Why Extinction Matters

Why Extinction Matters

We seem indifferent to the mass extinction we're causing, yet we lose a part of ourselves when another animal dies out.

More species are becoming extinct today than at any time since
dinosaurs were wiped off the face of the Earth by an asteroid 65 million
years ago. Yet this bio-Armageddon, caused mainly by humans, is greeted
by most of us with a yawn and a shrug. One fewer bat species? I've got
my mortgage to pay! Another frog extinct? There are plenty more!

In his new book Australian anthropologist Thom Van Dooren
tries to break through this wall of indifference by showing us how
we're connected to the living world, and how, when a species becomes
extinct, we don't just lose another number on a list. We lose part of
ourselves.

Here he talks about grieving crows and urban penguins-and how vultures in India provide a free garbage-disposal service.

Your book is part of a new field of enquiry known as extinction studies. Can you give us a quick 101?

It's an attempt to think about what role the humanities,
and to some extent the social sciences, might play in engaging with the
contemporary extinction crisis. In other words, how ethics, historical,
and ethnographic perspectives can flesh out our notion of what
extinction is and the way that different communities are differently
bound up in extinction or potential solutions via conservation.

We live in a time of mass extinctions. How bad is it?

I think that it's pretty widely accepted now that we're
living through the sixth massive extinction. The fifth one was 65
million years ago, when the dinosaurs vanished. Today we're losing
biodiversity at a similar rate. And this is, of course, an anthropogenic
mass extinction. The primary cause is human communities.

But what we're trying to do in extinction studies is to
think about scale in different ways. How the loss of a species is not
just the loss of some abstract collection of organisms that we can add
to a list but contributes to an unraveling of cultural and social
relationships that ripples out into the world in different ways.

You say that despite this,
there is very little public outcry. Are people just too overwhelmed by
the enormity of the crisis? Or what?

I think there are lots of answers to that question. For
some people it probably is overwhelming. People have "mourning fatigue."
But I think for most people it's just a genuine lack of awareness about
the rates of biodiversity loss that we're experiencing.

There's an even more important answer to the question,
though, which is that we haven't found ways to really understand why it
is that extinction matters. We can talk about numbers and the loss of a
white rhino or a kakapo.
But we haven't developed the kind of story that we need to explain why
it is that it matters-what is precious and unique about each of those
species.

You have a wonderful phrase, "telling lively stories about extinction." What does that mean?

I was trying to get at two things. One is to tell stories
that make a committed stand for the living world. The other is to tell
stories that are themselves lively, that will draw people in and arouse a
sense of curiosity and accountability for disappearing ways of life, so
they might contribute to making a difference. Stories are one way we
make sense of the world and decide what it is that matters and what it
is we will invest our time and energy in trying to hold on to and take
care of.

Flight Ways
differs from many other books in that it's less interested in the
phenomenon itself than in our moral and emotional responses to the
crisis.

I have a background in philosophy and anthropology. So I'm
more interested in how we understand and live with extinction. I started
out wanting to write a book about extinction in general. But what I
found doing fieldwork with scientists and communities bound up with the
disappearing birds I describe is that each extinction event is totally
different. There isn't a single extinction tragedy. Each case is a
unique kind of unraveling, a unique set of losses and consequences that
need to be fleshed out and come to terms with.

Tell us about "urban penguins."

One of the last colonies on mainland Australia, only about
60 or 65 breeding pairs, live in what is the biggest harbor in
Australia, Sydney, my hometown. Some of them even nest under the ferry
wharf, which many people don't know as they catch the ferry in and out
of the mainland. They're beautiful little birds, about one foot [30
centimeters] tall, and they've been coming here as long as there have
been historical records. Thanks to the dedication and work of
conservationists and volunteer penguin wardens, who make sure the birds
aren't harassed at night or attacked by dogs and foxes, they've managed
to hang on.

So that's a hopeful story?

Yes, I think in many ways it is a hopeful story. For the
most part we've been talking about extinctions that are caused by
people. But in this case living in proximity with humans seems to be
working.

One of your bugbears is what you call human exceptionalism. What is that?

This is a concept used by philosophers to describe an
attitude where humans are set apart from the rest of the natural world. A
little bit special, and so not like the other animal species.

The Lords of Creation?

Exactly. Rather than thinking of ourselves as an animal, we
have a long history, in the West at least, of thinking of ourselves as
either the sole bearers of an immortal soul or a creature that is set
apart by its rationality and its ability to manipulate and control the
world.

There are a whole lot of consequences that flow on from
that kind of an orientation to the world. And some of them are very
damaging for our species and for the wider environment. By diagnosing
and analyzing human exceptionalism, we can try to fit humans back into
the "community of life," as the philosopher Val Plumwood called it.

Extinctions affect us in complex ways. Tell us about the Gyps vulture of India.

That's a particularly interesting case, which drove home to
me how extinction matters differently to different communities. The
Parsi community in Mumbai have traditionally exposed their dead to
vultures in "towers of silence," as they're called in English. Now the
vultures are disappearing. Estimates suggest that 97 to 99 percent of
the birds have gone in the last few decades. So the Parsi community is
left in a very difficult position of trying to figure out how to
appropriately and respectfully take care of their own dead in a world
without vultures.

Vultures are great at garbage disposal, aren't they?

[Laughs.] They certainly are! It's estimated that they
clean up five to ten million camel, cow, and buffalo carcasses a year in
India. And that is obviously a free service. [Laughs.]

They've also played an important role in containing disease
of various kinds and controlling the number of predators that feed on
those carcasses and spread other diseases, like rats or dogs. The worry
now is that the decline in vultures may lead to rises in the numbers of
scavengers and in the incidence of diseases like rabies and anthrax in
India.

You wrap the idea of the
importance of mourning the loss of a species into a chapter about the
Hawaiian crow. Do crows really grieve?

Yes, I think there's very good evidence to suggest that
crows and a number of other mammals grieve for their dead, and we don't
quite know how to make sense of that. In part this is bound up in those
issues of human exceptionalism-the notion that grieving is something
that only humans do. But it's clear from observations of different
species around the world that crows do mourn for other crows. They
notice their deaths, and those deaths impact on them. So the chapter is a
provocation to us to pay attention to all of the extinctions that are
going on around us, to take up the challenge of learning from them in a
way that, I hope, leads us to live differently in the world.

The Hawaiian crow is another good news story, isn't it?

That's right, thanks to really dedicated work by the
Hawaiian state government, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the
San Diego Zoo. They've been looking after these birds and breeding them
in captivity for decades, and they now have over a hundred birds.

But what they need is somewhere for them to be released.
They need good forest, and there's not a lot of good forest left in
Hawaii. Introduced species, like pigs and goats, have largely destroyed
the understory of a lot of Hawaiian forest. There are plans to fence
some of these areas and remove the ungulates, so that the forest might
be restored. It's a work in progress. But something a lot of people are
dedicating a lot of time and energy towards achieving.

Your book is also a clarion
call to action. You write, "We are called to account for nothing less
than the entirety of life on the planet." What can a regular Joe like me
do?

That's a tough question, which I struggle with all of the
time. It's one of the reasons that I write and tell stories. I love to
do it. It's also something that I find challenging, and I think might
contribute in some way. So all that I can suggest to others is that they
find ways of contributing, which they feel similarly passionate about
and which might contribute, even in some small way. I don't think change
comes from singular, world-changing events. I think it's built slowly,
piece by piece, by people who are passionate about the world.