My book, Forest and Labor in Madagascar: From Colonial Concession to Global Biosphere (Indiana University Press, 2012), is an anthropological-historical account of the role of subaltern labor in forest conservation and ecotourism efforts. It examines the role of low-wage workers in the creation of value for rare species in Madagascar over the past century. My edited volume, The Anthropology of Extinction: Essays on Culture and Species Death (Indiana University Press 2012), places the processes of biotic and cultural extinction events into a common analytic framework and presents case studies about extinction from the angles of different anthropological subfields.
the anthropology of extinction essays on culture and species death
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Just as the death of biotic species clears space for emergent creatures, extinction events propel the evolution of cultural productions, including science and technology, politics, history, and art. The prospect of human extinction has animated a doomsday genre of film and fiction, for example. This genre depicts alien invasions and zombie epidemics that annihilate the human species. The life-sucking creatures that fascinate us on the screen and page dramatize and invert the human-nonhuman relationship. From the viewpoint of, say, an Egyptian Barbary sheep (Ammotragus lervia ornata), a Guam rail (Gallirallus owstoni), or a member of any number of species that have gone extinct in the wild, humans are the monsters to be feared.
As the rate of biotic and cultural extinction accelerates, we have been forced to ponder the meaning of life in its material and immaterial forms, and to imagine ourselves not just as authors of our histories but also as creatures bound by species-being. The sixth extinction is a species-bound perception of reality. An interesting fact about the sixth extinction is that it is not defined by a steep reduction of all life on Earth but rather by a reduction in the abundance and diversity of macroscopic life. Humans, explains biologist Sean Nee (2004), attend to the state of their food sources, plants and animals, and are repelled by the slimes and oozes that quiver with invisible microbes. He states, Our perception of our impact on the planet as equivalent to a mass extinction simply reflects the evolutionary prism through which we view life (Nee 2004:e272).
The global concern about species extinctions today marks a shift from the nineteenth century, when the extinction problem centered on indigenous peoples succumbing to European expansion. Patrick Brantlinger (2003) argues that a discourse of extinction emerged as Europeans waxed nostalgic over the primitive races killed by firearms and foreign germs, as well as by the more gradual effects of cultural imperialism, population displacement, and economic and social marginalization. Europeans elegized what they perceived to be living relics of their evolutionary past and regretted the violence done to cultural diversity at the imperial frontiers. Renato Rosaldo reveals the paradox of imperialist nostalgia:
A well-publicized case highlighting the politics of extinction with regard to a cultural keystone species is that of the controversy over whaling by the Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth tribes of the Pacific Northwest, who had depended on whaling for centuries until the gray whale population dwindled to near extinction by the 1920s due to commercial hunting. Although the whale had been a focal point of the economy and expressive culture of the Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth peoples for centuries, they voluntarily stopped exercising their government-granted right to hunt for seventy years, until 1994. This is when the gray whale was removed from the list of endangered species. The Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth tribes decided to resume whaling amidst public outcry by environmentalists and animal rights advocates. Their act of reclaiming a political right to hunt also asserted their right to exist as a unique cultural group, and whaling represented an important means of revivifying their cultural heritage (Coté 2010).
Often such international focus on local ecologies is dreaded by the populations who live there and rely on resource exploitation. Efforts to ward off biological extinction take the form of land enclosure to create nature reserves, the penalization of rule-breakers, and the development of science and technology, such as artificial reproductive technologies, cryobanking, ozone hole repair, cloning, and nanobotics (Heatherington, this volume). Each of these pursuits is rife with moral and ethical quandaries concerning who gets access to natural resources and who loses access, the extent to which scientists should manipulate life for the greater good, and the hierarchy of values ascribed to various species. Is the common good a concept that favors humanity to the exclusion of other species, or geopolitically dominant societies to the exclusion of marginalized ones?
