Imagining Extinction

The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species

Ursula K. Heise

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780226358161, 9780226358024
• eBook ISBN: 9780226358338
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

We are currently facing the sixth mass extinction of species in the history of life on Earth, biologists claim—the first one caused by humans. Activists, filmmakers, writers, and artists are seeking to bring the crisis to the public's attention through stories and images that use the strategies of elegy, tragedy, epic, and even comedy. Imagining Extinction is the first book to examine the cultural frameworks shaping these narratives and images.

Ursula K. Heise argues that understanding these stories and symbols is indispensable for any effective advocacy on behalf of endangered species. More than that, she shows how biodiversity conservation, even and especially in its scientific and legal dimensions, is shaped by cultural assumptions about what is valuable in nature and what is not. These assumptions are hardwired into even seemingly neutral tools such as biodiversity databases and laws for the protection of endangered species. Heise shows that the conflicts and convergences of biodiversity conservation with animal welfare advocacy, environmental justice, and discussions about the Anthropocene open up a new vision of multispecies justice. Ultimately, Imagining Extinction demonstrates that biodiversity, endangered species, and extinction are not only scientific questions but issues of histories, cultures, and values.

1

Lost Dogs, Last Birds, and Listed Species: Elegy and Comedy in Conservation Stories

1. How We Learned to Start Worrying and Love Endangered Species

Cultural anxieties about vanishing nature over the past two hundred years have typically focused on places and species. The concern to conserve places began to take legal and political shape in the nineteenth century with the creation of national parks, nature reserves, and wilderness areas in a variety of countries, efforts that continued throughout the twentieth century. The concern over vanishing species took longer to manifest itself institutionally, legally, and culturally. Three important turns in the knowledge and perception of species endangerment and extinction led up to the emergence of conservation movements and the concern with biodiversity loss that we are familiar with today: the discovery of extinction as a biological and historical process, fears concerning the extinction of individual species in the contemporary age that are often tied up with anxieties over the consequences of modernization and colonization, and insights into the historical importance of mass extinctions that generated the scenario of another mass die-off of species in the present.

Extinction is so ordinary and pervasive an occurrence in the history of life on Earth that we tend to take the concept for granted today. Yet it took the discovery of geologic time scales, the unearthing of prehistoric fossils, and the emergence of Darwinian theory in the nineteenth century to make extinction part of modern societies’ cultural horizons. The Christian belief in a natural world created by divine mandate made the idea implausible that God would let creatures he had gone to the pain of creating simply vanish. Once geologists opened up previously unimagined depths of past time in the early nineteenth century, ideas about Earth’s age and history began to shift. But even the discovery of fossils clearly belonging to creatures that geologists had never seen alive took some time to translate into the insight that these creatures had actually vanished, rather than inhabiting a remote continent where European and North American scientists had not yet had the occasion to see them. Once the reality of extinction had been broadly accepted and dinosaur bones were discovered, a wave of fascination with these prehistoric creatures swept Britain and the United States in the 1860s and 1870s.1

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the idea that species extinction had not merely occurred in the deep time of natural history but could occur in the present gradually gained acceptance. The decline of species such as the bison and the passenger pigeon attracted widespread public attention in the United States in the late nineteenth century (Barrow 2009, 78–134). From the 1920s on, conservationists of various stripes, often focused in a colonial manner on the preservation of wildlife in Africa for big-game hunting, began to establish committees and associations in Europe and the United States dedicated to the protection of endangered species. Conservation, in this context, built on game protection and forestry as they had developed under imperial rule. The possible extinction of big-game species added a new dimension and urgency to these preservation efforts (Adams 2005, 19–42).

In the 1970s and 1980s, evolutionary scientists such as David Raup and Jack Sepkoski began to emphasize the historical importance of large-scale mass extinctions over the gradual, one-by-one extinctions of individual species as a crucial factor in shaping the development of life on Earth. Periods of mass extinction function according to a different logic than ordinary evolution, in that they drive large numbers of species to extinction regardless of their adaptations. The best known of the five mass extinction events known to science occurred 65 million years ago, when a meteorite hit Earth and led to the demise of the dinosaurs as well as 80 percent of the species then existing: this was not a consequence of bad genes but bad luck, as Raup emphasizes. Bad luck for the reptiles, that is—good luck, by contrast, for mammals, whose subsequent evolution, including that of homo sapiens, was enabled by the disaster (Raup 1991; Jablonski 1993; Sepkoski 2012, chap. 9). Biologists such as Norman Myers, Paul Ehrlich, and E. O. Wilson argued that such abrupt evolutionary change might yet again be taking place in the contemporary age—but for the first time, mass extinction might be triggered by human activities (Myers 1979; Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1981; Wilson 2002). In the 1980s, endangered species and the threat of such a mass extinction in the contemporary age turned into a defining environmentalist concern, just as the term biological diversity and its short form, biodiversity, came into widespread use. It led to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and the declaration by the United Nations of 2010 as an International Year of Biodiversity and 2011–20 as the Decade on Biodiversity. In public debates, the threat of mass extinction now often features as one of several global ecological crises, right behind climate change in the urgency of action it requires.

