The first three chapters trace such engagements with modernization through texts and artworks – novels, poems, popular scientific books, paintings, films, and musical compositions – as well as through global biodiversity databases and biodiversity protection laws. The Legal Lives of Endangered Species: Biodiversity Laws and Culture, Chapter 4 Lewis, Michael L. 2004. Parenti, C., & Moore, Jason W. 2016. Site content licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Recommended.”, “Heise is the leading ecocritic of her generation. This shopping feature will continue to load items when the Enter key is pressed. “What Is a Species?” Journal for General Philosophy of Science 24 (1): 103–126. By Ursula K. Heise Her analysis of the impact of Red Lists is prescient, for it points to the biopolitical power that rests in lists of this sort that purport to describe disinterestedly all the species that are threatened with extinction, but actually do so much more – they deploy “normative and legal force in a state or country” (p. 68). “Can We Name Earth’s Species before They Go Extinct?” Science 339 (6118): 413–416. A major contribution of this book is the way she brings in the idea of ‘multispecies communities’. Vandergeest, Peter, and Nancy Lee Peluso. Unable to add item to List. Leakey, Richard and Roger Lewin. At a time when the destructiveness of human beings, as a crudely unified force of nature, is bulldozed across the digital and analog spheres of life on Earth, Imagining Extinction (2016) challenges liberal elitist narrations of the endangerment of ‘culturally significant species’ (p. 32). The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. There was a problem loading your book clubs. Use the Amazon App to scan ISBNs and compare prices. Crucially, she introduces early on the highly under-examined reality that “what a species is, which species are counted, which ones are considered important enough to receive in-depth attention, and how local and global species numbers should be compared are all matters of debate even among conservation scientists” (p. 29). From Arks to ARKive.org: Database, Epic, and Biodiversity, Chapter 3 New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Save up to 80% by choosing the eTextbook option for ISBN: 9780226358338, 022635833X. Ursula K. Heise argues that understanding these stories and symbols is indispensable for any effective advocacy on behalf of endangered species. Nor does she attempt to narrate the extinction of non-human species as a purely human problem, reifying humanity’s supposed domination of an external nature, as though humans can experience themselves as a species. Dodging Extinction: Power, Food, Money, and the Future of Life on Earth. "A nuanced re-visioning of extinction discourse, inflected powerfully by literary traditions ranging from elegy to epic. 2006. There's a problem loading this menu right now. After viewing product detail pages, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. New York: HarperCollins. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Remarking on the terraforming natures of speculative fiction, she writes of the Anthropocene as a new kind of geological speculative fiction, “in that it focuses on the reality of a terraformed planet that the genre has long held out as a vision for the future of other planets, but which has already arrived in the present on our own planet” (219-20). . Latour, B. It does, although it is equally relevant for anyone concerned about biodiversity and the environment.”. 2009. Imagining Extinction by Ursula K. Heise (University of Chicago Press, 2016) analyzes the narratives that shape public and expert debates about the extinction crisis to argue that biodiversity is primarily a cultural and political issue. Heise wrestles dutifully with the more vulgar faction of the animal rights crowd, the one that is content to see humans as inherently destructive and hell bent on the othering of the non-human. The hope–as Heise’s work indicates--is that it may serve as a starting point for telling different stories and imagining a better future. 3.0 Unported License. Along the way, European and North American conservationists – in an attempt to control the damage of these fatally flawed ‘ecological assumptions’ – have sought to “limit or terminate local communities’ uses of natural resources” (164), effectively killing off the multispecies communities that were already in advanced existence long before European and otherwise Western forestry began to dominate the forested spaces of the world at the dawn of the eighteenth century in Europe, Asia, South America, and then North America. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and former President of ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment). Modern scientific forestry, or what Vandergeest and Peluso have called “empiric forestry” (2006a/b) has long been the engine for making the world’s tropical forests more efficient, legible, and productive (Scott 1998). In short, then, the comingling of conservation efforts with multispecies justice is only going to happen if ‘histories, cultures, and values’ (237) are also seen as endangered. Drawing on multispecies ethnography, theories of cosmopolitanism, and Actor-Network-Theory, the book proposes multispecies justice as a new narrative for environmentalism that joins justice for disenfranchised human communities and justice for nonhuman species. Imagining Extinction by Ursula K. Heise (University of Chicago Press, 2016) analyzes the narratives that shape public and expert debates about the extinction crisis to argue that biodiversity is primarily a cultural and political issue. 