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Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age: Histories of Longing and Belonging
A groundbreaking study of how emotions motivate attempts to counter species loss. This groundbreaking book brings together environmental history and the history of emotions to examine the motivations behind species conservation actions. In Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age, Dolly Jørgensen uses the environmental histories of reintroduction, rewilding, and resurrection to view the modern conservation paradigm of the recovery of nature as an emotionally charged practice. Jørgensen argues that the recovery of nature--identifying that something is lost and then going out to find it and bring it back--is a nostalgic practice that looks to a historical past and relies on the concept of belonging to justify future-oriented action. The recovery impulse depends on emotional responses to what is lost, particularly a longing for recovery that manifests itself in such emotions as guilt, hope, fear, and grief.
Jørgensen explains why emotional frameworks matter deeply--both for how people understand nature theoretically and how they interact with it physically. The identification of what belongs (the lost nature) and our longing (the emotional attachment to it) in the present will affect how environmental restoration practices are carried out in the future. A sustainable future will depend on questioning how and why belonging and longing factor into the choices we make about what to recover.
Jørgensen explains why emotional frameworks matter deeply--both for how people understand nature theoretically and how they interact with it physically. The identification of what belongs (the lost nature) and our longing (the emotional attachment to it) in the present will affect how environmental restoration practices are carried out in the future. A sustainable future will depend on questioning how and why belonging and longing factor into the choices we make about what to recover.
- GenresEnvironment
256 pages, Paperback
Published October 29, 2019
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April 6, 2023
Comps reading. A fairly fascinating book. One thematic focus for my comps list on public history is on so-called ‘restoration’ projects — both ecological restoration and also the restoration of land back to Indigenous nations. This book in some sense addresses the first and not really the second, but it offers some conceptual insights useful for both those subjects.
I am fascinated by this question because many heritage sites in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) where I live, focus on ‘restoring’ 19th century settler heritage infrastructure. Leanne Simpson joked about this in her book This Accident of Being Lost, writing:
“They're also trying to make our neighbourhood into an Ontario heritage designation; I think that mostly means you can't do renovations that make your house look like it isn't from the 1800s or rent your extra floors to the lower class.”
This is the case for watermill sites around the GTA, where substantial capital is invested into ‘restoring’ these mill sites into artistic, fine dining, and wedding venues with a sort of heritage aura. Interestingly in the 19th century, watermill sites did not connote such a bucolic mood, but were dangerous industrial sites that settlers knew were destroying salmon populations. Settlers like Samuel Wilmot, who previously participated in colonial deforestation and sawmill projects that harmed fish, began fish restoration projects, which persist today through conservation authority projects of environmental management. The predominant salmon in GTA rivers like the Missinihe (Credit) are Pacific salmon species that were introduced in stream restoration projects. The local salmon species were extirpated from these rivers in the 19th century and attempts to reintroduce them have never been as successful as the introduction of Pacific species. Salmon were absolutely vital for the Anishinaabe and the salmon population collapses around the GTA were very closely connected with their dispossession and alienation from their land. So this paragraph on fisheries was particularly memorable for me:
“Cultures create associations with the landscape over generations, while at the same time individuals connect personally with it. Fisheries scientist Daniel Pauley launched the idea of shifting baseline syndrome into scientific discourse in 1995. In his work, he argued that fisheries scientists and managers were guilty of basing calculations on degraded ecosystem numbers rather than pristine ones: “Essentially, this syndrome has arisen because each generation of fisheries scientists accepts as a baseline the stock size and species composition that occurred at the beginning of their careers, and uses this to evaluate changes. When the next generation starts its career, the stocks have further declined, but it is the stocks at that time that serve as a new baseline.”
This theme of recovering some type of past was a central through-line in the book. The book’s central theme is one of recovery (Chapter 1), and it focuses on three particular practices of recovery:
1. Reintroduction (Chapter 2) - namely of beavers in Sweden, a project in large measure motivated by emotions of guilt.
2. Rewilding (Chapter 3) - namely of Norwegian and Swedish landscapes where muskoxen used to live, driven largely by fear and hope.
