This is my work on species extinction and responses to it. I have managed several large externally-funded projects on this topic: “Human-Environment-Animal Relations in Deep Time” (HEART), “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.
- Extinction as Cultural Heritage: The Dodo and The Turtle
This chapter investigates how local populations frame two extinct animals: the dodo on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, and the Hoàn Kiếm turtle in Hanoi, Vietnam. How do these two extinct animals appear in cultural contexts and what does that say about extinction as cultural heritage? In the case of the dodo, I begin … - New book Ghosts Behind Glass
Part travelogue, part academic analysis, Ghosts Behind Glass draws readers in by narrating a well-known truth about natural history displays—how they both vary and stay the same across time and space—and provides museum visitors and practitioners alike with fresh perspectives on it. Virtually encounter the extinct in the museum halls with the help of 80 full-color photographs. … - Extinction in Environmental History
Every extinction has a history—a cultural, economic, and political context that leads to the ultimate end of a type of living animal or plant. In this chapter, we argue that engagement by environmental historians with the issue of extinction is essential to unpacking how and why extinction happens. We take up two research directions within … - Displaying Displacement: Exhibiting Extinction in Natural History Museums
In this chapter I examine two displacements: species extinction and museum exhibition. Building on the idea of liveliness, I argue that both types of displacements displace animals from lively relationships, from history, and from place. I then turn to the intersection of the two displacements in displays of extinct birds such as the great auk, … - Resurrecting species through robotics : Animal extinction and deextinction in Do androids dream of electric sheep?
Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) is often understood as commentary on what it means to be human contra android. Less work has been done on animals in the novel, probably because the animal aspect was downplayed significantly in the movie version Blade Runner (1982), an entrance point for many scholars. … - Portraits of Extinction: Encountering Extinction Narratives in Natural History Museums
In this chapter I will examine three portraits of the bluebuck, one created by the MNHN in Paris, one by the Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet (NRM) in Stockholm, and one by Naturalis in Leiden to see how animals displayed in the archive of the natural history museum can narrate extinction. The fourth extant taxidermied bluebuck (and the … - The Beaver’s Journey
The public outreach project The Beaver’s Journey (Beverens reise) which was developed for the 100th anniversary of the beaver reintroduction project from Norway to Sweden has multiple components: - Feelings for nature : Emotions in environmental history
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 of more-than-human animals living both close-at-hand and in far-flung parts of the world but also on their wider habitats and the natural systems that support them. In this chapter, … - Expanding Eden: Animal discovery and rethinking paradise in Jan Brueghel the Elder’s Garden of Eden
Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625) painted one of the earliest European representations of guinea pigs in his work Garden of Eden (1613). In Brueghel’s creation, newly discovered animals from early explorations of the Americas, including the guinea pig, turkey, and scarlet macaw, are included alongside animals known from Africa, Asia, and Europe. The theme of the work—a depiction … - Erasing the extinct: the hunt for Caribbean monk seals and museum collection practices
The Caribbean monk seal (Monachus tropicalis), the only seal species native to Central America, was declared extinct in 2008, with the last confirmed sighting in 1952. This species historically had a broad range throughout the gulf of Mexico. This article discusses the history of Western science on the monk seal, from its first recorded sighting … - Extinction and the End of Futures
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 extinct. In this contribution to the “Historical Futures” series, I examine two aspects … - Bettering stories about stories about nature
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 Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris, I present three potential text types in museum displays which lend themselves … - Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age: Histories of Longing and Belonging
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, I use the environmental histories of reintroduction, rewilding, and resurrection to view the modern conservation paradigm of the recovery of nature as an emotionally charged practice. I argue … - Dependence on the whale: multispecies entanglements and ecosystem services in science fiction
Abstract: This article analyses how four science fiction stories frame whale endangerment and salvation as a problem of ecosystem service loss: Arthur C. Clarke’s The Deep Range (1957), Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), the Doctor Who episode ‘The Beast Below’ (2010), and T.J. Bass’s The Godwhale(1974). It uses the four categories of the scientific concept of ecosystem services as a … - After none: Memorialising animal species extinction through monuments
This article is the last chapter in the book Animals Count which looks at the ways in which the size of an animal population impacts how they are viewed by humans and, conversely, how human perceptions of populations impact animals. This chapter examines the role of monuments in remembering species that have become extinct, i.e. the … - Endling, the power of the last in an extinction-prone world
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 who were dying and thought of themselves as the last of their family line. … - Presence of absence, absence of presence, and extinction narratives
This chapter addresses where two issues – the problem of not seeing at a certain time and the idea of a static nature over time – converge in two historical searches for the last: the European beaver (Castor fiber) in Sweden at the end of the nineteenth century and the thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) of Tasmania in … - Who’s the devil? Species extinction and environmentalist thought in Star Trek
During the last decades of the 20th century, the environmentalist movement came of age. As it developed into a mass movement, it gradually changed its arguments and strategies for persuading the public that endangered species were worth saving. Although depicting a universe two hundred years (and more) into the future, the environmentalism exhibited in Star …