Wild Dog Dreaming

Love and Extinction

Deborah Bird Rose

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780813931074
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire et nature

We are living in the midst of the Earth's sixth great extinction event, the first one caused by a single species: our own. In Wild Dog Dreaming, Deborah Bird Rose explores what constitutes an ethical relationship with nonhuman others in this era of loss. She asks, Who are we, as a species? How do we fit into the Earth's systems? Amidst so much change, how do we find our way into new stories to guide us? Rose explores these questions in the form of a dialogue between science and the humanities. Drawing on her conversations with Aboriginal people, for whom questions of extinction are up-close and very personal, Rose develops a mode of exposition that is dialogical, philosophical, and open-ended.

An inspiration for Rose—and a touchstone throughout her book—is the endangered dingo of Australia. The dingo is not the first animal to face extinction, but its story is particularly disturbing because the threat to its future is being actively engineered by humans. The brazenness with which the dingo is being wiped out sheds valuable, and chilling, light on the likely fate of countless other animal and plant species.

"People save what they love, " observed Michael Soulé, the great conservation biologist. We must ask whether we, as humans, are capable of loving—and therefore capable of caring for—the animals and plants that are disappearing in a cascade of extinctions. Wild Dog Dreaming engages this question, and the result is a bold account of the entangled ethics of love, contingency, and desire.

1. Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

A few years ago my friend Jessica stopped by the office to tell me something awful. Not far from Canberra she had seen a tree that was strung up with dead dingoes. Horrified and inexorably curious, I went to see for myself. It was as she had told me: the dingoes were suspended by their hind legs, heads down, bodies extended, another “strange fruit” in the annals of cruelty. I prowled the edges of the area, my mouth dry and my throat constricting as the smell of decay and the horror reached into me. Vertigo was causing a sense of estrangement, and I could not be sure where I was, so that I kept looking back to the truck to remind myself that this was the twentyfirst century, that I’d driven here from my home in the national capital of Australia, that I was on an ordinary dirt road near the edge of a national park, that in a few minutes I would get back in the truck and drive away. In some fundamental sense I was lost. Dear God, I thought, where are you?

Stories flashed across my mind. Many of my Aboriginal teachers had told me long and wonderful accounts of dingoes. “Dog’s a big boss,” Old Tim Yilngayarri, the clever man, had said. “You’ve gotta leave him. No more killing.” He was speaking within a context in which dingoes are regularly poisoned and shot, and he knew, as did I, that the shadow of death falls heavily upon their future. They are not the first animal to be facing extinction, and they will not be the last. But they are one of the few whose extinction is actively being sought by some segments of human society. The Regulatory Review Committee of the parliament of the state of New South Wales (NSW) put the case succinctly, albeit bureaucratically: “It is however anomalous that the main NSW initiative to conserve existing Dingo populations is being undertaken under an Act that will classify them, statewide, as a pest requiring eradication.”¹

This “anomaly” is best encountered in the wider context of human-driven disaster. According to Paul Crutzen, the Nobel laureate who coined the term “Anthropocene,” the influence of humanity on Earth in recent centuries is so significant as to constitute a new geological era. Global climate change is altering how we understand the Earth system, and we are in the midst of the sixth great extinction event on Earth, the first to be caused by a single species, namely our own. Anthropogenic extinction, as it is called in conservation biology, is a fact of death that is growing exponentially. We are entering an era of loss of life unprecedented in human history. Indeed, as E. O. Wilson describes it, we are plummeting into an “Age of Loneliness.”²

The question, of course, is: if we humans are the cause, can we change ourselves enough to change our impacts? This question is brought vividly to our attention by the anthropologist Kay Milton. She notes the need for urgent action, and she notes that many calls to action have fear as an underlying motivating force. Milton draws on research that shows clearly that fear often is an extremely unsatisfactory driver, eliciting denial as much as action.³ In this work I take up an alternative driving emotion. “People save what they love,” says Michael Soulé, the great conservation biologist. He expresses an almost despairing concern over the current biodiversity extinction crisis, and he asks one of the most important questions of our time: Are humans capable of loving, and therefore of caring for, the animals and plants that are currently losing their lives in a growing cascade of extinctions? The power of love is awesome, as everyone who has loved will know. But equally, love is complex and full of problems as well as possibilities. William Stegner said it best in relation to place, and his words are applicable across all other ecological domains of our lives: “I really only want to say that we can love a place and still be dangerous to it.”⁴

Love in the time of extinctions, therefore, calls forth another set of questions. Who are we, as a species? How do we fit into the Earth system? What ethics call to us? How to find our way into new stories to guide us, now that so much is changing? How to invigorate love and action in ways that are generous, knowledgeable, and lifeaffirming?

I have developed the idea of ecological existentialism to address the questions about who we are and how we fit. Ecological existentialism pulls together two major shifts in worldview: the end of certainty and the end of atomism. From certainty the shift is to uncertainty. From atomism the shift is to connectivity. The West has reached these big shifts through the working of its own intellectual and social history. From our current position it becomes possible to open new conversations with people whose histories are completely different, but whose worldviews work with uncertainty and connectivity. This is a moment for new conversations and new synergies.

