CARRIER BAG THEORY OF CONSERVATION
This piece was created for Creature Conserve’s Re-Inhabiting Conservation: Using Art to Bring Wildlife Conservation Closer to Home exhibition at GoggleWorks Center for the Arts in Reading, PA. The exhibition is on view May 22 - July 26, 2026 in the Schmidt Gallery.
Prints now available here.
This painting is inspired by
Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (rooted in Elizabeth Fisher’s theory of evolution) which reframes human history as a story of gathering and tending to life rather than one of heroic conquest. Attention is shifted from familiar pollinator icons (adult moths and butterflies) and centers caterpillars with their host plants as “carrier bags” of future ecosystems: organisms whose survival and interaction make pollination, and the consequential radiation of life, possible. These small systems contain the fate of large ones. Conservation is not always heroic spectacle; it is slow and patient attention, carried in a bundle as small as a caterpillar. Le Guin writes, “It is the story that makes the difference.” Here, the story of conservation is one of reverence and devotion for interdependent and foundational relationships such as these.
36 x 36 inches; acrylic and latex on birch panel. Full species key here.
