Heise, Ursula K. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species

When Ursula K. Heise’s now canonic text Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global was first published in 2008, I was a doctoral student at SUNY Stony Brook writing seminar papers on Victorian perspectives of nature. In that second wave of Anglophone ecocriticism, those of us working in the newly incubated environmental humanities were thrilled to engage with the wide-ranging scope of Heise’s book, whose aims included the theorization and revisioning of cultural and political attachments to planetary notions of place. Sense of Place’s comparative approach analyzed not only literature, poetry, documentaries, and social science risk theory, but also blurred disciplinary boundaries to include explorations of geographical positioning systems and media such as the famous Apollo 17 “Blue Planet” image. Heise’s strategic methodology considered how state deterritorializations could lead to an ideal type of “‘ecocosmopolitanism’” (Sense of Place, 10). Her theorizations encouraged other scholars to expand ecocriticism’s disciplinary boundaries,the evidence of which appears in works by Cary Wolfe (What is Posthumanism? 2010), Matthew Hall (Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany, 2011), and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman, 2015), all of whom legitimized new discourses that ignited supra-taxonomies of animal, vegetable, and mineral in the environmental humanities’ canon. Today, that canon has evolved to include numerous sub-disciplines: ecocinema, ecofeminism, ecophobia, gender, and queer studies, material ecocriticism, postcolonial ecocriticisms, in/post/transhuman ecocriticism, political and cultural ecology, and extinction studies.

Science has proven that humans are accelerating Earth’s sixth mass extinction—an event that may be somberly noted as The Great Dying;Heise’s new text, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (2016) intervenes in current dialogues by claiming that cultural imaginaries titrate our perceptions of species imperiled by climate change. The essential assumption she puts forward in the opening pages of Imagining Extinction provocatively values culture as the narrativizer of science; in more simple terms, it is culture that distinguishes, measures, and eventually values those species who will be future-extinct. The innovative contribution this text makes to extinction studies is to emphasize how abstract cultural imaginaries relate to and speculate upon mass material deaths. Within this cognitive mediation between human imaginaries and the planetary materiality of extinction, Heise reasons that extinction narratives contain a certain “‘proxy logic’”(23). Hence the discourses of endangered species are organized through biological proxies, or literary synechdoches, the titration of which creates inherent biases that lead to hierarchies of value, such as the broad-based narrativizing of animals over that of plants or taxa (23).

Imagining Extinction’s commitment to interdisciplinarity incorporates a breathtaking scope of evidence that measures how culturally diverse artifacts, the arts, informatics, law, literature,media, and science have registered and historicized mass extinction events. The book’s six-chapter organizational structure is comprised of two parts and sequences from everyday cultural narratives of endangered species to broader and idealized conceptualizations that take into account the larger societal infrastructures, such as legislation, that have sanctioned wildly divergent entanglements concerning endangered species. Imagining Extinction concludes with a coda on the polar bear—a gesture toward the complicated path of multispecies justice.

Chapter 1 first describes the historicity of Earth’s mass extinction events resulting in biodiversity loss, reasoning how both anthropocentric conservation methodologies and biodiversity databases have attempted to categorize the importance of species by assigning value to “keystone”or “umbrella” ones but have, in effect, only recast the Linnaean hierarchical system. Heise’s comparative approach reveals the problematic ways in which science values both naturallyoccurring as well as “human-generated biodiversity” within the planet’s ecosystems (31). These scientific methodologies, she claims, are entangled in “narrative templates” of elegy, tragedy,and even comedy that abound in popular culture; analyzing case studies of ivory-bills and passenger pigeons, poetry by W.S. Merwin and Homero Aridjis, as well as eighteen texts ranging from George Schaller’s The Last Panda (1993) to Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History and the BBC TV series Last Chance to See: Animals on the Verge of Extinction,Heise shows how cultural relativism can inadvertently spur larger modes of endangerment (22).

