The Practice

Extinction Witness is a creative spiritual practice expressing and supporting varied human emotional responses to genocide, habitat loss, and anthropogenic species extinction.

To bear witness is to shed light on what is commonly and intentionally or unintentionally overlooked and/or hidden. Initiated winter 2011/2012 with an invitation to pause together in acceptance—the place of action—grief support and creative expression have been central to the practice.

Rooted in Quaker tenets and our traditionally action-oriented witness, Extinction Witness is led by fundamental optimism. That is, belief in the essential goodness. Humans can help revive biodiversity and possibly slow the rate of species extinction to normal background levels if we prioritize simplicity, socioeconomic equality, and quality process. As we strive, we can live well, “even beautifully” (Barry Lopez, personal correspondence).

The Extinction Witness website was consolidated with this portfolio site in 2019.

The current focus is on publishing the poetry.

For more, please see links below and connect.

Hummingbird Infinity Symbol—2014/2023

Vow 2 Act | Holy Compost | Year of the Fly

Lost Species Day

Original Extinction Witness interview (0:55)—This November 2013 interview was conducted by Tree Ring Productions among coast redwoods in Ohlone homeland. Please read "A Native History of the East Bay Redwoods" by Dana Viloria at Save the Redwoods League (2014/2023). Please also see and celebrate the return of ‘O Rew, a 125-acre property located off U.S. Highway 101 at the base of Bald Hills Road, to the Yurok Tribe.

References and reading on extinction:

IUCN Red List of Threatened Species—IUCNredlist.org

Accelerated modern human–induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction, G. Ceballos, et al., Science Advances.
THE SIXTH EXTINCTION: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert (Picador, 2014).