Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations

by Deborah Bird Rose (Editor), Thom van Dooren (Editor), Matthew Chrulew (Editor), Cary Wolfe (Foreword by)

Overview

Extinction Studies focuses on the entangled ecological and social dimensions of extinction, exploring the ways in which extinction catastrophically interrupts life-giving processes of time, death, and generations. The volume opens up important philosophical questions about our place in, and obligations to, a more-than-human world. Drawing on fieldwork, philosophy, literature, history, and a range of other perspectives, each of the chapters in this book tells a unique extinction story that explores what extinction is, what it means, why it matters—and to whom.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231178815
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	05/02/2017
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Deborah Bird Rose is adjunct professor of environmental humanities at the University of New South Wales.

Thom van Dooren is associate professor of environmental humanities at the University of New South Wales.

Matthew Chrulew is a research fellow in the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University.

Table of Contents

Foreword, by Cary Wolfe
Introduction: Telling Extinction Stories, by Deborah Bird Rose, Thom van Dooren, and Matthew Chrulew
1. Walking with Okami, the Large-Mouthed Pure God, by James Hatley
2. Saving the Golden Lion Tamarin, by Matthew Chrulew
3. Extinction in a Distant Land: The Question of Elliot's Bird of Paradise, by Rick De Vos
4. Monk Seals at the Edge: Blessings in a Time of Peril, by Deborah Bird Rose
5. Encountering Leatherbacks in Multispecies Knots of Time, by Michelle Bastian
6. Spectral Crows in Hawai'i: Conservation and the Work of Inheritance, by Thom van Dooren
Afterword: It Is an Entire World That Has Disappeared, by Vinciane Despret
Contributors
Index

Editorial Reviews

Extinction Studies collects haunting and haunted multivoiced stories that echo together in a vibrant plea for an ethic of care, lucidity, and obstinate, stammering hope. We need such stories to make us feel and think with the unraveling of a world we inherit and share together with innumerable entangled forms and ways of life. We need them also to repopulate our devastated imaginations and to help us escape the twin easy temptations of nihilist despair and blind confidence.

Isabelle Stengers

This book will interest those individuals who wish to deeply ponder the topic of extinction and its meaning and ramifications.

Choice

Human-caused extinction challenges our own survival—but also our compassion and our ability to tell stories adequate to shifting configurations of 'us' and 'them.' This volume gathers seven fine storytellers who show us what it means to lose or save another animal species in an era of rapid extinctions. These are tales of passion, time, conflict, learning, slaughter, imprisonment, and prayer. Drawing upon their common membership in an interdisciplinary and international working group on extinction studies, the authors show the potential of the environmental humanities to address one of the major crises of our moment in history.

Anna Tsing

Extinction Studies makes an important contribution to human-animal studies and the environmental humanities as the volume explores what extinctions and recoveries of endangered animal species mean in different cultural contexts. These perceptive and wide-ranging essays focus on the narrative and philosophical frameworks that turn the ecological reduction of bioabundance and biodiversity into sources of reflection about human and more-than-human ways of life as they unfold across generations and evolutionary ages. These analyses and meditations acknowledge both that animals can never be fully assimilated to human understanding, and that human stories play a crucial role in shaping the bonds with animals that take multispecies communities into a future of danger, but also of hope and exuberance.

Ursula K. Heise

This extraordinary collection addresses one of the most sobering aspects of the current environmental crisis. The contributing scholars use narrative as the vehicle for their historical, ethnographic, zoological, meditative, and poetic insights. The result is both personal and scholarly, both illuminating and a pleasure to read.

Harriet Ritvo

The studies contained in this volume cross species and kingdom boundaries, and are full of hope just as much as grief and mourning. In bearing witness to the lives of species that are functionally and/or already extinct, the authors present multiple modes of response and responsibility for those of us who remain.

Brett Buchanan

Emerging from the rich interdisciplinary work of the Extinction Studies Group, this important book focuses on particular critters, people, and places to ask in depth how the biocultural processes of extinction take shape, and who bears the burdens. This book insists on listening attentively to stories in the biologies as well as in the (more than) human sciences. The book develops in rich specificity what "entangled significance" means in an area prone to phrases like "mass extinction event," which unravel into abstract accounts that are at once too big and too small to hold the fleshly meanings and processes of actual collective death. Ethical understanding emerges not from first principles but from inhabiting living and dying on the edges and ledges of extinction for particular beings and kinds of beings. "Specific disappearing" and "multiply-storied" worlds are the themes, and they are searingly urgent.

Donna Haraway

The overall concept of [this book], to focus on social and philosophical aspects of species extinctions, represents an interesting and fresh perspective on the extinction phenomenon.

The Quarterly Review of Biology