The book’s second chapter explores the cultural panorama of elegiac extinction discourses,interpreting the importance of novels such as Margaret Atwood’s trilogy Madd Addam and Lydia Millet’s How the Dead Dream, Ghost Lights, and Magni fi cence, Maya Lin’s digital media memorial What is Missing, and Joel Sartore’s photographic art Last Ones: Threatened and Endangered Species. Signi fi cant to her study is the analyses of meta biodiversity databases such as ARKive, The International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collection and the IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species, where Heise interprets these forms of metadata as important cultural indicators that register the global articulation of extinction through classi fi cation and integration:

Global digital biodiversity databases, then, can be understood to emerge from the conjunction of two tendencies: an encyclopedic, centripetal impulse that reaches back to the Enlightenment and seeks to inventory the entire known world, and the hyperlinked,centrifugal architecture of the Internet, which seeks to approximate a representation of this world through the constant movement between data sites. (65)

Taken together, these diverse global elegies form a type of extinction “epic” that encompasses cultural imaginaries that are embedded in both individuals and systems (65).

Imagining Extinction’s third chapter studies global forms of endangered species legislation.Heise compares and contrasts the environmental statecraft of the US, Germany, the EU and Bolivia to explore how historic conservation practices emerged as a result of various types of agency and the valuing of natural assets. Her comparative approach importantly distinguishes between the 1966 US Endangered Species Act legislation that is based on valuing and protecting endangered species, as well as its 1978 and 1979 amendments for habitat protections, against other nations such as Germany and the supranational EU, who have instead focused on the ways in which legislation can preserve biodiversity. Heise also considers the model laws of Bolivia and Ecuador,the latter of which has recently attributed “legal rights to nature itself, thereby creating a new kind of legal and political subject” (111). Her careful description and interpretation of Bolivia’s Constitution, which emphasizes its status as a “‘plurinational’” state that recognizes its indigenous and Afro-Bolivian population, is a strength of the book and serves as a model for any global entities possessing the “political vision” to legislate nationalist forms of biodiversity (90, 122).

Set against Imagining Extinction’s fi rst part, the remaining portion of the book articulates the need, and then argues for the consideration of environmental justice through the sanctioning of multispecies communities. Chapter 4 begins with case studies considering the tensions between animal welfare and animal rights by exploring the nuances of Los Angeles’ feral cat population,seal and whale hunting, Guam’s tree snakes, African elephants, and global animal agricultures. It concludes by showing how these discourses act as complicated cultural imaginaries in novels such as Thomas Coraghessan Boyle’s When the Killing’s Done (2011), where it becomes clear than modernity has irrevocably domesticated and altered non-human forms of nature.

Chapter 5 offers a strong theoretical focus that details the divergent global history of the movement towards environmental justice. Heise interrogates current theories, such as Wolfe’s and Huggan and Tiffan’s, that query how to reconcile the “power differentials that lie at the core of postcolonial theory, of the environmentalism of the poor, and of environmental justice and human rights advocacies with the ‘ fl at ontologies,’ the leveling of categorical differences between kinds of beings, processes, and objects that accompanies many varieties of post-humanism”(166). Con fl ating the cultural biases of classism, racism, and speciesism to bolster her claim for multispecies justice, Heise conducts in-depth interpretations of graphic novels such as Virunga(2009), edited by Adam Johnson and Tom Kealey and created as part of the undergraduate Stanford Graphic Novel Project, along with Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2006) to make visible the dif fi culties in diminishing species’ violence and economic disenfranchisement.

Imagining Extinction’s final chapter extends Heise’s earlier conceptualization of “‘ecocosmopolitanism’” in Sense of Place by promoting the notion of “‘multispecies justice’,” which,according to Heise, “puts questions of justice for both humans and nonhumans front and center, even as it emphasizes that justice itself has to be imagined at the intersection of different cultural perspectives that may diverge in their conception of what is just” (226, 202 — 3). Focusing on Anthropocentric tropes in speculative narratives such as Orson Scott Card’s Ender series, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars,Green Mars, and Blue Mars trilogy, and Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (2014), Heise argues that these cultural discourses frame the Anthropocene itself as a cultural trope. Considering recent theorists, such as Dipesh Chakrabarty,Jason Moore, Slavoj Žižek, and Ulrich Beck, who have all, in short, tried to fi gure out how to reverse the train of climate change, Heise gestures towards a type of cosmopolitan assemblage theory that legislates justice for multispecies beyond the human, the time of which is ripe for planet Earth since as France’s President Emmanuel Macron has said: “Il n’ya pas de planѐte b.”