Join the Lost Species Day co-founders for a participatory online ritual to mark Earth’s losses and bind corporate giants.

The new IEA report states that net income for the world’s oil and gas producers is set to double in 2022 to an unprecedented $4 trillion. The sector has gained an average of $1 trillion per year in profits for the last 50 years. Scientists are becoming increasingly vocal about the need to hold power to account:

“The combined profits, taxes and royalties generated by the oil and gas industry over the past few months would be enough to capture every single molecule of CO2 produced by their activities and reinject it back underground. So why are we only talking about transforming society and not about obliging a highly profitable industry to clean up the mess caused by the products it sells?” (Professor Myles Allen)

“The situation is serious and bleak. Shell has made £26bn profit this year, carbon emissions are back at pre-pandemic levels, while 53,000 people died of heat stress in Europe in the summer, and floods have displaced millions from Nigeria to Pakistan. The solution is to do everything we can to defeat the fossil fuel industry – they stand between us all and a prosperous future.”** (Professor Simon Lewis)

Join Lost Species Day co-founders Rachel Porter, Emily Laurens and Persephone Pearl (Feral Theatre) for a participatory online ritual to mark the enormity of the harms done to life on Earth and use words, images, emotions and intentions to resist and undermine white supremacist patriarchal power. This event continues the series of online rituals for Lost Species day initiated during the 2020 lockdown (see videos of the 2020 and 2021 events on ONCA’s YouTube channel).

This event is part of ONCA’s Lost Species Day 2022 programme, Queer(ing) Ecological Futures, a diverse range of online and in-person talks and workshops that celebrate imaginings of multiple possible futures beyond mainstream notions and investigate what it means to queer death and ‘extinction’. All events are free but donations are warmly welcomed. This year, any donations will go to ONCA, helping us continue our vital work of creatively challenging the driving forces of climate breakdown and biodiversity loss.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Feral Theatre co-directors Rachel Porter, Emily Laurens and Persephone Pearl have been making multimodal, multidisciplinary projects together since 2007, using devised performance work to explore themes around biodiversity change and eco-emotions. They received a Tipping Point commission in 2010 to make the immersive and influential Funeral for Lost Species, a play set in an imaginary Celestial Garden of Remembrance for Lost Species. Emerging from that, they co-founded Lost Species Day in 2011 – a voluntary initiative that invites participants from all over the world to host or attend memorials, gatherings and events for extinct and critically endangered species, communities and places.

Over the past decade, Emily, Persephone and Rachel have moved into a curatorial and facilitative role with Lost Species Day, steering the project away from its initial focus on endling stories towards a more intersectional, anti-racist and anti-colonial framing, amplifying diverse voices through its platforms. Lost Species Day has touched many thousands of people and influenced academics, institutions and social movements.

ACCESSIBILITY

This online event will be not be recorded. Please email with any questions about accessibility.