The question of finding our way into new ways of understanding and acting is addressed through dialogue. Stories encounter each other and become entangled. They stick in unexpected places and spark up new thoughts. Many of the stories I recount arise out of my experiences with Aboriginal people in North Australia. More than a quarter of a century ago I left my home country, the United States, in order to live for a number of years with Aboriginal people in the communities of Yarralin and Lingara. I learned all that I could—all that people wanted to teach me and all that I was capable of absorbing—of their philosophical ecology.⁵ The colonizing history of this great tropical savannah country is tough. White settlers established broadacre cattle properties across this savannah region about 120 years ago, and after an initial period of overt and often extreme violence, most of the Aboriginal survivors settled into life on cattle properties where they worked as an unpaid and unfree labor force for many decades. Since the 1970s, the most oppressive aspects of colonization have been shifted, but in spite of decolonizing legislation, many colonial relations of power are alive and well.⁶

I lived with people, sharing events and conversations, hunting, cooking, eating, traveling, mourning, rejoicing, laughing, singing, dancing, taking care of children. My teachers and I have asked each other questions, probed each other’s values and worldviews, worked together on land claims, and sought by many means to understand each other. We’ve gone fishing, hunted and collected food together, eaten together and exchanged food with each other, buried the dead, wept, and welcomed new people into the world. I have come to understand that my teachers experience kinship with plants and animals at close quarters. Their relationships are tactile, and are embedded in creation, ethics, and accountability. And so it is that life within a system of cross-species kinship is in dreadful peril at this time. The animals and plants that are dying out are not so much vulnerable, endangered, or extinct species, but more significantly are vulnerable and dying members of the family. People’s experience of extinction is up-close and very personal.

The people who have taught me have faced extinction themselves. They’ve lived through massacres, near slavery, and many other forms of cruelty, and still they tell their stories, and still they are generous in their teachings. There is an intensity within people’s generosity that arises from their sense of having deep and serious understandings that other people should be listening to. As my teacher Daly Pulkara said, “We have listened to your stories. You, you Whitefella, you can listen to stories too.” He was referring to his own stories, of course, and he had a reason: “I tell you: nothing can forget about that Law.” He wanted people to listen because he knew himself to be giving an account of how the world really is. Aboriginal people’s accounts of how the world is and how they as humans fit into it speak to both the local and the universal. Their stories are always grounded in specific places and creatures. At the same time, many of my teachers, like Aboriginal people around the world, are certain that their stories also express accounts of how life on Earth really is—for everyone. A good example is cross-species kinship. All my teachers were born into kinship with various animals, plants, and countries. The relationships were specific, and had limits—to be related to some meant not being related to others. The question that arises, for them and for me, is: Is such a kinship a foundational condition of human life? Science today answers this question in the affirmative. Many Aboriginal people also affirm universality. The Aboriginal actor, dancer, and philosopher David Gulpilil stated the case in his own poetic prose: “We are brothers and sisters of the world. Doesn’t matter if you’re bird, snake, fish, kangaroo: One Red Blood.”⁷

In bringing some powerful Indigenous stories into conversation around the tormented questions of life and death, love and extinction, I also draw on some of the great stories of my own Western tradition. Stephen Kepnes’s definition of narrative biblical theology guides the process of bringing stories into encounter. “Narrative Biblical theology,” he writes, “involves a retelling of the narratives of the Bible in such a way that the central issues of the contemporary situation are expressed and addressed.”⁸ I am stretching the method beyond biblical narratives, and some of my encounters are partial because the intention is to stretch only one particular question. Equally, although it may not be accurate to suggest that working with Old Tim Yilngayarri’s stories of dingoes and death is a way of doing narrative theology, the spirit of the endeavor remains the same. Narratival encounters aim for truth; and truth, in my context of writing, is the spark that illuminates the ethical proximity of others—all others, all living beings, all who are, in the great term of the philosopher Val Plumwood, “our Earth others.”

When I stood before the defenseless bodies of dead dingoes, I was face-to-face with an event that encapsulates major questions of humanity and our ethical relationships with Earth life. I have written this book to explore a number of those questions from a range of perspectives. I draw on the teachings of wise people, some of whom are living, and many of whom are dead. I draw on some ancient stories as well as many that are contemporary, and I draw on teachers whose life experiences and cultures differ in the extreme. The conversation is open, and my words aim to draw readers into heightened awareness of their own possibilities for ethical encounter and action. At every step I am influenced by the philosopher Emil Fackenheim.⁹ He wrote in the aftermath of the Nazi Holocaust, and he was seeking ways to “mend the world” without pretending that worldshattering events can ever be wholly undone or overcome. I believe that the current extinction crisis is an Earth-shattering disaster, one that cannot be unmade, and in that sense cannot be mended, but yet one toward which we owe an ethical response that includes turning toward others in the hopes of mending at least some of the damage. “Turning toward” (Tikkun) in Fackenheim’s philosophy, is an ethics of motion toward encounter, a willingness to situate one’s self so as to be available to the call of others. It is a willingness toward dialogue, a willingness toward responsibility, a choice for encounter and response, a turning toward rather than a turning away.

