Who Will Cry for the Thylacine?: Radical Joy Revealed

Radical Joy Revealed is a weekly message of inspiration about finding and making beauty in wounded places. We hope you'll enjoy these doorways into places that are both familiar and surprising, and we welcome your suggestions, stories, and photos. Click here to subscribe.

Who Will Cry for the Thylacine?

A paper image of Martha, the last passenger pigeon, made for the 2014 Remembrance Day for Lost Species. Participants carried the bird to Mt. Caburn in Sussex, England and burned her in effigy. Photo by Robin Taylor

And who will cry for the golden frog, the Bombus franklini bee, the mammoth, the passenger pigeon, the dodo?

Many will mourn the fate of these and other animals who have disappeared forever from the Earth by observing Remembrance Day for Lost Species on November 30.

This annual event brings attention, art, and ritual to the grim reality of extinction. The idea began with English artist and activist Persephone Pearl on the day she discovered the thylacine. The animal, also known as the Tasmanian tiger, had been stuffed by a taxidermist and was on display in a glass case in the Bristol Museum. Pearl's grief for this one particular creature, whose death in 1936 also marked the death of its entire species and whose passing had gone unmarked, led her to co-found Remembrance Day for Lost Species.

Like Radical Joy for Hard Times's Global Earth Exchange, Remembrance Day for Lost Species takes place all over the world with people honoring extinct animals in their own ways. They have responded by making images of lost animals, doing theatre, conducting funerals, and reading poetry.

"We need to imagine and invent new rituals for the Anthropocene," said Pearl in a recent article in The Guardian. "What would a memorial for the Caspian tiger or the elephant bird look like? A memorial for the Great Barrier Reef? For 350 parts per million of atmospheric CO2?"

To participate in Remembrance Day for Lost Species, sign up on the event website.

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Radical Joy for Hard Times is a global community of people dedicated to finding and making beauty in wounded places. Reconnecting with these places, sharing our stories of loss, and making acts of beauty there, we transform the land, reconnect people and the places that nourish them, and empower ourselves to make a difference in the way we live on Earth.

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