This paper explores cultural geographies of extinction. I trace the decline of the Scottish osprey during the 19th century and its enduring, haunting presence in the landscape today. Taking inspiration from the environmental humanities, extinction is framed as an event affecting losses that exceed comprehension in terms merely of biological species numbers and survival rates. Disavowing the “species thinking” of contemporary conservation bio‐politics, the osprey's extinction story pays attention to the worth of “animal cultures.” Drawing a hybrid conceptual framework from research in the environmental humanities, “speculative” ethology and more‐than‐human geographies, I champion an experimental attention to the cultural geographies of animals in terms of historically contingent, communally shared, spatial practices and attachments. In doing so, I propose non‐human cultural geographies as assemblages that matter, and which are fundamentally at stake in the face of extinction.
This is an article about extinction, geography, and the geographies of extinction. The emerging field of extinction studies has brought a vibrant corpus of interdisciplinary scholarship that destabilizes static notions of species, traces the spatiality of death and violence in conservation contexts, and raises important political and ethical questions regarding how lives are lost, saved, and valued. Such work offers a counter to the biopolitical tendencies of contemporary conservation discourse, emphasizing the contingent and situated character of life’s forms and the processes by which these are, often slowly, severed from place. In this article, the authors draw upon research in diverse contexts—concerning the conservation of ospreys on Speyside, Scotland, and trans-border marine conservation in Mozambique—as a lens through which to demonstrate the multiple ways in which extinctions are “placed.” These are (1) an attention to geographical contingency of wildlife under threat from extinction; (2) the multiple, overlapping, and discordant political and economic geographies of violence, death, and attempted (necessarily partial) protections through which extinction unfolds; and (3) the geographies produced as a result of extinction, be they blasted, spectral, or sites for life amid ruins.
Research at York St John (RaY) is an institutional repository. It supports the principles of open access by making the research outputs of the University available in digital form.
The Wake of Crows writes ecological relations through the thickness and specificity of situated, ongoing encounters. For the geographer, van Dooren offers much for those looking to examine and conceptualise the situated involvement of humans and nonhumans, and the ethical questions they raise. This is also a book that fulsomely advocates the value of fieldwork -done collaboratively with a whole range of traditionally excluded others -as a means of crafting a careful, empirically rich site-attentiveness of the kind resurgent within recent disciplinary writing around place and landscape.The book offers five accounts of human encounters with crows, characterised as birds that force us to reckon with the lively agency and capacity for response in the nonhuman other. The substantial chapters consider, in turn: the (sub-)urban Torresian crows of Brisbane; the captive breeding of native crows ('alālā) on Hawaii's Big Island; the unwelcome presence of stowaway House crows in Hoek van Holland, the Netherlands; ravens predating rare tortoises in the Mojave desert; and, lastly, the fraught future of humans and Mariana Crows (Aga) on the Pacific island of Rota. Each serves to meditate on one of five key concepts -community, inheritance, hospitality, recognition and hope -offered by van Dooren to differently articulate the promise of his multispecies ethic. Inviting the reader into the complex wake of human-crow entanglements, van Dooren engages the trailing threads of their lived historical geographies, the books frames ethics as a practical matter of paying critical, curious attention to the world-making activities, capacities and responses of other beings.These stories of humans and crows are crosscut by familiar geographical themes: globalisation, urbanisation, conservation, (de-)colonisation and the questioning of dwelling amidst profound ecological upheaval. In Hawaii, proposals for reintroducing captive-bred crows involve efforts to reckon with and build upon historic relationships between islanders, crows and land that are scarred by colonisation. The work of conservation biologists in the Mojave, becomes a question of recognising and negotiation with corvid subjectivity to try to find a way of accommodating both tortoises and their raven predators without recourse to strategies of simply killing birds. In the Netherlands, the eradication of House Crows arriving aboard cargo ships offers an entry point for thinking about the Port of Rotterdam as an 'engine' (p. 113) of ecological transformation in the Anthropocene.Across such accounts, van Dooren avoids abstracting either the figure of the crow, or the question of responding to environmental change. Such narratives are necessarily specific: exploring 'what it means to craft flourishing worlds here, in this place and time ' (p. 10). And yet, 942786C GJ0010.1177/1474474020942786cultural geographiesbook reviews book-review2020
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.