The Craft: Altars of Extinction

L. Frank Menninguez (Raven's Manzanita) from
Mary Gomes' Altars of Extinction.

Fifteen years ago I stumbled upon Mary Gomes' project Altars of Extinction.
It inspired me deeply.  It was beautiful, creative, haunting, and important.  It was something I could really get my head around, but not yet my heart.  I didn't want to just care, I wanted to actually act.  Yet, I didn't.  Not then.  Not in meaningful ways.  Something just wasn't catalyzing in me yet and I was disappointed in that part of myself.  As ecological literacy educators are eager for us to all know, when it comes to heroic actions, like saving something, the most power comes to the individual who truly loves what they are saving.

Didn't I love nature and all its creatures great and small?

My answer in retrospect is no.  I respected it, well at least more than many people sharing my city with me.  I appreciated it, found it beautiful, and benefited from time spent communing in it, but no, I didn't love it.  I even grew up in nature.  I had the benefit of living on a small farm with big animals and running free in the woods without an adult in sight for hours.  Yet, I still didn't love nature in the way that would empower me to lift a two ton car off of its crushed leg.  (Or more accurately help reduce the estimated 1 billion cars crushing and chocking it worldwide.)  Ironically, I didn't fall in love with nature until I did the one action of my life that would wound it the most and became a mother.

My rite of passage into motherhood started with a stark initiation.  After a year of trying to conceive a child, I had tests, a surgery and a bleak prognosis - about a 1-5% chance that I would ever conceive a child naturally.  What followed was a literal beat the earth with your fist process of grief.  I had been a teenage girl in the eighties and all I had ever heard about pregnancy was "a woman's right to choose".  I had been living under the false assumption that it was all in my control.  Infertility schooled me and exiled me from my pack at the top of the food chain.  I wasn't in control, not like I thought I was, so rather than turning to the medical community I turned to nature.  Not for holistic treatments for infertility but for solace.  And, sadly, I found overwhelming company for my misery there.

Infertility was my personal initiation into extinction and Gary Snyder was my poetic shaman, "Death is one thing, an end to birth is something else."  I suddenly understood, no I FELT, all the animals grieving with me.  While well meaning friends were suggesting, "There are treatments..." I was enduring a rite of passage that was bonding me to a much bigger tribe; all the species suffering extinction at the hands of our unforgivable abuse of the communal environment.

I had a go-to mound of dirt that bore the brunt of my enacted rage.  It held its ground, until one day my anger finally gave way to sadness.  Then, the punches became tears and I was nearing the end of my initiation.  In fact, just a day before I was to learn that I had somehow miraculously beat those dire odds, and was indeed pregnant, two tiny mushrooms had burst through my mourning mound.  Which was just perfect.  Mushrooms, the lifeforms that push through and thrive from a big pile of crap.  I didn't need any more signs, I had gotten the message.  I had been given a second chance at life by being given the privilege of birth.  There was no doubt I was going to live differently.

So as I became a mother I finally became a true steward.  I was bound to the earth at the same time I was bound to my children through love.  I think of that paradoxical, mythic, moment in which I was granted a boon (the gift of birth) by a higher power that would be injured by the very gift it gave.  Not just one, but two more humans were granted.  Cute as their impossibly tiny toes may be one day they would create two more daunting footprints.  A heavy cost for nature whom in my opinion should in turn exact a payment.  So, in return for their lives I promised to raise my first and second born to be stewards committed to healing our mistakes and achieving sustainability.  I started reading up on ecological literacy and environmental education when E.P. was still swaddled.  I had a starting point, "Protect and nurture their innate biophilia."

It was a relief, learning that human babies are born preprogrammed to love nature.  I did underestimate, however, how difficult it would be to protect that natural instinct.  I listened to David Sobel's rule of "no tragedies before fourth grade" and tried to only provide positive opportunities to bond, wonder, and explore nature together.  I decided to save things like a family altar dedicated to our current mass extinction event for a few years down the road.

What one decade has proven in regards to how fast we are pushing our planet into dire peril has been staggering however.  Although Baanko is only in second grade the tragedies are too pervasive to push off.  She doesn't get to wait until fourth grade.  We don't get to wait another moment.  NOW is the moment we all need to activate our biophilia as the superpower necessary to save far more than just ourselves.

So, this year we made our first altar of extinction.  We placed it in the corner next to the Dead Letter Office.  I saw first hand why David Sobel made his fourth grade rule.   It was a simple altar but it hit the kids hard, particularly Baanko.  She moved the framed picture of Sudan, the last northern white male rhino that died earlier this year,  as if trying to get it placed perfectly.  The feeling we all shared was that there was no right place to put it.  It was all wrong.  She asked questions.  She tried to make sense of something so senseless.  I had to answer questions about guns, not the poachers but rather those humans armed to protect him in his last years from other humans.  She looked confused.  I felt sad.  In 2018 there is no protecting their biophilia.  There is only nourishing it and teaching them how to assert it.

Usually my entries under the title "The Craft" are full of whimsy, creativity, and tutorials.  Even if we are addressing a heavy topic usually our handiwork and what we learn leaves us in a more hopeful place than before we began.  Not this time however.  We completed our altar.  Every night we feel it in the corner, its one votive light, vigilantly flickering on Sudan's picture as if to remind how low our the planetary wick has become.

The kids spend their altar time focused on their family tree and their human ancestors.  I can't help but feel taken back much further and deeper to The Tree that Time Built  and the ancestors of the animals that I know currently face a truly terrifying expedited rate of extinction.  Just this morning WWF published a report about man-made factors creating a "mindblowing" crisis for wildlife:

"WWF UK Chief Executive Tanya Steele added in a statement, "We are the first generation to know we are destroying our planet and the last one that can do anything about it."

Reading our impact I feel grief of a global proportion and I am grateful for it.  It is part of the gift I was given with the conception of my children.  It is a result of the love that I finally authentically feel for all of nature.  Love born of compassion - suffering with.  It is a painful experience, like birth itself, but one I desperately wanted and must continue to repay by keeping my promise:  To help my children love nature enough to save it.