What is Missing? Reflections on the Human–nature Relationship in Maya Lin’s Final Memorial

Abstract

This article provides an analysis of Maya Lin’s final memorial, What is Missing? (WIM), to understand how it rhetorically draws awareness to the material impacts of the nature-culture divide. Lin’s memorial argues for preserving the natural world through combining visual, aural, and textual elements and employing locus of the irreparable within an online interface. The combination of these rhetorical strategies, as well as the interaction between form and content, disrupts the human gaze, which frames nature as an object for consumption. WIM also activates mastery-harmony, othering-connection, and exploitation-idealism dialectics to highlight the tension between these opposing perspectives and to create discursive openings for new understandings of the human–nature relationship.

Keywords:

• environmental rhetoric
• gaze
• dialectical tensions
• human–nature relationship
• Maya Lin
• nature-culture divide

Acknowledgments

A previous version of this manuscript was presented for the Environmental Communication Division of the National Communication Association convention, Orlando, Florida, November 2012. The author would like to thank LeiLani Nishime for her useful feedback in developing this piece. She would also like to thank Christine Harold, Leah Ceccarelli, Jennifer Peeples, and the three anonymous reviewers for their suggestions that helped improve the piece.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Lin uses the term “place” interchangeably with “nature”; I have used the term in the same manner. For a discussion on defining “place” and distinguishing it from “space,” see Endres and Senda-Cook (2011). For other considerations of “place” in environmental communication, see the special issue, “The Symbolic Transformation of Space”, Environmental Communication, 7(1), 2013.

2. For the purposes of this article, I am most interested in Milstein’s (2009) reflections on the presence of the human gaze in zoo exhibits, but Milstein discussed several other themes that emerged from zoo exhibits to shape understandings of nature, providing significant insights into the tension present at sites that hope to provide environmental education but ultimately must entertain.

3. Although WIM includes several physical exhibits, I focus on the website because it is the most accessible aspect of the memorial and is described as “the nexus of the project” (About the Project, n.d.). In the conclusion, I discuss connections between the website and other WIM exhibits as well as potential future studies.

4. At the time of printing the publication date for the third map is projected as Earth Day 2015, after previously being advertised as Earth Day 2013 and then Earth Day 2014.

5. I am grateful to the reviewer who pointed this out.

6. This video is representative of the other videos.

7. In many ways these videos resemble Milstein’s (2009) proposed online zoo as an alternative that avoids a subject–object framing.

8. The placement of text over the visuals also reduces the likelihood that visitors will ignore this information. Zoo exhibits frequently include informational panels with content similar to the textual elements in WIM. However such displays fail to disrupt the experience of the exhibit itself and often receive little attention (DeLuca & Slawter-Volkening, 2009; Milstein, 2009). By embedding this information directly in a viewer’s line of sight, WIM overcomes these limitations.

9. It should be noted that while WIM promotes a message of conservation and environmental intervention, as a website it still participates in practices with environmental impacts and contributes to the problematic but often invisible issue of e-waste (Maxwell & Miller, 2008).