In conversation with Caroline Hickman

The evening begins with a short sound-and-image piece made for Remembrance Day for Lost Species by musician Rob Harrison and artist Amanda Brown, with the borrowed voices of creatures on the critically endangered list. Headphones are recommended for the immersive soundscape. The voice that opens the evening’s sound piece is the last recording of the single male Kauai O-o bird left alive, calling for its mate (see image information below*).

Caroline Hickman (University of Bath and Climate Psychology Alliance) is in conversation with Mat Osmond (Falmouth University and Co-convenor of Borrowed Time) and Zoe Young, Falmouth University Pagan Chaplain**) about the love, longing and loss we may struggle to feel as we remember lost species. Caroline has been working as a depth psychotherapist with an ecological awareness whilst also researching children & young people’s emotional responses to the climate and biodiversity crisis globally for many years. She will bring these children’s narratives of loss to the conversation and reflect on their awareness of their own vulnerability and that of the others with whom we are living through these troubled times. For some young people they are being born and growing up in the shadow of their own personal and cultural mortality. And for them ‘it is personal, what happens to the animals is happening to me too’. 

Caroline says: 

As more of us turn to face the increasingly painful, hard-to-imagine truths of the climate and biodiversity crisis, we can find ourselves in deep water, struggling with broken or numbed hearts. We need shared spaces in which to call together the obscure hurt and sadness, spaces in which we can feel the earth under our feet, and listen to the grief and longing that surrounds us: grief for who and what we have lost already, who and what we are losing now, and will in the future. In remembering them we can perhaps be reminded that that we too are – as Donna Haraway puts it – ‘mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings’. 

Caroline’s event will finish at 18.15. Following this, for those interested, our friends at ONCA gallery are marking Remembrance Day for Lost Species with an Interdependence Ritual with Bea Xu that will be streamed shortly after this session, and which you can find out about and register for here.

*The image above is a museum specimen of Kauai O-o, Moho braccatus (collected 1898, believed extinct since c. 1985) From the collection of Te Papa Tongarewa (Museum of New Zealand) used here with their kind permission.

** We are grateful for support from Falmouth University’s Multifaith Chaplaincy in producing this event.