3. Resurrection (Chapter 4) - also known as de-extinction (of course Jurassic Park is discussed), this case study here focusing on attempts to bring back the passenger pigeon, largely driven by emotions of grief and a desire to reproduce hope (also love how that emotion is paired with the cheekily religious word, resurrection; perhaps this would make for some good holy week reading for those that are into that sort of stuff).
Next are reflections on how these three practices of recovery are remembered (Chapter 5) through public history, namely within the halls of natural history museums and nature tourist destinations. This chapter raises broader questions about environmental history, and its importance in any task that presumes itself to be involved in ‘restoration’. And finally, there is a final reflection on reconnecting (Chapter 6) through narrative, and the importance of emotions like love in this task and the “emotional attachment to past environments” that is often involved.
For a book that was about affect, I was surprised that term was deployed so sparsely (no mention of Sara Ahmed in here). One of the few places it was used was in this paragraph on the importance of narratives in museums:
“Museums feature in many of the remembrance places I discuss in this chapter. That is because they have the ability to construct “plots” that bridge the gap between the scientific and the affective, to arouse emotions in the public; exhibits can incorporate private memory to develop a shared public experience.11 Natural history exhibits, like the one featuring Bruno, have long been designed to impart a moral education as much as a natural history one. Natural history museums often have an explicit mission to advance public understanding of the natural world and our human history in it, as well as instill an environmentally friendly ethos.”
Nonetheless, emotion was a central focus of the book:
“In general, scholars working in the history of emotions acknowledge that there are some common physical responses to particular events (e.g., increased heart rate if scared or sweating if nervous)—which are often called affect—while simultaneously arguing that emotions, the outward expressions of feelings that may be brought on through affect, are socially constructed and socially interactive.
In this book, I am not interested in tracing the emotions tied to these animal lost-and-found stories for themselves, but rather as windows into understanding the motivations of the historical actors. Focusing on emotions allows me to move beyond discourse analysis, which, as Lyndal Roper has rightly pointed out, “offers no account of the relationship between language and psychology, and that makes it hard to explain why particular discourses might be appealing, or what the relationship is between thought and action.”51 The idea that emotions are practices—“something people experience and something they do”—allows us to see emotions in both what people say and how they act.52 As historian of memory Alan Confino remarked, emotions are “a force giving shape to politics, society and culture, to beliefs and values, and to everyday life, institutional settings, and the processes of decision making.” Emotions, then, are a way to understand conservation motivations and decision processes.”
This affective focus is interesting to anyone involved in public history because most humans connect with historical narratives that are emotionally rich and I think it’s such a vital part of communicating history and fostering collective memory:
“Collective memory is also dependent on the histories told—the explanations given of how things were in the past and why they are the way they are now. History (whether it happens in formal history writing or other history-creating enterprises, such as monuments and museums) reinterprets the past through the present, which in turn changes how we remember the past. Of course, memories are not just about the past, but also about imagining futures.”
