Angelaki

Journal of the Theoretical Humanities

ISSN: 0969-725X (Print) 1469-2899 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cang20

THE ANTHROPOCENE, PRACTICES OF

STORYTELLING, AND MULTISPECIES JUSTICE

Marietta Radomska

To cite this article: Marietta Radomska (2017) THE ANTHROPOCENE, PRACTICES

OF STORYTELLING, AND MULTISPECIES JUSTICE, Angelaki, 22:2, 257-261, DOI:
10.1080/0969725X.2017.1322847

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 ANGELAKI
journal of the theoretical humanities
volume 22 number 2 june 2017

Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings

of Endangered Species
Ursula K. Heise
Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2016
288 pp.
£19.50/US$27.50 (pbk); £74.86/US$82.50
(hbk)
ISBN-10: 022635816X; ISBN-13: 9780226358161
REVIEW ESSAY

O n 29 August 2016 the Anthropocene marietta radomska

Working Group (AWG), headed by geol-
ogist Jan Zalasiewicz from the University of Lei-
cester, officially presented its recommendation
concerning the declaration of a new geological
epoch at the International Geological Congress
in Cape Town, South Africa. The Anthropocene
will be registered as an epoch following the Holo-
cene in the Global Time Scale, provided the pro-
posal of such a formalisation is accepted by the
International Union for Geological Sciences
(IUGS). This will, however, take the next
several years during which the AWG is going
to proceed with analyses aimed at the identifi-
cation of a Global Boundary Stratotype Section
and Point (GSSP), that is a physical point in geo-
logical strata at a carefully selected place, com-
monly referred to as a “golden spike”
(“Provisional Recommendations”). In the
popular discourse and contemporary Western
cultural imaginaries, the Anthropocene is associ-
ated primarily with the sixth great extinction.
The term “Anthropocene,” defined as a dis-
tinct geological epoch generated by “human
activities on earth and atmosphere, and at all,
including global, scales,” was proposed in 2000
by chemist Paul J. Crutzen and biologist
Eugene F. Stoermer (17). While scientists still
THE ANTHROPOCENE,
PRACTICES OF
STORYTELLING, AND
MULTISPECIES JUSTICE
debate whether the human-induced biochemical
and geological changes in the composition of the
earth legitimise the establishment of the new
epoch, it is indisputable that human actions
have led to such changes on a global scale. Yet,
not all humans have had an equal impact on
the earth. Moreover, violence towards non-
human nature and stories of colonialism and gen-
ocide are deeply entangled with one another.1
In her brilliant book, Imagining Extinction:
The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species
(2016), literary scholar Ursula K. Heise demon-
strates how the questions of the sixth great
extinction, biodiversity, endangered species
and, what follows, the Anthropocene, not only
constitute objects of scientific enquiry but are
also substantial socio-cultural and political

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/17/020257-5 © 2017 Marietta Radomska

