This beautiful and sad video shows how fast the parks we love—Central park, Hyde park, Champs de Mars park—would be gone if they were logged at the same rate as the rainforests around world. The video is part of a multimedia science-based collection of artworks as memorial to the planet, titled, What Is Missing?. Designed by artist and sculptor Maya Lin, the goal of the memorial is to raise awareness about the sixth great extinction and its relationship to habitat loss, deforestation, and climate change.
90 acres of rainforest are destroyed every minute, threatening half the worlds species with extinction. Deforestation is responsible for 20% of all global warming emissions. This year in particular is a very bad year; not only did we lose 8 million acres (so far) in the United States in 2015; now Indonesia is on fire with both peat and forest burning in almost 100,000 fires intentionally set to clear land. These fires have released over 1 gigaton (1 billion tons) of CO2 so far, over 3% of total global emissions and more carbon than the entire country of Germany emits in a year. And in drought-ravaged Brazil, over 11,000 fires have burned in the Amazon rainforest this year.
What is Missing? is a call to action: the work “asks us to look at a memorial not as a singular, static object, but as a work that can exist in multiple forms and places around the world.”
For more about What is Missing? or to add your own memory to this memorial, visit the memorial web site.
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