Unsettling Extinction

Featuring contributions from key names in the field alongside some of the most exciting new voices, this collection presents cutting-edge work on species extinction from a wide variety of perspectives across the environmental humanities. Biodiversity loss threatens to transform the ecological foundations of all biological life on the planet, yet solutions to this crisis are fiercely contested. This book addresses extinction – along with climate change, the most urgent environmental crisis of the twenty-first century - by exploring species decline and conservation with a particular emphasis on divergent cultural framings, temporal scales, and media. Contributors explore what ethical guidelines underlie acceptable and unacceptable ways of interacting with plants and animals, what social, aesthetic, and affective perceptions and meanings are attributed to particular species, how human-nonhuman relations are construed as part of a particular social order and which species are considered worth conserving, and at what cost. Drawing on the disciplines of anthropology, cultural geography, environmental history, philosophy, literary studies, media studies, and studies of religion, this book explores how the engagement with biodiversity loss challenges basic assumptions in these disciplines and opens up new avenues of thought and activism for shaping the multispecies communities of the future.