Unsettling Extinction

Featuring contributions from key names in the field alongside some of the most exciting new voices, this collection presents cutting-edge work on species extinction from a wide variety of perspectives across the environmental humanities. Biodiversity loss threatens to transform the ecological foundations of all biological life on the planet, yet solutions to this crisis are fiercely contested. This book addresses extinction – along with climate change, the most urgent environmental crisis of the twenty-first century - by exploring species decline and conservation with a particular emphasis on divergent cultural framings, temporal scales, and media. Contributors explore what ethical guidelines underlie acceptable and unacceptable ways of interacting with plants and animals, what social, aesthetic, and affective perceptions and meanings are attributed to particular species, how human-nonhuman relations are construed as part of a particular social order and which species are considered worth conserving, and at what cost. Drawing on the disciplines of anthropology, cultural geography, environmental history, philosophy, literary studies, media studies, and studies of religion, this book explores how the engagement with biodiversity loss challenges basic assumptions in these disciplines and opens up new avenues of thought and activism for shaping the multispecies communities of the future. Environmental Humanities research has established that contemporary biodiversity loss is as much a social, cultural, and political as a scientific problem. This book explores responses to extinction with a particular focus on divergent cultural framings, temporal scales, and media. The essays approach biodiversity loss through the shift from a scientific to a cultural frame, but they also engage critically with basic concepts and assumptions in the humanities and foreground controversies and challenges that arise in the humanistic engagement with extinction. The section “Unsettling Histories” examines extinction through a decolonial lens in the shifting time horizons of European colonialism, Indigenous conservation and postcolonial cultural heritage preservation, each of which creates new tasks for historical reasoning. “Unsettling Narratives” analyzes how media from novels to activist documentaries and videogames encourage forms of more-than-human empathy, albeit at the risk of eliding the particularities of threatened lifeforms and the multidimensional causes of their decline. “Unsettling Boundaries” scrutinizes some of the many divisions that impede adequate understandings of, and responses to, the socio-cultural specificities of species extinction, including the conceptual separation between the domesticated and the wild as well as the disciplinary silos through which biodiversity loss is commonly researched. “Unsettling Ethics” explores how species decline challenges certain religious beliefs, values and practices that have historically privileged human interests and agency, inviting an enlarged understanding of communitas, whilst also complicating ethical reasoning in that extinction discourses question human exceptionalism even as they affirm humans’ global negative impact on other species, and their corresponding responsibility to seek to arrest escalating biodiversity loss.