I’ll just end with a number of memorable passages, many of which are about beavers, which I am particularly fascinated by because they constructed dams in Ontario long before European settlers constructed watermill dams, and they are great examples of how other organisms are also involved in modifying the environment in significant ways. What’s interesting is that when I heard an Haudenosaunee elder talk about beavers, he described their dams as things that protected trees. When they flooded areas, it made it more difficult for settlers to come and chop down the trees. Watermill dams were stores of energy used to power sawmills. They encouraged more trees to be cut down to make the capital investments into water-powered sawmills pay off. Anyway, some fragments about beavers and other projects of recovery:
“Despite dwindling numbers, some beavers in Europe were killed for food, as evidenced by recipes for beaver in medieval and early modern cookbooks. In his highly influential Natural History, Pliny the Elder classifies them as amphibious animals, a categorization that carried over to cooking manuals, such as John Russell’s Boke of Nurture from circa 1460, which starts the “Carving of Fish” section with the recommendation to serve beaver tail as the meat in pea soup or frumenty (a kind of cracked wheat porridge).12 A 1650 version of De Alimentorum Facultatibus (On foodstuffs) likewise starts its chapter “De Animalibus amphibiis” (The amphibian animals) with beaver, followed by otter and frog. The classification of beaver as an aquatic animal, instead of as a land animal, may have made it acceptable to eat beaver during Christian fasting seasons such as Lent. Gerald of Wales wrote that “in Germany and the arctic regions, where beavers abound, great and religious persons, in times of fasting, eat the tails of this fish-like animal, as having both the taste and colour of fish.”13 Beaver meat consumption, particularly by hunters who would then go on to sell the skins and scent glands, appears to have been common in eighteenth and early nineteenth century Sweden. Beavers in Sweden were hunted as much for medicine as they were a source of furs or meat. Beavers have scent glands called castoreum sacs located near the base of the tail. Humans harvested these glands to extract the castoreum, often by either drying them to make a powder or infusing the glands in an alcohol to cause the castoreum to leech into the liquid.”
“The importance of castoreum as a motivator of beaver hunts is evident in an ancient legend stating that when beavers are being hunted, they stop and bite off their testicles, which are then thrown to the hunter so that the hunter receives what he is after and the beaver is allowed to live. The legend confuses the castoreum sacs with testicles, but it is understandable: the castoreum sacs are paired, so they resemble testicles; they are located at the base of tail near where testicles would be expected; and beaver testicles are not descended, which makes it appear that the male beavers have lost theirs. This legend, which is repeated from the works of Pliny the Elder to the early modern period, is commonly used in illustrations of the beaver in books of beasts (figure 2.1).”
“According to Pliny, the oily castoreum was used in a variety of medicinal applications, including being taken internally to treat brain swelling, epilepsy, bowel irritation, vertigo, and paralysis, among others, as well as being applied topically to reduce bite and sting inflammation, toothaches, and earaches.15 Arabian medieval medicine employed castoreum in preparations to treat headache, urinary leakage, cramps, and mental illness. Such medicinal uses for castoreum were common until the twentieth century. The Norwegian pharmacopeia of 1879, for example, contains recipes for two castoreum tinctures.16 Old apothecary collections in museums almost invariably have a jar of castoreum. Oral history accounts of events in the early nineteenth century measure the beaver catch by the weight of the castoreum glands and note the medicinal uses for the beaver. For example, when the family of Olof Jonsson started trapping beavers in Flakaträsk in northern Sweden in 1810, they reported catching eleven animals with a total of 150 lod (approximately 2 kg) of castoreum sacs, which were sold along with the skins in Umeå. In 1828, hunters caught one beaver that yielded castoreum glands weighing 92 lod (approximately 1.2 kg).”
“The ties between cultural heritage and nature protection played a large part in building interest around the beaver project. Jämtland, where the beavers would be released, had a history with beavers. According to Eric Festin, “the legends about the beaver still live on on the people’s lips.”34 These legends of human-beaver interaction would be repeated time and again in publications about the reintroduction efforts. Stories were told: stories from old men from the Jämtland region of the great beaver trappers and the slaying of the last beavers; stories from grandmothers whose grandmothers used medicine made from beavers; stories of how the beaver once lived and died on the land. The memories of the beaver, though the stuff of legend, were integral to the decision to reintroduce it.”
“Bjurälvdalen was an area that the Society for Nature Conservation was keen to protect, and linking its protection to beavers seemed like the perfect way forward: “As a geologic peculiarity of the first order Bjurälvdalen should be protected, and that at the same time Sweden’s first resurrected beaver colony should have its sanctuary in this previous beaver paradise.”43 The religious imagery of a resurrection in paradise reflects well the nearly religious fervor with which Festin would pursue the reintroduction idea.”
“Lamenting the loss of the last was paramount. The Cincinnati Enquirer announced her death on September 2 this way: “‘Martha’ is dead. In one great respect she resembled Chincatgook, the ‘Last of the Mohicans,’ for she was the last of the Passenger Pigeons.””