https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2017.1322847

257
 review essay
issues imbued with value and shaped through
the practices of storytelling. By conducting a
critical analysis of literature, visual artworks,
musical compositions, databases and legal regu-
lations concerned with the conservation and
protection of endangered species, with utmost
care and precision, she argues that “the values
and principles that guide conservation decisions
are political and cultural even when they are
informed by scientific data” (Heise 234). Fur-
thermore, our understanding of and relations
towards other species “become part of the
stories that human communities tell about
themselves: the stories about their origins,
their development, their identity and their
future horizons” (5). Only by critically examin-
ing and questioning our own bias, projections
and values, which are often hidden behind eco-
logical and biological arguments, and thus, by
making the debates about conservation more
transparent and “honest” (234), will we able to
proceed to discussions that take seriously differ-
ent histories, presents and futures, endangered
species and their habitats, human/non-human
relations, extinctions, and communities. It is by
making “values, cultural perceptions, emotions,
and traditions” (236), which have always
formed part of our relation to non-human
others, explicit that a space for multispecies
justice may be created. In this way, the starting
point for Heise is similar to Donna Haraway’s
renowned, ethically crucial and timely statement:
“It matters what worlds world worlds. It matters
what stories tell stories” (Haraway 35). Diagnos-
ing these stories opens up a way to the realisation
of both their limitations and future potentials.
Imagining Extinction consists of six chap-
ters followed by a coda. Whereas the first
three chapters focus primarily on how different
cultural artefacts, legal documents and biodiver-
sity databases present extinct and endangered
species and their habitats, and thus how they
are entangled in cultural imaginaries and
values, the last three chapters concentrate on
the historical and present relations and tensions
between environmentalists, animal welfare, and
environmental justice advocates.
From the very beginning, Heise sheds light
on several mechanisms that permeate our
approaches to the issues of biodiversity and
extinction: taxonomic bias (we concentrate pri-
marily on endangered/extinct species of birds
and mammals); the so-called proxy logic
(species are often used as proxies for biodiver-
sity in both public and expert debates concerned
with environmental crises); and the understand-
ing of the loss of biodiversity in terms of “some-
thing that we [humans] lost in the course of
modernization” (Heise 23), to name a few. In
chapter 1 she looks closely at a number of fic-
tional and non-fictional texts, paintings, photo-
graphs, films, and sound artworks, all of which
concentrate in different ways on various
extinct species, which are iconic for the dis-
course on extinction: the Tasmanian tiger, the
dodo, the Honshu wolf and the North American
ivory-billed woodpecker, among others. The
disappearance of each of these species is
strongly interwoven with the histories of coloni-
sation, modernisation, and the accompanying
violence.
What characterises the majority of the ana-
lysed texts and artefacts is their elegiac nature:
they mourn the lost species. As Heise empha-
sises, melancholy over the state of nature func-
tions in environmentalist discourses as a
powerful emotional catalyst and – to follow
Judith Butler – carries a potential for becoming
an act of political resistance (Heise 34–35).
However, the author also evokes a few examples
of texts that could be classified as “comedies of
extinction and survival,” like Douglas Adams
and Mark Carwadine’s Last Chance to See
(1990). What these texts highlight in particular
are the parallel and intertwined, yet non-linear,
histories of nature and culture, which demon-
strate that biological conservation cannot be
equated with the return to “untouched”
nature, as nature has always been interacting
with humans in the first place.
Chapter 2 moves from elegy to the “modern
epic” of lists (like the Red List of Threatened
Species), catalogues and biodiversity databases,
for example the Encyclopedia of Life (EoL)
that aims to provide “a webpage for every
species” (qtd in Heise 63). According to
Franco Moretti, as Heise indicates, modern
epic seeks to “encompass the modern capitalist
258

