Remembrance Day for Lost Species

Abstract

This essay explores the work Remembrance Day for Lost Species (RDLS), a coalition of artists, activists, and environmental organizations who memorialise the losses of extinction. I argue that RDLS's practices create an ethics of witnessing ecological loss in ways that expand discourses about what (and who) counts as grievable life. I take up Judith Butler's theorisation of the powers of mourning in rendering life legible to illuminate the ways RDLS mobilises grief and absence, thus reimagining relations between humans and nonhumans in a space outside of capital.

RDLS participants unite on 30 November to bear witness to the extinction of species, habitats and cultures. The movement was founded in 2011 by UK-based performance collective Feral Theatre, artist Andreas Kornevall and Reverend Peter Owen Jones. Several other organizations and artists have since joined, though anyone may create participate, adding their events to the RDLS crowd-sourced electronic archive. I look at a particular event, the Lake Merritt Regenerative Memorial and Pollinator Procession (2017), to articulate the performance practices brought together under RDLS as a praxis of ethical witnessing in the time of climate crises.

RDLS renders nonhumans as subjects through the creation of mourning rituals for extinct and endangered species. By approaching nonhumans through what Butler has called grievability, RDLS counters the human exceptionalism that supports the exploitation of nature as merely raw material for endless accumulation. By challenging this logic of accumulation, RDLS participates in a queering of normative capitalist time through the creation of a time-space outside of the inexorable forward movement of capital. As they engage in ‘nonproductive’ uses of time, RDLS resists the vast unmarked (biodiversity) loss intrinsic to global capitalism, bringing forth new forms of human and nonhuman relationality in the face of ecological breakdown.

Notes

1 Head’s theorization describes grief as an affect specific to the Global North as climate change erodes the ideals of modernity – autonomy, individual rights, progress. She connects this sense of grief to the prevalence of climate change denial (2016: 38). The ways RDLS understands grief differ significantly from this idea, as I will demonstrate.

2 For example, see Bonneuil and Fressoz (2016), Demos (2017), Haraway (2016), Whyte (2018) and Yusoff (2018).

3 This concept runs through several of Butler’s works; see Butler (2004, 2009, 2015).

4 See Finney (2014) and Whyte (2018), for example.

5 I acknowledge that particular groups, such as Indigenous peoples or those in heavily agrarian societies, likely have a different relationship to pollinator species. However, as a practice originating in the urbanized Global North, RDLS intervenes in dominant understandings of ‘nature’ that persist there.