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Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism
Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction
We are living in the midst of the Earth’s sixth great extinction event, the first one caused by a single species: our own. In Wild Dog Dreaming, Deborah Bird Rose explores what constitutes an ethical relationship with nonhuman others in this era of loss. She asks, Who are we, as a species? How do we fit into the Earth’s systems? Amidst so much change, how do we find our way into new stories to guide us? Rose explores these questions in the form of a dialogue between science and the humanities. Drawing on her conversations with Aboriginal people, for whom questions of extinction are up-close and very personal, Rose develops a mode of exposition that is dialogical, philosophical, and open-ended.
An inspiration for Rose—and a touchstone throughout her book—is the endangered dingo of Australia. The dingo is not the first animal to face extinction, but its story is particularly disturbing because the threat to its future is being actively engineered by humans. The brazenness with which the dingo is being wiped out sheds valuable, and chilling, light on the likely fate of countless other animal and plant species.
"People save what they love," observed Michael Soulé, the great conservation biologist. We must ask whether we, as humans, are capable of loving—and therefore capable of caring for—the animals and plants that are disappearing in a cascade of extinctions. Wild Dog Dreaming engages this question, and the result is a bold account of the entangled ethics of love, contingency, and desire.
200 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 1, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
November 12, 2023
really interesting read! dogs are fascinating creatures because they are so social and disturb many cultures’ human/animal dichotomies. lots of cool stories, references, and reimaginings of dogs in history. thank u prof nguyen
November 5, 2018
Still processing but completely blown away. Rose takes Australian aboriginal (Yarralin) ontology and epistemology seriously, unlike virtually any historian or anthropologist I've read who are giving lip service to it while At the same time she grounds the work in a few individual teachers, including Old Tim Yilngayarri, Donna Haraway, Val Plumwood, and Emmanuel Levinas, making it clear that this is not a study of a culture (whatever that means) but a guided journey through what death and extinction can mean. This is serious philosophy in a form that (to me) is far more accessible and apply-able than the jargon of (the admittedly very little) modern philosophy I've read.
I'm still grappling with her choice of dingo as subject species - it makes complete sense with her anthropological work, but they're not currently seen by ecologists as at-risk of extinction. And yet of course individual dogs die in horrible ways all the time. Maybe this is bio-cide without extinction, at the moment?
I'm still grappling with her choice of dingo as subject species - it makes complete sense with her anthropological work, but they're not currently seen by ecologists as at-risk of extinction. And yet of course individual dogs die in horrible ways all the time. Maybe this is bio-cide without extinction, at the moment?
December 7, 2025
Seeking Connection in a World of Extinction
Constellation is always filled with mythological stories. The crab which pinches Hercule’s toes without fear of death was commemorated by Goddess Hera as Cancer. The cowherd and the weaver girl represent two stars which can only meet in the Chinese Valentine’s Day. The same is also true for the indigenous people in Australia. In their stories, Southern Cross becomes Crocodile. This is a big crocodile which is difficult to be killed by ordinary spear. To kill him who dominates the waterhole, the hero Nightjar Dreaming has to find a specific type of wood to make a new spear. But the hero finds the crocodile surrounded by a large group of man when he is back, and becomes angry at someone else targeting his prey. Instead of killing the crocodile, he calls the wind to blow away all the man as well as the crocodile. The crocodile is then stuck at the sky, with its tilting at certain angle indicating that the monsoon season is approaching.
The name of the hero, and the title of the book share the word “Dreaming”, and the idea of Dreaming has a divine meaning in the vocabulary of Australian aboriginal people. Deborah told us that Dreaming is used to
denote the creators, the origins, the process of creation, the continuities of coming into being and coming into pattern. (Chapter 1)
Maybe dreaming is the moment when human is closest to the creator. We are half awake and half asleep in a dream. This lets us elevate ourselves beyond the border of the physical body and connect to every being in the world.
Anna Tsing aims to explore an alternative way of living at the periphery of capitalism by describing the interaction between human and mushroom (see The Mushroom at the End of the World). This is not the approach taken by Deborah. Unlike many other studies which vividly describe the life of indigenous people to illustrate how human and nature can live in harmony, her intention is to convey a particular mindset to her readers. That is the mindset of connection, of becoming with others, and she named it ecological existentialism. Dreaming, an aboriginal idea of creation and connection, thus becomes the central theme of this book.
In this Australian culture, hero is Dreaming, ancestor is Dreaming, but Dreaming is not limited to human. Wild dog, called dingo in Australia, is also Dreaming. If we can learn a great deal of a culture from their mythological stories, then dingo’s presence in their constellation and taking the role of protagonist in many folk stories shall tell how people there treasures the deep relationship with them. Every culture has their creation story, and the story of these Australian starts with the Dingo Dreaming, who gives birth to both humans and dogs.
The shared origin is in obvious contrast against the traditional Western ideology. Darwin’s proof in his On the Origin of Species is faultless, but regardless of before or after the existence of such a proof, from Descartes to Heidegger, human tries to establish their uniqueness among all the beings in the world. Or it is better to say that the effort is doubled afterward to resist such an overwhelming proof. Deborah made the point succinctly in her comment on J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, where the main character David refuses to save a dog loving him:
On the face of it, David is sacrificing the dog in order to save both the boundary between human and animal and human control over that boundary … The disgrace arises in that rejection: because all your love, and all your caresses, your face, your tongue, your happy barking, none of that is enough to call a human into relationship. This turning away is David's disgrace. (Chapter 3)
Maybe the ethical response rests not on learning from indigenous people, but an unlearning from the modern Western thinking that we can dominate the nature, never minding whatever else is going to extinction. In Australia, dingoes were killed when colonialism receded and the whites want to displace but cannot simply shoot aboriginals; dingoes are killed when pastoralists felt their properties are threatened; and dingoes are killed and hanged on the tree just to show that human has power to do that. When connection is severed, everything else are the Others which are solely resources and tools to be manipulated. If the idea of existentialism is like the one described by Floyd Matson that “the knowledge of the world … is attained not through detachment but attachment” (see The Broken Image), then ecological existentialism is pushing this attachment one step further, to both human and non-human animals. This, cannot be done through staying within your sphere of control, but to embrace the uncertainty in each encounter, with openness and love.