world system, but unlike its ancient predeces-
sors” it proceeds with the awareness that
“this system can in fact not be captured in
the way the premodern world could be”
(Moretti qtd in Heise 65). By discussing
numerous examples of conservationist lists
and artworks that reflect the cataloguing
logic, Heise shows again that databases are
not “neutral”: they are arranged according to
cultural narratives and, in consequence, they
repeat stories about species that are valued
and privileged and those that are culturally
deemed irrelevant (and thus not even recog-
nised or included in a certain database).
Subsequently, the author focuses on legal
documents: biodiversity protection laws from
the United States, Germany, the European
Union, and Bolivia. She conducts an attentive
and detailed comparative analysis, concentrat-
ing on several key questions: who is in charge
of biodiversity protection; which objects
exactly are protected; how the relation between
species and their habitats is understood; and,
finally, the reasons why species or spaces are
protected. Chapter 3 is a true tour de force: in
an elegant, refined, and charismatic way, Heise
teases out the minor nuances and details of
each of the discussed legal regulations, while
paying meticulous attention to historical, econ-
omic, social, cultural and (geo)political circum-
stances, and conditions in which each of these
laws came into being and has been shaped
throughout decades. While Bolivia appears to
be unique among the analysed countries due
to the fact that its new constitution invokes
humans’ relation to “Mother Earth” and the
legal framework pays special attention to the
issue of environmental justice, Heise under-
scores that it is difficult to compare the effec-
tiveness of the analysed laws: each of the
discussed documents stems from a very specific
history, cultural imagination, values and socio-
political situation. Biodiversity laws – as much
as other literary and visual texts on endangered
species – are rooted in the situated practices of
storytelling and their specific values and
histories.
Although animal welfare and environmental
movements share many of their philosophical
259
radomska
and historical roots, the former concentrate on
individual animals at risk and the latter priori-
tise the well-being of the species over individ-
uals. These orientations do not converge often,
but the industrial breeding of livestock (or,
excessive domestication in general) is one of
the points where they do. In chapter 4 Heise dis-
cusses a variety of contemporary theoretical per-
spectives that deal with non-human and more-
than-human ethics: Gary Francione’s abolition-
ism; Giorgio Agamben’s thanatopolitics; new
materialism; “posthumanist” aspects of
thought of Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway
and Cary Wolfe; as well as the multispecies eth-
nographies of Deborah Bird Rose and Thom
van Dooren. These philosophical perspectives
nuance the arguments employed by each
movement.
In chapter 5 Heise brings into dialogue the
third orientation: that of environmental
justice, which has not always nor everywhere
agreed with conservationists. Simultaneously –
following Agamben, Rose and Wolfe in this
manner – Heise reminds us that the constitution
of the categories of human and animal has been
structurally informed by the logics of racism
and speciesism, which involve the operations
of power and violence. Yet the author does not
stop at a mere comparison of different perspec-
tives relevant in the discussions on extinction
and biodiversity. Rather, she uses the three
approaches of ecological conservationism,
animal welfare and environmental justice, with
their histories, nuances and varieties, in order
to mobilise an affirmative vision of multispecies
justice attentive to both human and non-human
well-being and based upon not only biological
but also cultural taxonomies (Heise 167).
Throughout her elaboration of multispecies
justice, Heise turns to the multiplex examples
of speculative fiction and environmental non-
fiction as proliferate genres that allow for an
exploration and imagining anew of relational-
ities within and among different ecological com-
munities, particularly in the context of the
Anthropocene. Such a vision of multispecies
justice in Heise’s work is anchored in “eco-cos-
mopolitanism,” understood as an “awareness
that very little commonality can be taken for
 review essay
granted and that speaking about the human
species, humanity, humanness, or the Anthro-
pocene requires a patient and meticulous
process of assembly” (226). Thinking along
these lines requires imagination – a capacity to
imagine a possible future – combined with hum-
bleness, honesty and the recognition of multi-
plex knowledges and multiplicitous human/
non-human relationalities “ranging from the
microbiome in human guts to charismatic mega-
fauna” (234). Such a thinking must thus be
based upon transversal conversations with
various cultural communities involved in a
specific ecosystem.
Throughout Imagining Extinction, Heise
reminds us a number of times that our inter-
action and relations towards non-human
others are saturated with cultural perceptions,
meanings, and values, and it is only by
making them transparent that we might be
able to start “the construction of new, func-
tional multispecies habitats [which] may be a
more productive and democratic goal to invest
our energies in than an attempt to recreate
the habitats of the past” (236). Although
gender – and, by extension, trans* – related
questions do not take much space in Imagining
Extinction, Heise clearly states that “the cul-
tural projections and biases in biology and con-
servation of the past” have been used to explain
certain phenomena (for instance, heterosexu-
ality, male aggression, binary gender division)
as “natural” (234). When seen as “natural,”
these occurrences have been used to legitimise
social structures and power relations. Only by
revisiting our cultural biases and perspectives
will we be able to pay meticulous attention to
the multiplicity of differences on micro and
macro, human and non-human levels, and
thus take a step towards creating a multispecies
justice.
While the book is on the one hand engaged
with the question of extinction in multiple
dimensions, and with speculative fictions on
the other, one aspect that could be more
present is an upfront dialogue with contempor-
ary philosophies of extinction, for example the
work of Claire Colebrook, who asks directly
about an ethics of extinction:
In relation to the human one might ask
whether modes of living and modes of
relation could exist without the assumption
of a “we,” and without the assumption that
“we” are worthy of living on; one might ask
whether the future should not be saved for
another mode of life altogether. (Colebrook
148)
Heise closes Imagining Extinction with one
more example of a non-human animal that has
become an icon of the Anthropocene and
climate change: the polar bear depicted in an
“environmentally-friendly” car advertisement
from 2010. The coda reiterates that the
meaning of multispecies justice is a matter of
multiple negotiations that – in this particular
case – should take into account polar bears,
Inuit societies, conservationists, bioscientists
and the public (Heise 244). As a framework, mul-
tispecies justice attends to the ways in which
cultural, socio-political, economic, and historical
differences have shaped our thinking about
human and non-human communities, as well as
our relations to biological and
ecological differences. 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.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by
the author.
note
1 For a discussion on the problematics of the
concept of the Anthropocene and the related
issue of the connection between oppression of
human and non-human individuals and populations,
see Davis and Turpin 3–30; Schneiderman.
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to See. New York: Ballantine, 1990. Print.
Colebrook, Claire. Sex after Life: Essays on
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2014. Print.
260
 radomska

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Marietta Radomska
Department of Thematic Studies
Gender Studies
Linköping University
581 83 Linköping
Sweden
E-mail: marietta.radomska@liu.se