By local artist Wayne Chabre, this 17-foot-high bell structure is made from bronze, locust wood and yew wood. The bell features quotations from essays on the environment by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Gary Snyder and award-winning Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan, and is intended to serve as a mourning piece for species which have become extinct.
The bell was officially dedicated September 17, 1998. It is located near the footbridge of the walking trail behind the Library building.
Quotation on front
The extinction of a species, each one a pilgrim of four billion years of evolution, is an irreversible loss. The ending of the lines of so many creatures with whom we have traveled this far is an occasion for profound sorrow and grief. Death can be accepted and to some degree transformed, but the loss of lineages and all their future young is not something to accept.
Gary Snyder
Practice of the Wild
Quotation on rear
A change is required of us, a healing of the betrayed trust between humans and earth. Caretaking is the utmost spiritual and physical responsibility of our time, and perhaps that stewardship is finally our place in the web of life our work, the solution to the mystery of what we are. There are already so many holes in the universe that will never again be filled, and each of them forces us to question why we permitted such loss, such tearing away at the fabric of life, and how we will live with our planet in the future.
Linda Hogan
Dwellings