“The shifting baseline syndrome has been applied in conservation science to discuss things such as perceptions of ecological change, how to plan for ecological restoration, and integration or rejection of newly introduced (or reintroduced) species. People tend to view the environment of their childhood as the “right” one, and thus things that changed before that are imperceptible unless they hear stories told about the way it used to be. In other words, shifting baseline syndrome is about memory practices: what’s remembered and what’s forgotten.”
I am fascinated by this question because many heritage sites in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) where I live, focus on ‘restoring’ 19th century settler heritage infrastructure. Leanne Simpson joked about this in her book This Accident of Being Lost, writing:
“They're also trying to make our neighbourhood into an Ontario heritage designation; I think that mostly means you can't do renovations that make your house look like it isn't from the 1800s or rent your extra floors to the lower class.”
This is the case for watermill sites around the GTA, where substantial capital is invested into ‘restoring’ these mill sites into artistic, fine dining, and wedding venues with a sort of heritage aura. Interestingly in the 19th century, watermill sites did not connote such a bucolic mood, but were dangerous industrial sites that settlers knew were destroying salmon populations. Settlers like Samuel Wilmot, who previously participated in colonial deforestation and sawmill projects that harmed fish, began fish restoration projects, which persist today through conservation authority projects of environmental management. The predominant salmon in GTA rivers like the Missinihe (Credit) are Pacific salmon species that were introduced in stream restoration projects. The local salmon species were extirpated from these rivers in the 19th century and attempts to reintroduce them have never been as successful as the introduction of Pacific species. Salmon were absolutely vital for the Anishinaabe and the salmon population collapses around the GTA were very closely connected with their dispossession and alienation from their land. So this paragraph on fisheries was particularly memorable for me:
“Cultures create associations with the landscape over generations, while at the same time individuals connect personally with it. Fisheries scientist Daniel Pauley launched the idea of shifting baseline syndrome into scientific discourse in 1995. In his work, he argued that fisheries scientists and managers were guilty of basing calculations on degraded ecosystem numbers rather than pristine ones: “Essentially, this syndrome has arisen because each generation of fisheries scientists accepts as a baseline the stock size and species composition that occurred at the beginning of their careers, and uses this to evaluate changes. When the next generation starts its career, the stocks have further declined, but it is the stocks at that time that serve as a new baseline.”
This theme of recovering some type of past was a central through-line in the book. The book’s central theme is one of recovery (Chapter 1), and it focuses on three particular practices of recovery:
1. Reintroduction (Chapter 2) - namely of beavers in Sweden, a project in large measure motivated by emotions of guilt.
2. Rewilding (Chapter 3) - namely of Norwegian and Swedish landscapes where muskoxen used to live, driven largely by fear and hope.
3. Resurrection (Chapter 4) - also known as de-extinction (of course Jurassic Park is discussed), this case study here focusing on attempts to bring back the passenger pigeon, largely driven by emotions of grief and a desire to reproduce hope (also love how that emotion is paired with the cheekily religious word, resurrection; perhaps this would make for some good holy week reading for those that are into that sort of stuff).
Next are reflections on how these three practices of recovery are remembered (Chapter 5) through public history, namely within the halls of natural history museums and nature tourist destinations. This chapter raises broader questions about environmental history, and its importance in any task that presumes itself to be involved in ‘restoration’. And finally, there is a final reflection on reconnecting (Chapter 6) through narrative, and the importance of emotions like love in this task and the “emotional attachment to past environments” that is often involved.
For a book that was about affect, I was surprised that term was deployed so sparsely (no mention of Sara Ahmed in here). One of the few places it was used was in this paragraph on the importance of narratives in museums:
“Museums feature in many of the remembrance places I discuss in this chapter. That is because they have the ability to construct “plots” that bridge the gap between the scientific and the affective, to arouse emotions in the public; exhibits can incorporate private memory to develop a shared public experience.11 Natural history exhibits, like the one featuring Bruno, have long been designed to impart a moral education as much as a natural history one. Natural history museums often have an explicit mission to advance public understanding of the natural world and our human history in it, as well as instill an environmentally friendly ethos.”
