The Monday of fall break, I had the pleasure of seeing Porter Robinson’s EDM concert at The Factory. It was a blast, to say the least. While the magic of the experience cannot be conveyed through words, the video “Nurture Live at Second Sky 2021” on Porter Robinson’s YouTube channel was part of the same tour that I saw – songs, visuals, and all. With that, you have an opportunity to follow along with what I have to describe next.

His “Nurture” album is a hopeful one overall, whose theme revolves around regrowth and new beginnings both personal and universal. However, that doesn’t make it blindly self-content. In particular, the lyrics to Porter Robinson’s song “Wind Tempos” are tinged with a melancholy saudade for nature that will not return. Not now, not ever.

Really, there are only three phrases that comprise the entire lyrical composition: “It’s so holy”, “To point out you”, and “Dream of you”. At the same time, there is a word left unsung, in place of the word “holy”, that nonetheless appears everywhere in the performance’s visuals: “lonely”.

How do people worship something that is holy? Not all religions share the same iconography, scriptures, statues, shrines and temples and churches. But no matter what one may choose to believe, common among all religions is some form of representation. To remember each other and their place in the world, worshippers congregate at shrines. To remember holy figures long deceased, worshippers erect statues in their honor. To remember sacred history long past, worshippers pass down written scripture until it’s no longer known whose words are whose. To represent what they themselves may never experience, iconography exists as a promise that their God(s), their religion, truly exists in this world.

Porter Robinson’s performance of “Wind Tempos” is his way of worshipping nature. Paint strokes forming a canopy swaying in a nonexistent breeze, pointillistic dots forming leaves rotating in computer-rendered exhibition, rough sketches of birds sewn together into a Boy Scout badge, square snapshots breaking up the scenery like dead pixels on a monitor. Imperfect representations of what we take for granted: green fields, blue skies, white doves, blooming daisies, rippling streams, dandelion seeds ready to flee… 

If all of this were to be gone, wouldn’t we worship what we have left of them, what we made to remember them? And then still … wouldn’t we be lonely without them?

The same day Porter Robinson published that concert video, federal officials from the Fish and Wildlife Service publicly proposed to declare 23 species extinct, requesting them to be removed from the endangered species list. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, there are now 902 species that have gone extinct since the list was first compiled in 1964, a number that will continue to grow and be unrepresentative of the true loss. Even so, these species are not just “possibly extinct” nor simply “extinct in the wild” – both of which are official categories by the way – but definitively extinct.

The thing is … I just told a half-truth. Not all 23 species were just added to the IUCN Red List Extinct category; in fact, around half of that number was officially labeled “extinct” beforehand. From the Fish and Wildlife Service’s perspective, it is a better use of resources to protect living species than to spend time confirming the passing of dead ones. From Capitol Hill’s perspective, President Biden has still yet to nominate a new director for the agency, and despite Biden’s request for an over $60 million budget increase for protecting endangered species, the House Appropriations Committee has already cut that by $17 million.

For these reasons (plus generally a lot of backlog because this is an U.S. governmental agency we are talking about), there is a long delay between final sightings and extinction declarations. For many of the newly declared extinct species, their final sightings were in the 1980s. For the Kaua’i nukupu’u (Hemignathus hanapepe), the last sighting was in 1899. 

On average, it takes 12 years for a species initially being considered for U.S. governmental protection to actually receive it. At least 47 species have gone extinct in the middle of this process.

It’s easy to balk at those numbers, to rage against the U.S. government for taking our taxpayer money and yet failing at the simple job of identifying problems right in front of them, let alone actually solving them. And we could. But no matter who we chose to blame or who chooses to repent, there was really nothing that could have been done for these species. By the time the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, many of these species were most likely already extinct or teetering over the edge. At that point, our job isn’t to save the life around us. Our job is just to mark their graves.

That isn’t easy. It’s one thing to have to write a eulogy for a public figure, a parent, a friend. It’s another thing to mark the death of an entire species with only a checkmark for an epitaph. But that’s all the biologists at the Fish and Wildlife Service could do, including Amy Trahan, who told the New York Times that it was “probably one of the hardest things I’ve done in my career … I literally cried”.

Even so, why does it take decades to declare a near-dead species extinct? I suggest this answer: somewhere in our hearts, we humans struggle to accept that an entire species is dead because of us – so we upheave heaven and earth and time itself in search for just one last one that has to be alive out there, somewhere.

The species that Amy Trahan cried over in fact makes for a dramatic example of this. The ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) was last confirmed sighted in 1944. However, in 2004, Gene Sparling claimed to have discovered a woodpecker that looked like the missing species while kayaking in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas. On the same day, a researcher at Cornell Lab named Tim Gallagher saw the news, and within two weeks was one of the two men who had flown in to meet Sparling and see for themselves. The bird in question flew in front of them. They started shouting and crying, moved by the miraculous miracle – and the bird was scared away.

One year, 16 researchers, seven new sighting claims and a blurry videotape later, a paper was published in Science that concluded with this information that the species was in fact still alive after six decades. Ten million dollars were allocated for the protection of the ivory-bill, despite rising criticism that the bird had been completely misidentified. For comparison, one out of four protected species receive less than $10,000 a year. 

It may have been a hasty decision. Yet, I personally feel that I can’t begrudge the grown men and women that cried and prayed for the survival of a species they were too scared to simply give up on.

Yet no matter how much anyone tried, the ivory-bill was never seen again. Not even a possibly mistaken sighting. Nothing. And so, with that overwhelming void of evidence, Trahan put her pen to paper and marked, “delist based on extinction”. 

Funnily enough, the IUCN Red List still marks the ivory-billed woodpecker as “critically endangered”, two categories removed from extinction. In the end, no matter who it is, it’s still hard to let go of the ghost that may have never been there.

All we have left of footage for the ivory-billed woodpecker is that blurry videotape from 2004. On YouTube you can find that video yourself where that bird, with two white stripes down its body and a pale beak poking into the hollow of a tree, may live forever in recorded memory. Yet this holy artifact may not even be of the right species. No matter what the truth may be, the fact remains that the passing of the last ivory-bill went unwitnessed. Our picture remains just as incomplete as the flashing images of sky, ground, and life that formed a halo behind a particular white-haired artist as he played his lonely eulogy.

Then Porter Robinson steps away. Behind him, the light has revealed a path. On the left side, we pass by the words “death”, “undo”, “delete”, “despair”. On the right side, “emotion”, “love”, “restore”, “create”. We define ourselves by both sides, we feel the weight of both possibilities, we are capable of both virtue and sin.

According to some religions, humanity began with two individuals, Adam and Eve. They may have existed. They may not have. According to the Bible, Adam “gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field” as if he was a father naming his newborn son. Is the scripture right? Maybe. Maybe not.

I’m not personally religious. But maybe ever since the Garden of Eden, we have remained caretakers of this world. We may be capable of both inflicting death and restoring life, but it is because of this dual nature that the responsibility falls on our shoulders. If you ask me, I’d say Porter Robinson’s asking us to make a choice. Neglect this world and be left with pictures. Or continue to nurture it, so that a new fledgling can grow up.

The light flashes again. We’re still traveling forward along that path, but the words on both sides are replaced by a single one: “Nurture”.