November 16, 2023

Nov 16, 2023

Tomorrow, November 16, 2023, the rule enacted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service delisting 21 species from the Endangered Species Act (ESA) will come into effect.

The FWS initially proposed this rule in September 2021, and included 23 species/subspecies in total.

On October 17, 2023, the agency withdrew Phyllostegia glabra var. lanaiensis, the single plant, from the proposed rule. It also held off on a decision regarding the ivory billed woodpecker. Finally, it finalized the rule with respect to the other 21 species/subspecies of nonhuman animals.

This action is so quiet.

For Clarity

It surprised me when I opened my email October 17 and realized the agency had published the final rule. This was ten days off the October 7 attack in Israel, during the beginning of Israel’s current and ongoing cataclysmic assault on the Gaza Strip. The rule coming in at that moment was so strange I felt unmoored. It felt uncontainable.

But I had to sit with it because that is a central aspect of Delisted 2023, building capacity to sit with, and in relation to, other bodies.

It feels important for me to note here that Delisted 2023 is not a a project that asks you to shut down attention to human suffering. (I do not believe in a “nature” as a means to escape, avoid, or exorcise our humanness.)

Instead, Delisted 2023 seeks to support expansion of the capacity for being in the world in relationship with other bodies, human and more than human and in loss.

Give yourself to loss
and when you’re lost you’ll be at home.1

Delisted 2023 refuses to feed the trauma response, or to hew to calcified narratives. Delisted 2023 does not seek easy and hardened “meanings”. It is not a political movement, nor is it an activist movement, although participants, may themselves take political or direct or protest actions.

Delisted 2023 is dedicated to context and trauma’s metabolization, to embodied caretaking, to joy in grief, to the energies beneath the narratives. Delisted 2023 is in solidarity with the killed, the injured, the captive, the grieving.

Delisted 2023 yearns for a cease fire, for release of hostages, for healing.

It is possible to hold space with the human and the more than human and to not collapse.

3. The Rule

The 21 species included in the rule that comes into effect tomorrow join the 11 other species/subspecies/morphs removed from the endangered species list by the FWS or NOAA/NMFS from the early 1980s through 2018 because the best available science led the FWS and NOAA/NMFS to conclude they were extinct.

The removal of these species from the list means that the federal government is no longer compelled under the ESA to dedicate resources to their recovery. Similarly, the ESA will no longer mandate any identified critical habitat of these species be protected.

At the same time, poems, and stories, and drawings are emerging from this project. Art 25 conducted their ceremonial for Phyllostegia glabra var. lanaiensis the same month the FWS was planning on removing the plant from the rule and these other species, the mussels, bat, birds and fish, are being attended to, written of, contemplated.

These texts, poems, stories, and images are starting to emerge into the world, and I’ll provide opportunities for readings and other engagements with these works next year.

For now, I invite you into your creative practice.

I invite you to take time on November 16, 2023, or the not too distant future thereafter to recognize this quiet delisting, the shifting of federal attention away from these beings. I invite you into curiosity, contemplation, creativity, mourning, discovery.

Below I list the species and link to the federal sites where you can read a bit more about them. I also invite you to engage the creative practice I posted in May.

I will be doing this practice myself tomorrow morning.