Extinction

This is my work on species extinction and responses to it. I manage two large projects on this topic: “Beyond Dodos and Dinosaurs: Displaying Extinction and Recovery in Museums” and “Extinction as Cultural Heritage? Exhibiting Human-Nature Entanglements with Extinct and Threatened Species”. You can read more about these projects on Remembering Extinction.


Feelings for nature : Emotions in environmental history

Andy Flack and Dolly Jørgensen, in The Routledge History of Emotions in the Modern World, ed. KatieBarclay and Peter N. Stearns, 235-251 (Routledge, 2022) More-than-human environments often evoke highly consequential emotional responses which are always rooted in spatial-temporal contexts. Human emotions have often directly impacted not only on the lives…

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Extinction and the End of Futures

History & Theory 61, no. 2 (2022): 209-218. Extinction, in biological terms, is the end of an evolutionary line, a potential future cutoff. It involves a transition between the historical past in which a species was biologically alive and a future in which it isn’t, a transition from extant to…

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Bettering stories about stories about nature

Ecozon@ European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 11, no. 2 (2020): 200-207. Both environmental historians and ecocritics are in the business of simultaneously analysing the stories we tell about the human-nature relationship and creating those stories. Using the case of Kiki, an Aldabra giant tortoise on display in the…

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Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age: Histories of Longing and Belonging

MIT Press, October 2019 This groundbreaking book brings together environmental history and the history of emotions to examine the motivations behind species conservation actions. In Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age, Dolly Jørgensen uses the environmental histories of reintroduction, rewilding, and resurrection to view the modern conservation paradigm of the…

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Endling, the power of the last in an extinction-prone world

Environmental Philosophy 14, no. 1 (2017): 119-138, doi: 10.5840/envirophil201612542 Abstract: In April 1996, two men working at a convalescent center wrote a letter to the journal Nature proposing that a new word be adopted to designate a person who is the last in the lineage: endling. This had come up because of patients…

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Presence of absence, absence of presence, and extinction narratives

In Nature, Temporality and Environmental Management: Scandinavian and Australian Perspectives on Peoples and Landscapes, ed. Lesley Head, Katarina Saltzman, Gunhild Setten, and Marie Stensek, 45-58. Routledge, 2016. Abstract: This chapter addresses where two issues – the problem of not seeing at a certain time and the idea of a static nature over…

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