The Life Cairn Project

The Life Cairn Fire

Throughout human history, cairns have been built as landmarks to help guide a journey, to memorialize fallen comrades, for spiritual or shamanic practices, or simply to indicate a reverence for the natural world. The Life Cairn is a powerful new version of this tradition established in England by Reverend Peter Owen-Jones and Andreas Kornevall and assisted by Vanessa Vine, to memorialize species rendered extinct by human activity. The mission of The Life Cairn Project is to promote and catalyze the creation of Life Cairns as memorials to species that have become extinct due to human impacts on the environment, and to sound urgent alerts about critically endangered species, cultures and island nations.

A Life Cairn is more than a static memorial; through repeat visits to add stones and express our grief when another species disappears forever, a Life Cairn becomes a crucial touchstone for our sacred interdependence. As board member Diana Lightmoon puts it, "Grieving for the loss of a fellow creature of creation is an act of acknowledging what is happening right now. From this place of acknowledgement, we may be able to find a new way of being in this world with each other and with all species." To learn more about constructing Life Cairns and what you can do about our Earth Community's suffering, visit the Life Cairn Project website.