“2” in “Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth”
2
De-extinction
A Gothic Masternarrative for the Anthropocene
Michael Fuchs
In the superhuman scale of geological time, extinction is an inescapable component of any species’ evolutionary cycle; extinction, the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould explained, is “the normal fate of species.”1 Indeed, 99 percent of the 4 billion species estimated to have populated our planet in the last 3.5 billion years have disappeared. Since 1900, extinction rates have, however, soared to about a thousandfold the background rate.2 Currently, more than 40 percent of insects, about one-third of all freshwater fishes, 25 percent of all mammals, 20 percent of all plant species, and 13 percent of all bird species are threatened with extinction.3 More than thirty thousand species are threatened with extinction, according to the International Union for Conversation of Nature’s Red List—and this number has been rising steadily. Extinction does not simply surround us but an extinction event of epic proportions is on the horizon.
If scientific reports are increasingly clear on the inevitability of an extinction event of catastrophic proportions, recent decades have also seen a culture “filled with depictions of zombies, plagues, and other spectacular representations of ecological catastrophe,” all of which testify to the fact that “the specter of extinction haunts the popular imagination today.”4 This proliferation of death, in combination with its cultural companion of the undead, renders the current natural-cultural moment inherently gothic. Indeed, the Anthropocene, which is defined by the future recovery of human traces in the Earth’s layers—by “future fossils . . . that will endure into the deep future”—has, as the present volume demonstrates, “gothic” written all over it.5
The sheer omnipresence of extinction has not only brought forth countless depictions of apocalyptic scenarios and barely inhabited postapocalyptic worlds but also fueled the popular and scientific imagination in another way. In the Introduction to his edited volume After Extinction, for instance, Richard Grusin invokes a future ghost by wondering, “what comes after extinction?”6 For some scientists, the answer to this question seems relatively simple, maybe even too simple: de-extinction. Indeed, as Stewart Brand has noted, “that something as irreversible and final as extinction might be reversed is a stunning realization. The imagination soars. Just the thought of mammoths and passenger pigeons alive again invokes the awe and wonder that drives all conversation at its deepest level.”7 Brand pictures de-extinction as a reset button that will allow humankind to undo past mistakes.8 This desire to resurrect species is nostalgia literalized—the longing for the future return of a past that never was. After all, passenger pigeons (Ectopistes migratorius) and woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) did not live in an age suffering from the weight of close to eight billion human beings. And while the passenger pigeon’s extinction was a first sign of the “accumulation of extinctions” typical of capitalism, it was, arguably, not until the Great Acceleration that the workings of capitalism truly became tangible.9
This chapter draws on these various contexts to discuss actual de-extinction projects, discourses surrounding them, and representations of resurrection science in popular culture. I will suggest that de-extinction epitomizes the Anthropocene. In doing so, I will rely on Jeffrey Weinstock’s contribution to this volume, in which he argues that spectrality, monstrosity, and extinction are three key narratives, and omnipresent tropes, of the Anthropocene, all three of which converge in de-extinction. In fact, de-extinction exacerbates the proliferation of Anthropocene specters by unlocking a future in which the undead will quite literally walk upon the Earth (perhaps only to vanish again). Akin to a kind of necromancy, de-extinction scientists try to make possible the return of the dead, as they seek to transport the past into the present while effectively transforming fantasy into reality and guaranteeing the constant reproduction of capital and the attendant exploitation and annihilation of the planet. Exemplifying Jeff VanderMeer’s point that “the uncanny has infiltrated the real” in the Anthropocene, the fantastic, inherently gothic notion of bringing the dead back to life thus becomes a reality.10 As the specters of species eradicated by anthropogenic activity are turned into necrofaunal revenants reminding of their past extinctions, such phantom species—paradoxically—also promise hope for a “better” future. Indeed, whereas the gothic generally functions as a projection screen for contemporaneous fears and anxieties, de-extinction promises to offset the constant state of “out-of-controlness” characteristic of the Anthropocene condition and promises humans to regain control over the fate of the planet.11 De-extinction “look[s] to the past in the service of the future” in an attempt to reassert human exceptionalism,12 yet inevitably also extrapolates past wrongs into the future and hence contributes to the proliferation of specters in the Anthropocene.