Extinction is a process and moment of loss that compels thought about the moral relationships among humans, nonhuman species, and habitats, as well as among social groups with varying degrees of power and autonomy. My own essay, in chapter 3, removes us from the cultural milieu of Western science and examines how science intrudes on the subsistence economy of northeast Madagascar, where rural people grapple with species depletion due to rain forest loss. One finds a convergence of extinction events: Malagasy people are abandoning animal taboos that have long protected certain species from hunting (an instance of cultural extinction), while the populations of endemic fauna are decreasing (an instance of multiple biotic extinctions). I reflect on how conservationists and residents use and transform the meaning of animal taboos and taboo animals, as well as pursuing their respective moral practices, in conservation-heavy zones.
BEN GARLICK, PhD, is a lecturer in geography at York St. John University. His research interests include exploring the geographies of animal cultures, extinction, and theories of landscape. He has worked on the conservation history of the osprey (Pandion haliaetus) in Scotland, UK, and is currently researching peatbogs as Anthropocene landscapes.
This special section of Environmental Humanities explores, defines, and elaborates on the spatial character of species extinction and its effects. The importance of extinction studies in environmental humanities is well established, and there have been significant and valuable contributions that problematize the scientific and atomized definition of the death of a species and move us toward a richer understanding of the social, cultural and affective aspects of the slow loss of whole ways of being. However, there has been relatively little debate on how these rich and specific understandings of extinctions are grounded in geographic insights into historic, social, political, ecological, and economic transformations at different scales, and how a geographic lens that foregrounds the contingencies of place (and time) might help bring these relationships into focus. The aim of this special issue, then, is to bring extinction studies into closer conversation with approaches in traditions such as human geography and political ecology to shed light on geographies of extinction. By this, we mean the place-specific nature of extinction, including spaces and places that are deemed to be extinct; the geographies through which extinction processes unfold; and the geographies that are left after extinction.4
Central to the work of extinction studies is a valorization of the work that particular stories can do when seeking to theorize the experience of wordly loss as both profoundly localized, yet also necessarily defying containment within any single locality, embroiled as it is in wider processes of economics, governance, and violence. Good stories are generative, and they force us to bear witness.16 The power of such stories, as Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing and many others assert, is that they make matter the deaths of others, forcing us to become uncomfortable with, to stay with, even embrace, the trouble(s) of capitalist living. The histories and geographies of extinction are therefore also histories and geographies of capitalism.
Maan Barua is a Research & Teaching Fellow at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford. Maan's work focuses on the governance of life in the Anthropocene, drawing upon scholarship in more-than-human geography and political economy. Maan's past research involved understanding human-animal relations in India and the UK. At present he is working on the cultural geographies of species extinction and how they comprise a form of catastrophist biopolitics in the 21st century. Email: maan.barua@ouce.ox.ac.uk
We hope that the three empirical cases explored in this special section show the different ways through which alterity-in-relation comprises togetherness. We also hope that the articles demonstrate the ways in which vulnerability, violence, and death are part of on-going, generative engagements with nonhuman others, rather than simply being negative elements that can be repressed, ignored, or solved. We suggest that the environmental humanities are ideally equipped to show the poignant complexities of multispecies flourishing, a flourishing that is never innocent, nor good for all involved, but rather an awkward, fumbling process. For the forces of care and suffering, love and death, flow through the same circuits: this can be seen in the death of Giant Isopod No.1, since as much as the public and his caretakers wanted him to flourish in his tank, something about his enclosure affected him and, ultimately, killed him.
Cite As:Münster, Ursula, Thom van Dooren, Sara Asu Schroer, and Hugo Reinert. 2021."Multispecies Care in the Sixth Extinction."Theorizing the Contemporary,Fieldsights,January 26. -care-in-the-sixth-extinction
GMS: I hope to convey two key messages. First, that history matters deeply. And, second, given the acceleration of species extinctions, climate change, and habitat loss, it is high time for a redistribution of aid to further the global conservation effort. 2ff7e9595c
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