderate Party presented their working group on how environmental politics should understand the human place in nature. “It is almost a philosophical perspective but without this dimension, politics risk getting lost and become messy and inconsistent”. Human beings are the point of departure, this is already clear for the working group. It will develop proposals on how politics will “balance the protection of biological diversity with the need for development of our society”, implying that protection of biodiversity may be detrimental to human development. This is less as a right-wing conservative view of human-nature relationships, than it is the dominant view in western culture. The Moderate Party members are just unusually clear in their articulation.
But we are now in a time when the message from the most cherished institution of this very culture, science, are in conflict with its ideas of human development. There is no doubt about either that humans need healthy ecosystems, or that those ecosystems are in urgent need of protection and restoration. Last week I had the opportunity to listen to Ron Milo of the Weizmann Institute of Science at a seminar at the Anthropocene Lab. He asked “will there ever be more human-made mass than all biomass? If so, when?“ I already knew the answer to that question, as I have extensively used his and his colleagues study on how the technosphere now exceeds the biosphere.
Since around 2020, there is more human-made mass than biomass in the world. Let that sink in. I find it dizzying. By weight, there is more plastic in the world than animals. I find it difficult to believe that the working group of the Moderate Party are aware of this. If they were, one would think that they would call for a little moderation. It is difficult to believe that anyone aware of this single piece of information could see a tension between protecting biodiversity - LIFE, nb! - and “human development”. I mean, how can it be aligned with development to know this and not choose another direction? Isn’t that below human dignity? Doesn’t this prompt the question: what IS human development?
EVEN IF one agrees with the Moderate Party (and again, our culture in general!) on humans as the point of departure for environmental policy - this paints a stark picture for a balance in favour of biodiversity.
When I was sitting with Terry Erwin on a veranda after dinner at the Tiputini Research station in the Amazon - cicadas singing, looking out over the Río Tiputini in the hope to see a pink river dolphin - I asked him which book I should read. He said, read Ishmael. I did. I recommend it highly. It is a spiritual adventure with a gorilla as a teacher. There is a poster mentioned at the beginning: WITH MAN GONE; WILL THERE BE HOPE FOR GORILLA?
At the end, the protagonist sees the backside of the poster: WITH GORILLA GONE; WILL THERE BE HOPE FOR MAN?
It is such a wonderfully paradoxical expression on the interbeing that we are living or dying with in this world. Somehow, we have managed to forget that we can only live together. The whole community of life are now suffering from this forgetfulness.
At the ceremony in Stockholm, people solemnly go one by one and lay their stones onto the Life Cairn. “I lay my stone for the forests, which are taken down as we speak. It is like I am being cut down too”. “This is for the herring in the Baltic Sea, it makes me angry and sad that we allow trawlers to sell it as fodder on a global market, fully aware that the herring populations are collapsing”. Hundreds of stones, some small, some very big, are shaping the cairn. Every stone is an expression of love for the living web of this planet. Every stone is there with an intention, by a human witness to the extinction. We are at least not going to let this happen without paying attention.
One may be discouraged by how few we are around the Life Cairn. One may feel resignation and resentment about how little attention society is offering to the fact that we live in a mass extinction of life comparable to the end of the dinosaur era. One may feel powerless to see it but not be able to stop it. The medicine against that is to offer the finest gift you have: your own attention. To notice. To be a witness. To be present. If we are capable of bearing witness, at least Sudan and all the other, less massive beings don’t leave unnoticed. Directing your attention is a powerful thing. A few people directing their attention is what makes it possible for a whole culture to do the same.
Ami Vinale, who withnessed Sudan the Rhinos death, began her career covering conflicts. She writes: “If we choose to look for what divides us, we will find it. If we choose to look for what brings us together, we will find that too. Those years in war zones led me to an epiphany: stories about people and the human condition are also about nature. If you dig deep enough behind virtually every human conflict, you will find an erosion of the bond between humans and the natural world around them.”
The Life Cairn is a wish for bringing us together, humans and more-than-humans. It is a manifestation of presence and attention. The stakes could not be higher.
Come and lay your stone, or create another Life Cairn close to you. Some background information and links are below.
The natural world is the larger sacred community to which we belong. To be alienated from this community is to become destitute in all that makes us human. To damage this community is to diminish our own existence. Thomas Berry
Some history about the Life Cairn in Stockholm:
The Life Cairn is located at Gärdet (59°20'6.1"N, 18°6'40.6"E) in the National City Park of Stockholm. It has been there since april 29, 2014 when it was moved from its initial location close to Stora Skuggan, Norra Djurgården. The first inauguration was at the World Environment Day June 5th, 2012.
The Life Cairn was inspired by the first Life Cairn in the world, inaugurated May 22 in 2011 at Mount Caburn, East Sussex, England. Andreas Kornevall, co-founder of the this cairn was part of the inauguration in Stockholm. (Read Andreas text about Life Cairns here).
The cairn was moved to its current place in connection with the first conference on rights of Nature in Sweden, held by Lodyn in 2014. Earth lawyer Polly Higgins and chairman of the Sami Parliament Stefan Mikaelsson was among the people holding the inauguration ceremony. The cairn got a sign by the Royal Djurgården Administration.
In connection with the second conference on rights of nature in 2017, Earth lawyer Cormac Cullinan lay a stone at the Life Cairn. He was quite taken by the experience; he shared how he got the idea of erecting such a memorial for lost species and had mentioned it to Andreas Kornevall. “I was totally unprepared for seeing my own idea materialised”, he said at the occasion.
There are other Life Cairns in Sweden and around the world, including one at the Galapagos Islands, created by former Lodyn member Nikolas Berg among others in memory of Lonesome George, the last Pinta tortoise .
What springs to mind reading this, is for an Earth Cairn to be created on and around the stump of the Sycamore Gap tree that was sawn down last year. A national icon of the north of England.
It could be a place of remembrance of, but also over and above that one tree.
I live in London, and it feels like an idea which I cannot realise, but I am sharing here. To allow this idea to have space to breathe in the wider world beyond my own consciousness.
However, I will start talking with other neighbours though to start an Earth Cairn in a local park called Lordship Rec. Which is now also a seed released out in the wind....
To notice. To be a witness. To be present
Thank you.