The Anthropocene Extinction
Recent research has suggested that
predicted patterns of future ocean O2 loss under climate change . . . are broadly similar to those . . . for the P/Tr [Permian–Triassic] boundary. Moreover, greenhouse gas emission scenarios projected for the coming centuries . . . predict a magnitude of upper ocean warming by 2300 CE that is ~35 to 50% of that required to account for most of the end-Permian extinction intensity.13
In other words, the geological and climatological similarities between the near future and previous mass extinctions cannot be denied—they are horrifying when considering the scope of the ecological catastrophe and the attendant species loss that is to be expected in the (relatively) near future. Indeed, “there are clear indications that losing species now in the ‘critically endangered’ category would propel the world to a state of mass extinction. . . . Additional losses of species in the ‘endangered’ and ‘vulnerable’ categories could accomplish the sixth mass extinction in just a few centuries.”14
“Could accomplish” is a key phrase here, because leading paleontologists, such as Douglas Erwin, have repeatedly stressed that the proclamation of an ongoing sixth mass extinction constitutes a grave misunderstanding of the extent of the “Big Five” and exaggerates the implications of the environmental collapse we are facing right now.15 Although “the recent loss of species is dramatic and serious,” the current extinction numbers do “not yet qualify as a mass extinction in a palaeontological sense.”16 Nevertheless, acknowledging the potential dawn of the sixth mass extinction as a fact of life in the early twenty-first century not only emphasizes the destruction humankind has been wreaking upon the planet but also affirms that our ways of conceiving of the world have radically shifted. After all, extinction events are generally determined retrospectively. Paleontologists identify the vanishing of species based on traces these life-forms have left in the planet’s crust, which indicate that these creatures used to inhabit the planet. The idea that what Earl Saxon calls the “Anthropocene extinction” will, at some future point in time, turn out to be a mass extinction exemplifies the changing realities characteristic of the Anthropocene.17 As Claire Colebrook has explained:
the positing of an anthropocene era . . . deploys the idea of human imaging—the way we have already read an inhuman past in the earth’s layers—but does this by imagining a world in which humans will be extinct. The anthropocene thought experiment also alters the modality of geological reading, not just to refer to the past as it is for us, but also to our present as it will be without us.18
This viewpoint exposes the planetary insignificance of the individual human being. At the same time, it acknowledges that Homo sapiens “rival[s] the great forces of Nature” and (both consciously and unconsciously) leaves behind traces in the planet’s layers.19 A basic tenet of geology maintains (or, rather, used to maintain) that human time scales are inconsequential in view of geological deep time. But the Anthropocene condition suggests otherwise. As humankind has evolved from a biological into a geological agent, its planetary role has magnified and been implanted into deep time. The species’ future-past role on the planet is imagined to be recovered or remembered by some post- or nonhuman life-form whose existence is projected into a future that will inevitably become reality.