Nonetheless, emotion was a central focus of the book:
“In general, scholars working in the history of emotions acknowledge that there are some common physical responses to particular events (e.g., increased heart rate if scared or sweating if nervous)—which are often called affect—while simultaneously arguing that emotions, the outward expressions of feelings that may be brought on through affect, are socially constructed and socially interactive.
In this book, I am not interested in tracing the emotions tied to these animal lost-and-found stories for themselves, but rather as windows into understanding the motivations of the historical actors. Focusing on emotions allows me to move beyond discourse analysis, which, as Lyndal Roper has rightly pointed out, “offers no account of the relationship between language and psychology, and that makes it hard to explain why particular discourses might be appealing, or what the relationship is between thought and action.”51 The idea that emotions are practices—“something people experience and something they do”—allows us to see emotions in both what people say and how they act.52 As historian of memory Alan Confino remarked, emotions are “a force giving shape to politics, society and culture, to beliefs and values, and to everyday life, institutional settings, and the processes of decision making.” Emotions, then, are a way to understand conservation motivations and decision processes.”
This affective focus is interesting to anyone involved in public history because most humans connect with historical narratives that are emotionally rich and I think it’s such a vital part of communicating history and fostering collective memory:
“Collective memory is also dependent on the histories told—the explanations given of how things were in the past and why they are the way they are now. History (whether it happens in formal history writing or other history-creating enterprises, such as monuments and museums) reinterprets the past through the present, which in turn changes how we remember the past. Of course, memories are not just about the past, but also about imagining futures.”
I’ll just end with a number of memorable passages, many of which are about beavers, which I am particularly fascinated by because they constructed dams in Ontario long before European settlers constructed watermill dams, and they are great examples of how other organisms are also involved in modifying the environment in significant ways. What’s interesting is that when I heard an Haudenosaunee elder talk about beavers, he described their dams as things that protected trees. When they flooded areas, it made it more difficult for settlers to come and chop down the trees. Watermill dams were stores of energy used to power sawmills. They encouraged more trees to be cut down to make the capital investments into water-powered sawmills pay off. Anyway, some fragments about beavers and other projects of recovery:
“Despite dwindling numbers, some beavers in Europe were killed for food, as evidenced by recipes for beaver in medieval and early modern cookbooks. In his highly influential Natural History, Pliny the Elder classifies them as amphibious animals, a categorization that carried over to cooking manuals, such as John Russell’s Boke of Nurture from circa 1460, which starts the “Carving of Fish” section with the recommendation to serve beaver tail as the meat in pea soup or frumenty (a kind of cracked wheat porridge).12 A 1650 version of De Alimentorum Facultatibus (On foodstuffs) likewise starts its chapter “De Animalibus amphibiis” (The amphibian animals) with beaver, followed by otter and frog. The classification of beaver as an aquatic animal, instead of as a land animal, may have made it acceptable to eat beaver during Christian fasting seasons such as Lent. Gerald of Wales wrote that “in Germany and the arctic regions, where beavers abound, great and religious persons, in times of fasting, eat the tails of this fish-like animal, as having both the taste and colour of fish.”13 Beaver meat consumption, particularly by hunters who would then go on to sell the skins and scent glands, appears to have been common in eighteenth and early nineteenth century Sweden. Beavers in Sweden were hunted as much for medicine as they were a source of furs or meat. Beavers have scent glands called castoreum sacs located near the base of the tail. Humans harvested these glands to extract the castoreum, often by either drying them to make a powder or infusing the glands in an alcohol to cause the castoreum to leech into the liquid.”
