I thought of this image we included in Hunab Ku as I listened to Maya Lin on NPR the other day. You may remember her for the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. which she designed as a 21 year old Yale student.
Maya was talking about her latest memorial : What Is Missing?, a multi-sited work incorporating video and sounds of birds and animals now threatened. She builds her art on facts and we can emotionally draw from those facts what we care to take away.
One in three amphibians, one in four mammals and one in eight birds is now threatened and in danger of forever dying because of habitat loss. (And 70% of our plants!)
The Nazca story is a compelling one and a sophiaserve reader recently sent me an update that may interest you as much as it interests me.
According to Earth News, the people who created these lines in Peru's southern deserts disappeared about 1500 years ago--all because of a tree. Or rather, the logging of those trees.
Imagine for a moment a tree called huarango. Its massive root system anchored nitrogen so deeply into the soil, it literally kept life going. People used the trees for food, shelter, life itself. They were aquifiers. When the trees disappeared, so did their civilization.
But they left complex lines behind in the desert for us to see--from the air. Some are miles long--monkeys, whales, and of course, birds. Eighteen have been found to date. They're formed like all the drawings, from stones, pebbles and red sand. The people created them from 500 BCE to 500 CE until, as the Cambridge University professor, David Beresford-Jones believes, they reached a tipping point. El Nino floods came. Climate change gradually induced by deliberate actions destroyed their civilization.
But their line art including "our" hummingbird with its 140 yard wingspan, still hovers over the desert trying to tell us...something.
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