While this post- or nonhuman life-form might appear to be little more than a neat rhetorical construct at first, it is required for conceptualizing the present moment remembered in the future-to-come, as Homo sapiens will have ceased to exist (at the very least in its current form). “Most of us can imagine humans living in a future full of space elevators, and even cities on the Moon,” as “we usually picture our distant progeny in that future looking exactly the way we do now,” Annalee Newitz notes in her book Scatter, Adapt, and Remember (2013). However, as Newitz stresses, our species is “going to evolve into creatures different from humans today—perhaps as different as we are from Australopithecus.”20
Both the anticipation of human vanishing and the disappearance of a disproportionate number of species have rendered extinction “something to be sensed and imagined here and now.”21 Extinction hence combines a feeling of guilt concerning other species’ past and ongoing vanishings and an anxiety about future extinctions, humans included. Traditional temporal categories collapse, as today’s human beings (and arguably the planet) become aware of past, present, and future extinctions—indeed, not just “aware” but rather haunted by their present and future memories. The resultant condition is akin to what Paul K. Saint-Amour, in the context of nuclear anxiety, describes as an “inverted or preposterous phenomenon of traumatic symptoms . . . that exist not in the wake of a past event, but in the shadow of a future one,” with the difference being that this inverted trauma adds to the trauma caused by the accumulation of species extinctions caused by anthropogenic activities in the last ten thousand plus years.22 What perhaps becomes particularly troubling for individual human beings is the acknowledgment of future human extinction, as it “afflicts humanity with a case of anticipatory mourning, a mourning in advance of loss.”23 The inevitability of human extinction (and the long-term efforts needed to decrease the rate of other species’ extinctions) causes paralysis. In fact, the contemporary fatalist discourse dominated by human-caused extinction (and self-extinction) in the past, present, and future potentially “undermin[es] all sense of agency” and “produc[es] melancholic forms of subjectivity deprived of capacity for action.”24
Becoming Un-extinct
But extinction is not as “final and irreversible” as we generally believe it to be.25 As a matter of fact, there are sometimes zombies lurking in the fossil records of past extinctions. In 1996, paleontologist J. David Archibald described the “zombie effect” as the process by which fossils, due to erosion and other natural causes, are redeposited in layers millions of years younger than the fossils themselves.26 The no-longer-extinct hence walk through deep time and stratigraphic space.
Biblical undead likewise haunt paleontology. The Lazarus taxon was named after the New Testament tale of Lazarus returning from the dead and includes species that disappear from the fossil record or the historical now, leading paleontologists and biologists to believe that these species are extinct. However, the believed-to-be-extinct species suddenly reappears. The Lazarus effect is closely connected to mass extinction events, as “the population density of numerous species declines drastically and they disappear from the fossil record. For many species, the decline in abundance is terminal and they become truly extinct, but some species may survive in much reduced numbers.”27
The coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae and L. menadoensis) is probably the most famous Lazarus taxon. The fish was believed to have died out during the end-Cretaceous extinction sixty-six million years ago, only to be caught by fishers off the coast of South Africa in 1938. Since then, specimens of the West Indian species have been discovered in five more African countries and specimens of the Indonesian variety in the waters off Indonesia.28 Similarly, scientists assumed that the pygmy right whale (Caperea marginata) disappeared from the face of our planet about two million years ago, until a carcass washed up in New Zealand in 2002.29 And the Laotian rock rat (Laonastes aenigmamus) was thought to have vanished about eleven million years ago, until a scientist discovered “bodies of two unusual-looking rodents on sale as food” at a market in Lao People’s Democratic Republic in 1996.30
Arguably, these believed-to-be-extinct species were, to draw on Avery Gordon’s elaborations on ghosts, “seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes” but made themselves “apparent to us.”31 Indeed, in a paper on Lazarus taxa, Emmanuel Fara explains that the Lazarus effect exposes not only the incompleteness of the fossil record but, more importantly, paleontology’s tendency to suppress these gaps in knowledge, as the field usually pretends that the current level of knowledge “is adequate to document major evolutionary patterns.”32 Lazarus taxa accordingly mark a return of the repressed, as their “appearances signal epistemological uncertainty and the potential emergence of a different story and a competing history,” to quote from Jeffrey Weinstock’s elaborations on specters.33 Taxa of “un-extinct” (or “undead”) species allow paleontologists to acknowledge that the fossil record is incomplete, thereby “call[ing] into question the veracity of the authorized version of events,” to draw on Weinstock again.34 At the same time, seemingly never-ending reports in pop science publications inform the public that species thought to have been extinct have been rediscovered and that entirely unknown species have been discovered. Whenever one such species appears or reappears as a result of humankind’s increasing penetration of Earth, the media tend to stress the number of species likely yet to be discovered and the variety of Lazarus taxa. Unfortunately, both of these numbers pale in comparison with all the species lost for the same reason that new ones are discovered—human encroachment upon the nonhuman world. As a result, the becoming-un-extinct of species exposes the omnipresence of extinction in our age.
