Unsettling Extinction

About this book

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 this ecological crisis – one of the most urgent of the twenty-first century – by exploring species decline and conservation with a particular emphasis on diverse cultural framings, temporal scales, and media.
Asking questions such as:
- 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
- Which species are considered worth conserving, and at what cost?

Essential reading both for those new to the field as well as those already immersed in it, 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.

Contents

Introduction / Roman Bartosch, Ursula Heise, and Kate Rigby

Section 1: Unsettling Histories
1. Our Ancestors' Dystopia Now: Indigenous conservation and the Anthropocene / Kyle Powys White
2. Military Snails: Multispecies Solidarities in Hawai'i / Thom van Dooren
3. Extinction as Cultural Heritage: The Dodo and the Turtle / Dolly Jørgensen

Section 2: Unsettling Narratives
4. Extinction and Experience in Digital Eco-Games / Roman Bartosch, and Julia Hoydis
5. Coextinction? The Southern Resident Killer Whales in Culture and Science / Greg Garrard
6. Will Revery Alone Do? A (Mono)cultural Narrative of Bee Decline / Eline Tabak

Section 3: Unsettling Boundaries
7. Speaking in Spores: Extinction and the Fungal Imaginary / Sicily Fiennes, Graham Huggan, Stefan Skrimshire, and Serena Turton-Hughes
8. Multispecies Influenza: An Environmental Humanities Approach to Zoonotic Disease / Natasha Fijn
9. Animal domestication, genealogies of exile, and the long Anthropocene / Linda Williams

Section 4: Unsettling Ethics
10. 'Bees for Peace': Pollinators, Plants and Places of Worship / Carrie Dohe and Kate Rigby
11. Detectives on an Alien Planet: Distant Pasts, Mass Extinctions, and Speculative Futures / Ursula Heise
12. Should Humanity Live Forever? Human Extinction and Biodiacritics / Ted Toadvine

Afterword / Richard Kerridge

Customer Reviews

Biography

Roman Bartosch is Full Professor of Teaching Anglophone Literatures and Cultures and Director of the Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Teaching in the Humanities at the University of Cologne, Germany.

Ursula K. Heise holds the Marcia H. Howard Term Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, USA

Kate Rigby is Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Cologne, Germany