Extinction Studies : Stories of Time, Death, and Generations

Extinction Studies focuses on the entangled ecological and social dimensions of extinction, exploring the ways in which extinction catastrophically interrupts life-giving processes of time, death, and generations. The volume opens up important philosophical questions about our place in, and obligations to, a more-than-human world. Drawing on fieldwork, philosophy, literature, history, and a range of other perspectives, each of the chapters in this book tells a unique extinction story that explores what extinction is, what it means, why it matters—and to whom.

"Extinction Studies collects haunting and haunted multivoiced stories that echo together in a vibrant plea for an ethic of care, lucidity, and obstinate, stammering hope. We need such stories to make us feel and think with the unraveling of a world we inherit and share together with innumerable entangled forms and ways of life. We need them also to repopulate our devastated imaginations and to help us escape the twin easy temptations of nihilist despair and blind confidence." - Isabelle Stengers, author of Cosmopolitics

"This extraordinary collection addresses one of the most sobering aspects of the current environmental crisis. The contributing scholars use narrative as the vehicle for their historical, ethnographic, zoological, meditative, and poetic insights. The result is both personal and scholarly, both illuminating and a pleasure to read." - Harriet Ritvo, Arthur J. Conner Professor of History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology