By Pip Swinger | Staff Reporter
Hidden among trees, just off the path of winding WSU Vancouver trails, rests a looming structure—waiting to surprise hikers with its haunting song. Reaching 17 feet into the sky, The Wailing Bell is more than just a simple sculpture or landmark on a map—it is a requiem for lost species, and a warning of what’s at stake. The entire piece is a dedicated tribute to all the ecosystems and species that have gone extinct, a final knell to those who have already gone.
Ringing in dull, thudding tones, the bell’s haunting sound resonates through the surrounding landscape, in a deliberate evocation of absence and sorrow, an auditory representation of a world fractured. “A torn spot in the universe” is how the bell’s sculptor Wayne Chabre described it.
Etched onto either side of the bell are two essays by Pulitzer Prize-winning poets Gary Snyder and Linda Hogan, two environmentalists who lend their work to this piece. Their words, carefully etched into bronze by calligrapher Jeanne McMenemy, invoke a reflection on our place in the natural world, urging us to reckon with those we’ve lost while forging a path toward preservation. WSU Vancouver’s known commitment to conservation and the protection of wildlife is deeply intertwined with this monument.
On the front of the bell reads the following:
“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
On the back of the bell reads the following:
“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
The bell stands as a harsh reminder to all who encounter it — a solemn demand that we safeguard what remains. To hear its song is to be confronted with an undeniable truth: the echoes of extinction should not go unheard.