1992. Biodiversity, Environmental Justice, and Multispecies Communities, Chapter 6 Berkeley: University of California Press. The Sixth Extinction: Patterns of Life and the Future of Humankind. Often, stories about endangered species rely on the genre templates of elegy or tragedy; databases and photographic inventories also mobilize the strategies of epic and encyclopedia to convey the scope of the crisis. As a critical geographer deeply concerned with the ways in which the ‘human’ is constructed in scientific literature, and how that intersects with capitalism, socially and spatially, I found many points of convergence in this book. Kolbert, Elizabeth. Inventing Global Ecology: Tracking the Biodiversity Ideal in India, 1947-1997. . All rights reserved. Heise rightly takes issue with this in her own way, mapping out, in chapter four, the move from the rhetoric of ‘animal welfare’ to ‘animal rights’, made much more radical following the work of Peter Singer (1975). “The range of Heise’s analyses and the care with which she maintains her critical distance are remarkably impressive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. The world capitalist system is as much, in my view, the culprit for the systemic torturing of animals on farms and the deforestation of their habitats as the supposedly uniform tendencies of a unified, abstracted, global human species being. Singer, Petere. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species Instead of seeking to convince the reader of their moral or ethical duty to care about the potential disappearance of our animal friends, Ursula K. Heise pushes for a critical questioning of how the phenomenon of the ‘endangered species’ is culturally produced, and even beyond that, how this cultural production is, in many cases, used as a tool for many processes that are in and of themselves technics of further endangerment, such as the wretched uses of ‘charismatic megafauna’ in the production of commodities (think: coffee cups with polar bears on them). Introduction Her book breaks interesting ground, examining the role of archives and databases as cultural mechanisms for establishing meaning as important as science fiction, ethnography, and theories of justice. 24-25), while these IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) Red Lists display little to no bacteria, insect, or other small animal species (Costello et al. : The Bizarre Time Warp Facing U.S. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species Current rates of species extinction exceed the evolutionary background rate, and some biologists claim we are witnessing the sixth mass extinction in the history of life on Earth. As the book progresses, she weaves a fairly dense web of interconnections from the cultural and scientific constructions of species endangerment, to the cultural underpinnings of the global conservation industrial complex, eventually finding her way to questions of radically biopolitical “ontological foundations of human identity through the question of the animal” (143), rifling through the thinking of Haraway, Derrida, and Wolfe, in the sense of thinking the ‘posthuman’. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global, Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People, Designing Wildlife Habitats (Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture), The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Forerunners: Ideas First), Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation after Nature, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Berlin Family Lectures), Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (City Lights Open Media), Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future, “[An] important, scholarly book. 5-8; Gadgil and Guha 1995: 92). . She’s very good at asking difficult questions. Ursula K. Heise argues that understanding these stories and symbols is indispensable for any effective advocacy on behalf of endangered species. She goes into great detail in Chapter 5 about the historical process of separating the human and non-human, or what we might call, in the lexicon of the colonist, the ‘non-savage’ and the ‘savage’. 1995. All of that said, her very in-depth analysis of the role of science fiction and speculative fiction (something that also harmonizes well with Haraway’s recent work) make up for a lot of that lost ground in not implicating the systemic narrative that an engagement with capital requires. However, in her discussions of the important role of colonialism in the making of the current biodiversity crisis we are now living in, capitalism is not treated in its historical sense, namely as an organizing power deeply embedded in the colonial project all over the world, and very specifically in the Americas. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Environmental Education in the Anthropocene, Minor in Environmental Systems and Society, D. Env in Environmental Science and Engineering, Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award. Gadgil, Madhav, and Ramachandra Guha. Ursula K. Heise is the Marcia H. Howard Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English and the Institute of the Environment and New York: Verso. . Berkeley: University of California Press. She does mention capitalism, while highlighting the thinking of radical world-historian Jason W. Moore and his writing on the Capitalocene, a critically Marxist poetic to the first draft of the Anthropocene (see Parenti and Moore 2016). Lost Dogs, Last Birds, and Listed Species: Elegy and Comedy in Conservation Stories, Chapter 2 2014. . ", “This ambitious study covers extensive intellectual ground. . . However, she takes a remarkably empathetic tone in regard to the various ways Red Lists and other such mechanisms of species description and protection can be used in ways that actually foster the agency of non-human beings, echoing Latour’s more recent thoughts on the matter (1999 [2004]). References Barnosky, Anthony D. 2014. Imagining Extinction is the first book to examine the cultural frameworks shaping these narratives and images. From the End of Nature to the Beginning of the Anthropocene, Chapter 1