The focus on species extinction and habitat loss also forms the focus of Maya Lin’s website What is Missing? Created in 2009, What is Missing? is a multimedia project that functions both as a memorial for lost or threatened species and as a resource to connect people, “presenting plausible future scenarios for a sustainable planet, and showcasing examples of what is already being done around the world to make these ideas a reality, all the while providing people the much-needed feeling that it is within our power to make change” (What is Missing?).

 

The site features a combination of videos, interactive maps and timelines, and collections of personal memories that individual users across the globe can contribute. As the website explains: “These accounts create a collective memory of the planet, giving people an idea of how wondrous the natural world used to be but also how resilient nature can be.” The collective memory function of What is Missing? makes it, as Barry Jason Mauer argues, “dynamic and active, allowing visitors, and, indeed, whole online communities, to shape and be shaped by a number or perspectives, narratives, and artifacts” (2).  Lauren R. Kolodziejski argues that “by disrupting the human gaze and highlighting tensions within communication about the environment, [What is Missing?] creates openings for alternative articulations of the human–nature relationship” (429).

 

The main page of the site features a map of the world with dots that represent videos, timelines, or memories. The timelines track extinctions and changes to environments and habitats in different locations. For example, one timeline tracks the extinction of different bird species on Hawaii between 1824 and 2008. Another timeline focuses on Chicago, 1674-present day, recording descriptions of the land, natural resources, plants, and animals, ranging from early settler descriptions of the area to recent problems with zebra and quagga mussels and algae blooms.

 

Timelines like these two, according Kolodziejski, “[replicate] othering and connection perspectives simultaneously, creating an interactive experience that draws attention to the tension between them and complicates simplistic framings of nature” (439). Viewers feel connected to the timelines because they can track species loss that has occurred within their lifetime and feel a personal sense of loss, while, at the same time, they maintain distance from the information given in a broad, sweeping representation of space and time (438-439).

 

What is Missing? also features seventy-five videos “on threatened species, habitats, and critical environmental issues” (What is Missing?). The videos follow a pattern: from a blank screen a circle opens up revealing the video, which begins out-of-focus; as the image becomes clear, a series of texts appear superimposed over the video while either ambient noise or the sounds of the animal featured in the video can be heard. Kolodziejski points of that the structure of these videos “disrupts the human gaze and its objectification of nature, inviting visitors to pay closer attention, to engage more deeply and to see the thing being viewed as a subject” (435).

 

While many of these videos are focused on present day threats to species and habitats, others take a more historical viewpoint. For example, “The Abundance of Bison” features an image of a nineteenth-century photograph of a man standing in front of an enormous pile of buffalo skulls. The video slowly pans across the image while a quote by W.T. Hornaday about the amazing abundance of millions of buffalo in the nineteenth century appears in front of the image and the sounds of buffalo grunts provides the video’s only audio. The video emphasizes the physical animal body and how it can be separated or disassembled into parts. The buffalo noises remind viewers of the physical presence of the animal and that the mountain of skulls belonged to once living, breathing creatures.

 

The vast collection of personal memories contributed by visitors to the site are intermixed with excerpts from writings by naturalists such as John James Audubon. Many of these memories focus on contributors’ encounters with or observations of animals and how they have noticed a decrease in their numbers. For example, in one post about owls, contributor Janet Griffiths writes: “When we first moved to Houston,Tx., [sic] in 1976 we would frequently hear or see big owls, barred owls I believe, who perched on tall pylons crossing Buffalo Bayou. Also we saw and had nesting in our yard screech owls. No nests recently and I’ve only heard one screech owl in the last 12 months.”

 

Or this memory written by contributor Cate Moses:

“I saw my first mountain lion in the wild in 1975. Since then I have encountered eight more. As the largest predators in the forest, they order our experience of wild. I fear that they may soon be gone. Humans hunt them for sport, running them down with dogs, leaving the skinless carcasses where they lie. Almost every photo you have seen of a mountain lion was taken seconds before the paid guides bring the wealthy hunter in for the pleasure of shooting a treed lion. Often the dogs keep the lion treed for hours or days while the hunter is summoned by cell phone, flies to the site, and is ferried in via air conditioned range rover for the kill.”

 

The personal memories shared on the site feel familiar and accessible, and serve to prompt in readers not just a consideration of species loss, but also a desire to share their own memories as well. Unlike In Pieces, What is Missing? provides more opportunities for users to engage with the website’s material. They are invited not only to participate, but also are encouraged to be changed or altered by experiencing the site. Such involvement impresses more clearly upon our senses and sensibilities and creates a greater sense of engagement and enmeshment of humans with the nonhuman world. Rather than taking a memory from the site by downloading desktop wallpaper, users give memories and records to be shared and experienced by others around the world.