Constellation is always filled with mythological stories. The crab which pinches Hercule’s toes without fear of death was commemorated by Goddess Hera as Cancer. The cowherd and the weaver girl represent two stars which can only meet in the Chinese Valentine’s Day. The same is also true for the indigenous people in Australia. In their stories, Southern Cross becomes Crocodile. This is a big crocodile which is difficult to be killed by ordinary spear. To kill him who dominates the waterhole, the hero Nightjar Dreaming has to find a specific type of wood to make a new spear. But the hero finds the crocodile surrounded by a large group of man when he is back, and becomes angry at someone else targeting his prey. Instead of killing the crocodile, he calls the wind to blow away all the man as well as the crocodile. The crocodile is then stuck at the sky, with its tilting at certain angle indicating that the monsoon season is approaching.
The name of the hero, and the title of the book share the word “Dreaming”, and the idea of Dreaming has a divine meaning in the vocabulary of Australian aboriginal people. Deborah told us that Dreaming is used to
denote the creators, the origins, the process of creation, the continuities of coming into being and coming into pattern. (Chapter 1)
Maybe dreaming is the moment when human is closest to the creator. We are half awake and half asleep in a dream. This lets us elevate ourselves beyond the border of the physical body and connect to every being in the world.
Anna Tsing aims to explore an alternative way of living at the periphery of capitalism by describing the interaction between human and mushroom (see The Mushroom at the End of the World). This is not the approach taken by Deborah. Unlike many other studies which vividly describe the life of indigenous people to illustrate how human and nature can live in harmony, her intention is to convey a particular mindset to her readers. That is the mindset of connection, of becoming with others, and she named it ecological existentialism. Dreaming, an aboriginal idea of creation and connection, thus becomes the central theme of this book.
In this Australian culture, hero is Dreaming, ancestor is Dreaming, but Dreaming is not limited to human. Wild dog, called dingo in Australia, is also Dreaming. If we can learn a great deal of a culture from their mythological stories, then dingo’s presence in their constellation and taking the role of protagonist in many folk stories shall tell how people there treasures the deep relationship with them. Every culture has their creation story, and the story of these Australian starts with the Dingo Dreaming, who gives birth to both humans and dogs.
The shared origin is in obvious contrast against the traditional Western ideology. Darwin’s proof in his On the Origin of Species is faultless, but regardless of before or after the existence of such a proof, from Descartes to Heidegger, human tries to establish their uniqueness among all the beings in the world. Or it is better to say that the effort is doubled afterward to resist such an overwhelming proof. Deborah made the point succinctly in her comment on J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, where the main character David refuses to save a dog loving him:
On the face of it, David is sacrificing the dog in order to save both the boundary between human and animal and human control over that boundary … The disgrace arises in that rejection: because all your love, and all your caresses, your face, your tongue, your happy barking, none of that is enough to call a human into relationship. This turning away is David's disgrace. (Chapter 3)
Maybe the ethical response rests not on learning from indigenous people, but an unlearning from the modern Western thinking that we can dominate the nature, never minding whatever else is going to extinction. In Australia, dingoes were killed when colonialism receded and the whites want to displace but cannot simply shoot aboriginals; dingoes are killed when pastoralists felt their properties are threatened; and dingoes are killed and hanged on the tree just to show that human has power to do that. When connection is severed, everything else are the Others which are solely resources and tools to be manipulated. If the idea of existentialism is like the one described by Floyd Matson that “the knowledge of the world … is attained not through detachment but attachment” (see The Broken Image), then ecological existentialism is pushing this attachment one step further, to both human and non-human animals. This, cannot be done through staying within your sphere of control, but to embrace the uncertainty in each encounter, with openness and love.
December 21, 2023
I feel terribly disappointed... I expected a lot from my first reading of Bird Rose, and it hasn't been fruitful for me at all. This is not an ethnographical work, nor a philosophical one. In fact, I don't really know what it is. Even if there are some interesting concepts to work with, for sure -those related to the country and singing up the country, the shimmer and flip too-, the book is short yet terribly boring. What I really can't stand is the fact that she talks and talks, but there are no strong ideas behind that talk, just a massive round about. And of course, using the fucking BIBLE to think about species extinction in the 21st Century? Hell, no! I'm sorry, I can't stand the use of biblical references for anything and I really, really think that our thoughts have to go way beyond the very toxic paradigms of mosaic religions.
June 24, 2022
One less mentioned merit of the work is Rose's intertextual reading of other texts (philosophies, Biblical stories and fiction) is highly insightful and ingenious and critical. At large, the book manages to penetrate some fundamental questions about the psychological state of being in the era of mass extinction. That this is achieved through graceful storytelling is admirable.
June 21, 2020
Absolutely fantastic!
September 30, 2024
No es mi estilo
November 22, 2024
Profundo y devastador.... La triste y cruel realidad que sufrieron los aborígenes australianos. La importancia de la conservación y la empatía.
November 3, 2025
so beautiful!!
‘The complexity of dogs offers insight into our own complexity, and into the complexity of Earth life more generally.’
‘The complexity of dogs offers insight into our own complexity, and into the complexity of Earth life more generally.’
October 27, 2021
Read it... and then read it again
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews