I wrapped up 2023 with the fiction book Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman which is set in a not too distant future when species are rapidly becoming extinct and the world has come up with a cap-and-trade mechanism for extinction credits. It is first and foremost a terrific work of sci-fi and has a great plot and characters and interesting ideas and could be read just for that. In some parts it is a bit didactic but for the most part it is a well told story that raises numerous philosophical and ethical questions regarding extinction. Beauman wonders why so few humans feel anything when a species goes extinct, especially when we fully know that human activities are mainly responsible for the fate. He poses a thought experiment - Imagine that you find out someone you know has cancer. Then imagine, that you are the person who has to tell them that they have cancer. Now, he asks us to consider our mental state when we have to tell them they have cancer and we were responsible for giving them the fatal form of cancer. Isn't that how we should be feeling towards species that we have driven to extinction - from the dodo / passenger pigeons to the Hawaiian Crows? But somehow we all don't grapple with these questions. Beauman in an interview mentioned the book Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction by Thom Van Dooren as one of the books that informed him during the writing of the Lumpsucker. So I decided to start my 2024 reading with this book.
Fair warning: This is going to be a long read as there are so many important ideas in the book and I am writing this for a few friends (you know who you are) who might not be able to get their hands on the book easily or have the time to read it. But I hope everyone will at least skim the post and get the actual book. One minor point - I am personally not a big fan of the postmodernists (Foucault, Derrida). Van Dooren quotes them frequently but I was not turned off. He also quotes Donna Haraway. I am not a big fan of her Cyborg Manifesto but I have admired her views on companion species so I was OK with the constant references to Haraway.
Flight Ways is a fantastic book (and very short too) and should be read more widely! I mostly volunteer my time for conservation causes especially for birds and this book spoke to me personally. The author traces the Flight Ways of 5 species - Laysan Albatross, Indian Vulture, Little Penguins, Whooping Cranes and Hawaiian Crows. Each of these bird species is facing extinction at different rates and through each case study Van Dooren raises ethical questions and asks us to adopt new ways of looking at a species, at extinction, and even at conservation.
Van Dooren reminds us that the thing we call "species" is first and foremost an incredible achievement! To have survived against all odds and made it through generation after generation and be here at this moment is testament to the fact that "a species does not just happen but must be achieved in each new generation." When a species goes extinct it is therefore more than just the last individual of the species dying but it is in fact the loss of a complete way of life - culture, language, sounds, and meanings. Every species has an inherent value and meaning independent of their use for humans. While extinction occurs naturally just like evolution does, the pressures on other species thanks to human activity is unprecedented. Van Dooren argues for us to adopt not an anthropocentric view but a "cenocentric" one where we extend our feeling of togetherness not just to other humans but to all of us who co-evolved during the cenozoic era (following the extinction of dinosaurs) - or as he puts it "a plea for the continuity of cenozoic achievement."
Albatross - Messy Temporalities
Albatrosses spend almost 8 months in the air flying across open oceans. They come to the land only to breed and raise their young. It is a two-parent, full-time activity that calls for enormous dedication from the parents. One parent can incubate the egg going without food for 20 days while the other is out feeding. Once the chick hatches it takes two to feed the chick continuously until the fully grown chick can take off into the air. They have been doing this phenomenal work for millennia but now are threatened by plastic waste accumulating in the ocean which enters their foodchain. The photographer Chris Jordan documented all the plastic that can be found in the dead chicks stomach with his eerie photographs like the one above. There is an intersection of two different timescales here. On the one hand these birds have evolved and survived over millions of years but an individual chick's life is being cut short by our culture's use and throw attitude towards plastics. Plastics however remain in the environment for a long time and the persistent organic pollutants released by these use-and-throw materials has the ability to threaten evolutionary timescales. Some folks may argue that Albatrosses have failed to adapt to our modern world. But Van Dooren asks us to consider if we have "evolved" into the kinds of beings worthy of our inheritances. How can we continue to alter environments in the way it "undermines the possibilities" for other beings?