Wild Wisdom

Lev Shestov the philosopher and Old Tim Yilngayarri the Australian Aboriginal “clever man” were two of my great teachers in life. They shared a fabulous glee in their awareness that the living world is more complicated, less predictable, more filled with transformations, uncertainty, and fantastic eruptions of life’s mysteries than is allowed of in ordinary thought. Each in his own way was a holy fool, and each brought a wild wisdom into the world.

I fell in love with Lev Shestov when I discovered his stunning essays that rail against rationalist-dominated modernity and offer a “crazy” vision of a world in which life exceeds knowledge, and in which mutability and uncertainty are blessed emanations of life. Against the prevailing ethos of secular modernity, Shestov writes in passionate exuberance to create a philosophical celebration of the joyous mysteries of the unpredictabilities of life on Earth.

Shestov’s deep plea for the Western world is that we regain the capacity to acknowledge that the Earth is good. In a particularly powerful passage, he asks, “Why should creation not be perfect? … No one, neither of our time nor even of the Middle Ages, dared to admit that the biblical ‘very good’ corresponded to reality, that the world created by God” was truly good.¹⁰ His desire, the desire within the whole of the work, as I understand it, is to restore to European humanity the capacity to see the world in its goodness—to find contemporary ways to recover the “divine ‘very good’.”¹¹

Old Tim was one of my most generous teachers. He was born about 1905 in his mother’s country, the clan territory known as Layit. The country is demarcated by a creek that is a tributary of the Wickham River, itself a tributary of the Victoria River, which is one of the great monsoonal rivers of North Australia. The region had only recently been occupied by White settlers when Tim was born, and the frontier pastoralists were still struggling to protect their cattle against the difficulties of weather, terrain, cattle thieves, Aboriginal people, and nonhuman predators such as crocodiles. For a decade or so, the warfare was intense as Aboriginal people sought to defend their home countries. Pastoralists were aided by a mounted constable, and the record books show that he made numerous patrols into Layit in search of “cattle killers” (Aborigines).¹²

By the time Tim was born, the worst of the warfare was over. His parents had joined the Whitefellas on Victoria River Downs Station, and he lived most of his adult life in the outback pastoral society of White overlords and Indigenous workers. He was fluent in Aboriginal Pastoral English and for many decades had been a cowboy. At the same time, he was fluent in several Indigenous languages. He had been through all the initiation ceremonies for men, and had become a Lawman himself, an expert and leader in knowledge and ritual. In addition, he was a clever man, a man with extraordinary powers. In fact, he was the only person I’ve been lucky enough to meet who could describe having been taken to the Sky country, which is where his powers were bestowed on him. By the time I met him, Old Tim had lost much of his power, and no one in that area has demonstrated similar gifts. It may be, as some suggest, that such power is being lost in that part of the world, but perhaps not. Life is full of surprises.

When I met Old Tim in 1980, he was already old: grey-haired, and sporting a wonderful long white beard. His humor was undimmed, and his passionate attachment to dogs was legendary. One of Old Tim’s names was Old Bogaga, Bogaga being his father’s country. It was an area away to the southwest of us, and was full of important Dingo sites and songs. The old man had a special relationship with the wild dogs of Australia known as dingoes, and he told long, fabulous stories about shared kinship: about how dogs and humans have a common origin and destiny. Unlike many Indigenous creation stories, which tell of specific places and specific people, Old Tim’s dingo stories are meant to concern all human beings. These are stories of death and what happens after, of the desire to dominate, of the failure to reciprocate, and of the deeply abiding connections between humans and nonhumans, expressed most forcibly as kinship. In Tim’s stories, dingoes are the ancestors of all human beings; they give us our faces, our stance, our death, and the return that cycles us through the bodies of other living creatures. At first there was only one creature—a dog-human person—and this creature differentiated himself/herself, inaugurating both dog-persons and human-persons. Dogs/dingoes and humans are still close kin because of their shared origins. Old Tim universalized this story, ensuring that we understand that the story is for all of us: “Dreaming [creators] worked that way for everyone, White lady, Aboriginal men, all the same. They walk, they stand up, they’re finished being dogs now, they’re proper humans, women and men. Mother and Father Dingo made Aboriginal people. White children come out of a white dog.” Think about it: to look at the face of a dog is to see your own ancestor and your contemporary kin. It is to see mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers. They still walk with us and nuzzle us with their long-nosed faces. Without them we would not be who we are, and their faces turn toward us in the knowledge that we are here together, all of us, living and dying in our related ways.

Rain Dogs

Tom Waits has an album called Rain Dogs on which he sings the lives of the lost, the homeless, those without direction. Dogs find their way in the world primarily by scent. “Rain dogs” are the ones who are lost becau...