[POSTPONED] One Million Counterextinctions, Stage 2, at Depot Park

[EVENT POSTPONED DUE TO INCLEMENT WEATHER]

Join the SAAH and other community members on Friday, October 2 at Depot Park on the Hill to imagine infrastructure that will allow species local to Alachua County to survive the climate conditions they will face in 2045.

One Million Counterextinctions is a multi-stage, multi-year civic project led by Conrad Cheung (Assistant Professor of 3D + Extended Media) in partnership with Alachua County Commissioner Anna Prizzia and the Office of Resiliency.

By 2045, rising heat, saltwater intrusion, habitat loss and seasonal disruption will push dozens of local species past thresholds they can’t come back from. The species our lives depend on have no say in how cities build infrastructure; this project proposes a city-level prototype for designing multispecies infrastructure as a public, non-expert process.

At Depot Park, attendees will be introduced to a local species and the specific climate scenario it faces by 2045, and design a response by drawing or modeling a habitat, system, tool, something no one has imagined yet. No expertise required and there are no single solutions; the event is free to the public, open to all ages and attendees can drop in at any time.

Every design created is credited to its maker and enters a permanent, open-source public archive at counterextinctions.com — already home to more than 250 community-authored designs and counting — free for anyone to build. The project’s first installations, selected from that archive, will be fabricated at functional scale and sited on public land across Gainesville, where the species they were designed for will test them as real infrastructure.