According to Darwinian theory, extinction and adaptation are, of course, normal components of evolutionary processes that have taken place during all of the 3.5 billion years of biological life on Earth. Genetic changes that arise randomly in biological organisms create handicaps or advantages for certain individuals and populations as they interact with a complex network of other species and configurations of soil, water, climate, and vectors of disease. Dynamic processes of ecological change lead to the increase of some plant or animal species and the decrease or extinction of others at what biologists refer to as the “background rate,” which is computed either as the number of species that go extinct in a particular number of years, in Million Species Years, or as the time intervals during which species survive (Lawton and May 1995). Some of the extinct species may be succeeded by differently adapted daughter species. But currently, biologists estimate that we may be losing species at about 50 to 500 times the background level. If one adds to this figure species that may have gone extinct but whose status is not known with certainty, the extinction rate rises to 100 to 1,000 times the background level, though the exact numbers are in dispute among biologists themselves.2 What is not in dispute is the general trend toward higher extinction rates; neither are its causes, mainly habitat destruction, invasive species, pollution, human population growth, and overharvesting (the list is sometimes abbreviated HIPPO). Climate change may become an additional factor driving extinctions in the future. While most extinctions over the past five hundred years have been limited to island ecosystems, they have now spread to continents, in a sign of deepening crisis (Wilson 2002, 50; Baillie, Hilton-Taylor, and Stuart 2004, xxi–xxii).

Mass extinctions are extremely rare; they have occurred only five times previously in the 3.5 billion years of life on Earth and have never before been triggered by human agency. Each time, biodiversity took millions of years to return to precataclysmic levels.3 If we are currently undergoing a sixth mass extinction, it may entail a large-scale biological and ecological transformation whose consequences are difficult to predict. They include the possible collapse of some ecosystems, the destruction of some of the basic foundations of food and energy economies, the disappearance of medical and other resources for the future, and the disappearance of important cultural foundations and assets. Such cataclysmic portrayals of past and future species extinctions are common currency in biodiversity discourse. Less catastrophic consequences, such as increases in local biodiversity, range expansion for certain species, hybridization, and the emergence of new species, are rarely mentioned, presumably because biologists and environmental advocates fear that they might make the crisis appear less serious to a public that does not usually delve into scientific detail.

But even when we focus on those dimensions of biodiversity that are commonly discussed, it is striking how often public debate, including scientists’ own summaries of their knowledge, leaps over complexities, uncertainties, and open questions. The story template according to which nature in general and biodiversity in particular has done nothing but deteriorate under the impact of modern societies is mostly taken for granted, and details that do not unambiguously fit into this narrative tend to be underemphasized or left out. The narrative template is made to work in the context of species endangerment and extinction through a pervasive logic of what biologists usually call proxy and literary scholars call synecdoche—the part standing in for the whole. Such proxy procedures link different scales and different levels of abstraction in the scientific arguments, and they also enable the interpretation of biological changes as indicative of cultural transformations. As I will show in this 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. Biodiversity discourses revolve at bottom around these cultural values and narratives, which are crucial to take into account in any consideration of the future of conservation.

Let me explain what I mean by the “proxy logic” of discourses about endangered species and biodiversity. This logic works by a series of referrals whereby certain kinds of species are taken as a shorthand for all species. Species serve as proxies for ecosystems and biodiversity. And biodiversity itself becomes a measure for what we value about nature as well as, more indirectly, about ourselves, so that biodiversity loss comes to be felt and understood as a sign of something that we lost in the course of modernization and/or colonization—the “we” referring to national, regional, or indigenous communities in different contexts. There is nothing in principle wrong with interpreting observations about natural change in this way, either scientifically or culturally. But it is important to remain aware of the substitutions that are made and what they involve at each step, so that the narrative that emerges at the end does not appear as falsely inevitable, but as one possible story. Taking into account other measures and substitutions opens up the possibility of different stories we might tell about how biodiversity is currently changing—and how our communities are changing.

As is obvious to anyone who has seen or bought one of the innumerable commodities that revolve around endangered species—chocolate bars, calendars, tote bags, T-shirts—or who has watched documentaries, read books, or attended lectures about the extinction crisis, the species that are usually selected to signal the crisis tend to belong to a fairly narrow set. The species or groups of species that are portrayed are almost always animals, while plants, which are equally affected by extinction, receive almost no attention. Among the animals, large mammals such as gorillas, tigers, bears, pandas, whales, and white rhinos, and birds, particularly beautiful ones such as raptors, parrots, and colorful songbirds, are the preferred objects of coverage, while reptilians, amphibians, and fish are mentioned far less frequently. Among invertebrates, only photogenic butterflies—particularly, in recent years, the monarch butterfly, which has generated a whole advocacy movement of its own—occasionally come into view; taxa such as worms, crabs, fungi, and bacteria usually remain invisible.

