Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species

by Ursula K. Heise

The central thesis of this book is that however much individual environmentalists may be motivated by a selfless devotion to the well-being of nonhuman species, however much individual conservation scientists may be driven by an eagerness to expand our knowledge and understanding of the species with whom we co-inhabit the planet, their engagements with these species gain sociocultural traction to the extent that they become part of the stories that human communities tell about themselves: stories about their origins, their development, their identity, and their future horizons. These human stories that frame our perception and relation to endangered nonhumans are the subject matter of this book. Such stories, directly or indirectly, explain why we care, not just as individuals but as communities or cultures. This is not to deny the important role that passionate individuals have played in science and conservation and will no doubt continue to play, but to focus on the larger narratives that enable individuals’ efforts to resonate with larger social networks. Public engagement with endangered species depends on these broader structures of imagination, and individuals’ paths to conservationist engagement become meaningful for others only within these cultural frameworks. Ultimately, I will argue that biodiversity, endangered species, and extinction are primarily cultural issues, questions of what we value and what stories we tell, and only secondarily issues of science.

the idea that humans used to live in a more harmonious relationship with nature just a generation or two ago is not mere nostalgia, but also a powerful anchoring point for both political authority and resistance. For environmentalists, this story template offered an important critique of more dominant narratives about social, economic, and technological progress, and as such it was able to attract a variety of political forces that were opposed to certain aspects of modernization. From Thoreau’s ambivalence toward the construction of the railroad to the countercultures of the 1960s and current protests in the global south against the role of northern societies in generating global warming, to pick just three examples, advocacy on behalf of a natural world at risk has been linked to—and has arguably derived a good deal of its power from—broader opposition to the shape modern society has been taking.

traditional approaches to nature and its conservation are no longer quite in sync with the environments we currently confront. But quite a few of them arrive at this conclusion by way of arguments that are diametrically opposed to McKibben’s. The idea that environmentalism should seek to protect natural ecosystems from human interference and, where possible, return them to what they were before modern (especially European) humans disrupted them is becoming harder to sustain as evidence mounts that indigenous peoples around the world have reshaped their environments far more extensively and over longer time periods than was previously thought.

The wilderness European settlers in North America initially feared and later came to embrace as they began to think of their new continent as “nature’s nation,” it turns out, was often purchased at the price of ignoring or understating the impact of the indigenous societies that had preceded them (Cronon 1995).

environmental science may need to reenvision its own task in terms of “intervention ecology,” the deliberate design of future ecosystems, rather than the more conventional “restoration ecology”

The question that the tension between these divergent new strands of environmentalism raises, then, is whether and how it might be possible to move environmentalism beyond the stereotypical narrative of the decline of nature without turning it into progress boosterism.

chapter and throughout this book, the cultural logic of extinction discourses lies in their function as powerful tools for criticizing or resisting modernization and colonization; so powerful, in fact, that scientific arguments themselves are inflected by this logic.

more typical tragic and elegiac perspectives. Rather than casting the animal at risk as a precious treasure of biological information or beauty that humans are on the verge of destroying, it portrays animals as average citizens finding unusual ways to make a living and not always succeeding, or as experimenters who do not always hit the mark.

mourning. All of us, Adams suggests, whether we are humans or nonhumans, struggle to make it in a complex and often inhospitable world, and solidarity with each other would make the struggle easier.

Adams and Carwardine’s account highlights that in the last instance, the imperative to conserve biodiversity does not derive from science but from a human commitment to value biological otherness and shared vulnerability to contingency.

“Habitat conservation in the US [Endangered Species Act] is always aimed at the conservation of a certain species, while in the EU, habitat conservation can be aimed at a certain type of habitat as well. The latter approach seems to be more function oriented and, thus, more precautionary,

Tourism, published a plea to the American Fish and Wildlife Service in the New York Times in 2013 not to list the African lion as endangered. In practice, he argued, this would put lion conservation in Tanzania at risk: “We are alarmed that the United States Fish and Wildlife Service is considering listing the African lion as endangered,” he wrote. “Doing so would make it illegal for American hunters to bring their trophies home. Those hunters constitute 60 percent of our trophy-hunting market, and losing them would be disastrous to our conservation efforts” (Songorwa 2013). Songorwa’s plea acquired a new resonance in 2015 as international debate erupted over the killing of a popular and well-known lion, Cecil, in Zimbabwe at the hands of an American game hunter. As

kill a median of 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals a year