Indian Vulture - Death woven into life
I cannot think of a better bird to represent India than the vulture. Ancient Hindu Vedic texts constantly call to mind how we are all food and how life is about eating and being eaten. Vultures have the unique ability to "twist death back into life." Until the late '80s/early '90s India supported a huge population of vultures unlike any other place on earth. There are many reasons for this 1) vultures are revered by Hindus (Jatayu who challenged Ravana in the Ramayana) and Parsees relied on them for disposing their dead 2) large domestic cattle population that was not eaten by humans 3) humans did not compete with the vultures for the dead cattle so they never shoot at vultures 4) humans relied on the service of vultures for disposing off the dead carcasses of cattle. So what changed? A drug called Diclofenac used as an anti inflammatory / pain killer is frequently injected into cattle especially by the poor in an attempt to extend the life of their cows. Vultures who can digest anthrax easily are unable to handle Diclofenac and are dying out. This has so many unintended consequences because vultures are woven into the complex fabric of life in India. Van Dooren lays out this complex interconnection beautifully. Here is my simplified version:
Poverty --> cattle life extended by Diclofenac --> death of vultures --> carcasses not consumed by vultures now consumed by stray dogs --> stray dog population explode --> transmit rabies --> poor more likely to be bitten by rabies infected dogs --> anthrax spread from cattle bones that are not picked clean by vultures --> partially cleaned bones sent to fertilizer industry --> poor recruited to clean flesh off bones which might contain anthrax --> death of bread winner plunges family into poverty
The death of vultures has a disproportionate impact on the poor in India but it also raises the spectre of diseases like rabies and spread of anthrax to humans. If this is not a wake up call then I am not sure what is! Extinction of vultures is not just an extinction of one species but it "disrupts and cuts across and confuses simplistic categories like natural and cultural, biological and social, the living and the dead"
Little Penguins - Storied places in animal worlds
The third species looked at was the Little Penguin specifically the ones that come to land to breed in Manly in Australia. Their habitat is now threatened by human encroachment of shorelines. As humans want beachfront properties our wants have threatened the homes of these penguins who are now seen as "unwelcome guests" although they have been doing this for millennia and we are the newcomers. In this chapter Van Dooren asks us to think about spaces especially shared spaces and how do humans make places out of spaces and if that is any different for other species. We make places out of spaces not just with physical alterations but also through social/ mental processes that give meaning to the space. In other words, we build our homes through stories. Little Penguins show extreme "site fidelity" even if it means facing death as this has been an evolutionary strategy that has worked well for them over so many generations. The changes we have made to their "habitats" are very recent in terms of evolutionary history that so many colonial seabird species face the same issue. They are returning home every year to find their homes invariably altered by human (and dogs and foxes) encroachment. Van Dooren argues that penguins don't just occupy habitats - "rather they inhabit experiential worlds in which a burrow might meaningfully be understood as a home." These are "inter-generationally gifted" spaces.We need to take the penguin stories seriously. In fact all shared spaces have other agents besides humans and we need to think of them as capable of narratives to come up with a strategy that is collaborative and ethical.
Whooping Cranes - Violent Care of Captive Life
One of the greatest success stories of conservation is that of the Whooping Cranes. Dedicated conservationists wearing stifling crane suits for hours together to avoid the chicks imprinting on them act as surrogate parents and help the young birds migrate by leading them on in an ultra light aircraft. This is pretty much all I knew about Whooping Crane conservation and in my mind there was nothing wrong with this picture. After all we have come a long way from Konrad Lorenz who was the first to study imprinting with some very questionable experiments. But that was those days and this is now. You can see where this is going. This chapter made me the most uncomfortable as I believe the ethical dilemmas posed by captive breeding of nearly extinct species are complicated to say the least. Here are some of the issues highlighted by Dooren that are not known outside the conservation groups
1) The violent nature of artificial insemination - the process of collecting the semen and injecting it 2) using sandhill cranes to incubate the eggs of whooping cranes 3) Quails were used as "food testers" for the whooping cranes when a microtoxin was found in the food supply 4) Canada geese and trumpeter swans were used for testing out potential hazards (like power lines) on the migration routes 5) finally, the human caregivers work long hours in sweltering heat in uncomfortable suits for many hours.
Van Dooren calls the above as "sacrificial surrogacy" where a species of least concern (e.g. quail, Canada geese) is sacrificed for the sake of the threatened species. Does the conservation of the Whooping cranes justify the violence meted out to the other species? There is no easy answer to this one and Van Dooren doesn't provide one. He just wants this violence to be acknowledged and communicated transparently.
Mourning Crows - Grief in a shared world
This was the final species covered by the book and fittingly it was about grief. The Hawaiian crow is extinct in the wild and only about 100 birds are alive in captivity. They are different from the "true crows" as these are fruit and forest specialists, but they are similar in intelligence and social structure like the true crows. With loss of the forests and increased predation from rats, mongoose and avian malaria the Hawaiian crows were driven to extinction in the wild. Corvids are often described as elephants with feathers. They are social, intelligent creatures and grieving and mourning the dead has been observed among corvids. A magpie funeral involves pecking at the dead and leaving behind some grass near the dead one. Crows gather in huge flocks around one of their dead and one hears a lot of scolding and noise at such a wake. Crows are known to avoid a place for nearly 2 years where one of them died. So maybe a crow funeral is an opportunity to learn something is dangerous and is to be avoided. Van Dooren calls this grieving as a "process of relearning the world." Extinction in this case is not just about the loss of a species or a biodiversity loss - even conservationists think of extinction only in these limited terms. But it could mean a loss of non-human languages, social ties, ways of grieving and other ways of life.
This goes back to the question raised by Van Dooren and Ned Beauman - why then is there very little mourning when a species becomes extinct? Human exceptionalism? Perhaps. Van Dooren also suggests that we have "hyperseparated ourselves from nature and reduced it conceptually" and so we don't use an ethical lens to look at the non-human sphere. He warns that this will come back to bite us as we push ecosystems to the edge. Mourning matters as we learn to live with the dead, and learn to acknowledge that these lives and their stories and cultures matter and maybe Van Dooren hopes it will motivate us to come up with new approaches if "life in its diversity is to go on."
It has been a few days since I finished the book but it has stayed with me. I have often volunteered for habitat restoration events and monitoring populations of the endangered California Least Terns. As I read the chapter on the Manly penguins I thought about the terns and how we have squeezed them onto 3 artificial dunes in Mission Bay and even those spaces are not guaranteed homes for them. I am now working on stopping a golf project next to a nesting site of these terns. Reading this book has given more weight to my arguments. It has opened my mind to thinking about these places as not "habitats" but "homes" for these birds and I am recognizing that it is my ethical duty to share these spaces collaboratively in the spirit of mutualism.