“The importance of castoreum as a motivator of beaver hunts is evident in an ancient legend stating that when beavers are being hunted, they stop and bite off their testicles, which are then thrown to the hunter so that the hunter receives what he is after and the beaver is allowed to live. The legend confuses the castoreum sacs with testicles, but it is understandable: the castoreum sacs are paired, so they resemble testicles; they are located at the base of tail near where testicles would be expected; and beaver testicles are not descended, which makes it appear that the male beavers have lost theirs. This legend, which is repeated from the works of Pliny the Elder to the early modern period, is commonly used in illustrations of the beaver in books of beasts (figure 2.1).”
“According to Pliny, the oily castoreum was used in a variety of medicinal applications, including being taken internally to treat brain swelling, epilepsy, bowel irritation, vertigo, and paralysis, among others, as well as being applied topically to reduce bite and sting inflammation, toothaches, and earaches.15 Arabian medieval medicine employed castoreum in preparations to treat headache, urinary leakage, cramps, and mental illness. Such medicinal uses for castoreum were common until the twentieth century. The Norwegian pharmacopeia of 1879, for example, contains recipes for two castoreum tinctures.16 Old apothecary collections in museums almost invariably have a jar of castoreum. Oral history accounts of events in the early nineteenth century measure the beaver catch by the weight of the castoreum glands and note the medicinal uses for the beaver. For example, when the family of Olof Jonsson started trapping beavers in Flakaträsk in northern Sweden in 1810, they reported catching eleven animals with a total of 150 lod (approximately 2 kg) of castoreum sacs, which were sold along with the skins in Umeå. In 1828, hunters caught one beaver that yielded castoreum glands weighing 92 lod (approximately 1.2 kg).”
“The ties between cultural heritage and nature protection played a large part in building interest around the beaver project. Jämtland, where the beavers would be released, had a history with beavers. According to Eric Festin, “the legends about the beaver still live on on the people’s lips.”34 These legends of human-beaver interaction would be repeated time and again in publications about the reintroduction efforts. Stories were told: stories from old men from the Jämtland region of the great beaver trappers and the slaying of the last beavers; stories from grandmothers whose grandmothers used medicine made from beavers; stories of how the beaver once lived and died on the land. The memories of the beaver, though the stuff of legend, were integral to the decision to reintroduce it.”
“Bjurälvdalen was an area that the Society for Nature Conservation was keen to protect, and linking its protection to beavers seemed like the perfect way forward: “As a geologic peculiarity of the first order Bjurälvdalen should be protected, and that at the same time Sweden’s first resurrected beaver colony should have its sanctuary in this previous beaver paradise.”43 The religious imagery of a resurrection in paradise reflects well the nearly religious fervor with which Festin would pursue the reintroduction idea.”
“Lamenting the loss of the last was paramount. The Cincinnati Enquirer announced her death on September 2 this way: “‘Martha’ is dead. In one great respect she resembled Chincatgook, the ‘Last of the Mohicans,’ for she was the last of the Passenger Pigeons.””
“The shifting baseline syndrome has been applied in conservation science to discuss things such as perceptions of ecological change, how to plan for ecological restoration, and integration or rejection of newly introduced (or reintroduced) species. People tend to view the environment of their childhood as the “right” one, and thus things that changed before that are imperceptible unless they hear stories told about the way it used to be. In other words, shifting baseline syndrome is about memory practices: what’s remembered and what’s forgotten.”
March 5, 2024
sets out to argue for the role of emotion in species recovery efforts. i was expecting this book to be more about the ethics of such endeavors rather than the "emotions" that go into these projects, but an interesting read nonetheless.
December 28, 2020
I had the pleasure of seeing Dolly Jørgensen give a talk about the Arctic humanities that essentially re-purposed the muskox chapter here while expanding on some aspects, and found it interesting and quite practical as a historical sketch. The book is fine: serviceable and interesting, but almost too direct. There are few stylistic touches here that will be surprising and a predictable academic tendency to use arguments from authority (or, as others might say, "name dropping") as stand-ins for narrative explanation. If you're looking for an interesting history of mostly Scandinavian attempts at rewilding and restoring biodiversity, look no further.
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