The author and a child watching a video in the Listening Cone at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.
Every twenty minutes a living plant or animal species disappears because of humans. Maya asked herself,
“What can I do as an artist?”
And she came up with the idea for a multimedia project called What Is Missing? She says, “I want to wake people up to species loss and habitat loss. And suggest things we can all do to help. How can we protect and restore nature? Art can get people to pay closer attention.”
Maya set up her own nonprofit foundation in 2003 to fund the memorial. Then over the next five years she and her assistants and many volunteers gathered more than six hundred testimonies from people on every continent and planned a website that features charts, maps, and educational videos.
In 2009 Maya installed the first part of the project at the California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco. It’s a huge sculpture called the Listening Cone. Made of bronze and redwood, it’s shaped like a gigantic megaphone. Children and adults can crawl inside and curl up to watch videos of endangered and extinct species and hear their sounds.
Javan rhinoceros. Jaguar. Lion. Bat. Prairie chicken. Humpback whale.
Some people like sitting in it too long, and that can be a problem when other visitors are waiting for a turn.
In addition to the permanent Listening Cone, the memorial includes traveling exhibits and an interactive website. People of all ages are invited to go online and share their memories, or stories they’ve heard from parents and grandparents, about once-common creatures and plants that are disappearing. One man wrote that when he was a boy in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, “all it took was a jar and five minutes in anybody’s backyard to capture dozens of fireflies, to be enjoyed and set free.” Now he can’t remember the last time he saw a dozen fireflies in an entire evening.
The Listening Cone at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco features a selection of seventy-five videos with texts linking threatened and endangered species to their habitats.
One video in the exhibit is called “Unchopping a Tree.” The movie shows a redwood tree being chopped down until it is just a stump. Then, the film goes backward and at the end of the movie the redwood magically appears whole again. The film urges people not to chop down trees—or if they do, to plant new ones in their place. Maya says, “Together we can save two birds with one tree.”
Maya Lin received a National Medal of the Arts. This is the nation’s highest honor for artistic excellence. Maya was recognized for “her profound work as an architect, artist, and environmentalist.” And in 2016, she received the Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama as well.
But Maya is not content to rest on her achievements. She continues to push the boundaries of what a memorial can be. The newest part of What Is Missing? is a sculpture called Sound Ring. It was installed in 2014 at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, in Ithaca, New York. Maya developed it with scientists at the lab. The ring, 9 feet (2.7 metres) high, has hidden speakers that play the sounds of threatened species: toots of lemurs, wails of loons, and nighthawks booming “who-hoo.” There is even an underwater recording of Weddell seals in Antarctica.
In 2010 Maya received the 2009 National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama, who said, “The arts and humanities appeal to a certain yearning that’s shared by all of us.”
At the unveiling Maya said, “We can’t do anything about what has already been lost, but can we learn enough from the past to rethink a different and better future?”
The memorial is a work in progress that presents an ecological history of the planet. So far, forty scientists and conservationists around the world are participating. The project will end with Greenprint for the Future, a series of e-books and booklets that will offer people ways to protect the planet, such as changing their diets—for instance, eating less meat to save natural resources, growing native plants instead of lawns to reduce the need for water, and using solar power to reduce the use of fossil fuels. “There’s a lot we can do,” she said. “We could all make a difference.”
Although Maya continues to juggle many exciting art and architecture projects in her studio, as well as take care of her teenage daughters at home, she dedicates much of her time to the What Is Missing? project.
“It’s my last memorial. It will probably take my lifetime and beyond . . . If you give nature a chance, the world can heal.”
