The Howard E. Woodin Environmental Studies Colloquium Series

“Hopes Echo: Learning an Extinct Birdsong for Ecosphere Healing” by Julianne Warren, Writer, Climate Justice Community Organizer, and Fellow, Center for Humans and Nature.

This presentation will feature an unusual, 1949 recording of an old Ma”£ori man imitating his memory of songs of huia—birds endemic to Aotearoa New Zealand until human activities caused their extinction in the early twentieth century. We will consider how this collective bird-man-machine echo sounds at the intersection of colonialism, indigenous traditions, and land use histories and expresses the Anthropocene. Might learning to listen and remember lost songs also help people—as ourselves, as land communities-not only think about, but embody absence and bear it responsibly into the unknown future as an animate, perhaps even re/generative, ecosphere presence?