There are some good reasons why scientists might want to focus on some species at the expense of others. So-called keystone species occupy crucial positions in the food web; without them many other species would also be endangered, and it may therefore be more important to conserve those species than others.4 The health or decline of “indicator species” can sometimes help to diagnose the status of the ecosystems they inhabit. Focusing conservation efforts on “umbrella species” can help preserve habitat that is also used by many other species. But this kind of selectiveness does not lead to what conservationists themselves often call, half humorously and half disdainfully, “charismatic megafauna” or, more neutrally, “flagship species,” animal types whose appeal to the broad public makes them good tools in campaigns to raise public awareness and funds for conservation issues.

Many conservationists view these species with ambivalence. The focus on a single species that is selected for its obvious anthropomorphic qualities or its aesthetic appeal blocks from view other species, lacking those qualities, that may be more endangered or more crucial for ecosystemic functioning. It is doubtful that charismatic species by themselves can generate any real public understanding of how ecosystems work and what threatens their functioning. And yet, such “taxonomic bias” is not limited to the nonexpert public. Conservation science itself shows preferences in its objects of study that broadly parallel public biases: The 2008 edition of the most comprehensive Red List, that of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), indicates that all of the 5,488 known mammal and 9,900 bird species have been evaluated for their endangerment status; but of 30,700 known species of fishes, only 3,481 have been assessed; of 950,000 insect species, 1,250; of 12,838 fern species, 211, and of 30,000 species of fungi, just one (Hilton-Taylor et al. 2008, 17, table 1; cf. chapter 2 of the current volume).5 A recent study that focused on changes in rates of extinction concluded that the evidence indeed pointed to an ongoing mass extinction—but the study limited itself to vertebrates because of “data deficiencies” regarding other species (Ceballos et al. 2015). In both the expert and the nonexpert spheres, then, attention focuses above all on birds and mammals as proxies for understanding the welfare of species at large.

If we move from charismatic megafauna in biodiversity discourse to the role of species more broadly understood, other complications arise. Biological diversity ranges from genetic diversity to species and ecosystem diversity, and not all biologists are convinced that species are the best category for organizing conservation efforts. Some of them believe that the conservation of populations, geographically specific groups of a particular species, is more decisive for maintaining ecosystem services. “If the population of spruce trees in the canyon upstream from your house in Colorado is cut down, its flood protection service will be lost. That the same species of spruce has abundant populations elsewhere will be of little consolation as you struggle to keep your head above water while riding your house downstream,” biologists Paul and Anne Ehrlich quip (2004, 52–53). By the same token, if bees were to disappear everywhere except in Italy, the species itself would not be extinct, but the consequences for agriculture would be catastrophic.6 “Indeed, it would theoretically be possible to lose no more species diversity at all and yet, because of declines in population diversity, suffer such a steep decline in ecosystem services that humanity itself would go extinct,” the Ehrlichs argue (2004, 53). From this perspective, the focus on the conservation of species needs to be complemented by a close analysis of their geographical and ecological distribution.7

The species concept itself raises other problems. Species have been classified in terms of Linnaean taxonomy since the eighteenth century, yet contemporary biology has proposed a variety of different definitions. The most famous is undoubtedly Ernst Mayr’s “biological” species concept, which defines species in terms of their reproductive isolation, that is, the mating and reproductive behavior by means of which one species distinguishes itself from others. “Phylogenetic” definitions, by contrast, understand species as communities of the same evolutionary lineage that disappear when all their organisms die or when new species evolve from them. “Morphological” species definitions refer to physical characteristics that enable the distinction of different species and overlap sometimes, but not always, with evolutionary species definitions. Some of these species definitions are more applicable to some organisms than others: the biological species concept, for example, is difficult to use for species that do not reproduce sexually and for fossil species whose mating behavior is unknown. The morphology and reproductive behavior of bacteria are so different from those of other taxa that biologists often recur to a “physiological” species concept based on metabolic processes. The rise of molecular genetics and genomics, in turn, has opened up new possibilities for the definition of species.8 Taxonomy, which had become a dusty and somewhat disdained subdiscipline in biology, has reemerged as an innovative area of research, partly because of the biodiversity crisis, but its new prominence has served only to highlight the lack of consensus regarding species definitions.9 Debates among biologists about species boundaries are often highly technical, but the questions they address are far from merely academic. Most laws and policies protecting endangered species presuppose at least an approximate consensus on the species concept to de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: From the End of Nature to the Beginning of the Anthropocene
• 1 Lost Dogs, Last Birds, and Listed Species: Elegy and Comedy in Conservation Stories
• 2 From Arks to ARKive.org: Database, Epic, and Biodiversity
• 3 The Legal Lives of Endangered Species: Biodiversity Laws and Culture
• 4 Mass Extinction and Mass Slaughter: Biodiversity, Violence, and the Dangers of Domestication
• 5 Biodiversity, Environmental Justice, and Multispecies Communities
• 6 Multispecies Fictions for the Anthropocene
• Coda: The Hug of the Polar Bear
• Works Cited
• Index