Becoming De-extinct
On another level, the zombie and Lazarus effects reveal humankind’s eagerness to categorize and name natural phenomena in an attempt to create the illusion of understanding them. At the same time, these attempts expose the inability to comprehend “nature.” Twenty-first-century technologies have made possible a similar, yet at the same time very different, phenomenon: de-extinction. A shadow companion of extinction, de-extinction—also referred to as resurrection biology and species revivalism—denotes the restoration of extinct species.
The idea to resurrect an extinct species might sound like fantasy or “soft” science fiction at first, but de-extinction is not a figment of the imagination—not quite. The Pyrenean ibex (Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica), also known as bucardo, was one of four subspecies of the Iberian wild goat. After the endling, Celia, was found dead, the bucardo was officially declared extinct on January 6, 2000.35 The taxon vanished from the face of the Earth due to anthropogenic activities and their effects—overhunting in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and habitat loss, which led to overgrazing. In the 1980s and early 1990s, ibex populations were decimated by sarcoptic mange outbreaks, with some populations suffering mortality rates of more than 95 percent.36 As early as 1992, Spanish scientists succeeded in creating bucardo embryos, but assisted reproductive technologies were not available for the species. Inspired by the successful cloning of the sheep Dolly in 1996, scientists collected DNA samples from Celia in 1999. Soon after Celia’s death, they began to inject bucardo DNA into domestic goat eggs emptied of their own genetic material. Still in a lab, the scientists started the process of cell division and the creation of embryos. These embryos were implanted into domestic goats, with disturbing results, as the domestic goat’s uterus cannot properly nourish a bucardo.37 The photographs which Alberto Fernández-Arias showed at the TEDx conference in 2013 testify to the fact that the domestic goats gave birth to ghastly abominations, seemingly mummified creatures that rendered manifest the monstrous reproduction and Frankensteinean resurrection in which the scientists were engaged.38
The malformed offspring apparently inspired the genetic engineers to conquer the next frontier of science. In their ongoing attempts to revive the bucardo, French and Spanish scientists took the next step: hybridizing domestic goats with Spanish ibex over several generations before using the hybrids as breeding vessels. On July 30, 2003, one of the hybrids calved a Pyrenean ibex, rendering the bucardo de-extinct (while nevertheless remaining functionally extinct, as one specimen cannot secure the species’ future). However, when Fernández-Arias “held the newborn bucardo in his arms, he could see that she was struggling to take in air, her tongue jutting grotesquely out of her mouth.”39 The little creature died after a few minutes due to a deformation of her lungs. A hideous progeny produced by crossbreeding and other forms of human tampering with life, the calf saw the light of the Earth without any chance of survival; she was, effectively, stillborn, and her subspecies practically went extinct for a second time as soon as it had become de-extinct.
We see this serialized extinction reflected in fiction too. For example, in the second book of Piers Anthony’s Xanth series, Source of Magic (1979), the main character, a magician named Bink, encounters thirteen black cats. The narrator remarks, “Bink had never seen a pure cat before, in the flesh. We regarded the cat as an extinct species. He just stood there and stared at this abrupt de-extinction, unable to formulate a durable opinion.” Bink knows that he has to overcome the cats in some way. The narrator wonders, “If he killed these animals, would he be re-extincting the species?”40 If Source of Magic thus arguably exposed the linguistic conundrums that the de-extinction (and possible future re-extinction) of species entails nearly a quarter-century before the bucardo re-extincted minutes after it had become de-extinct, the Jurassic Park franchise presciently broaches some of the ethical and legal questions de-extinction raises. In The Lost World (1995), a character opines that “an animal that is extinct, and is brought back to life, is for all practical purposes not an animal at all. It can’t have any rights. It’s already extinct. So if it exists, it can only be something we have made. We made it, we patent it, we own it.”41 In Jurassic World (2015), a character who wants to deploy velociraptors in warfare echoes these ideas: “We do own them. Extinct animals have no rights.” However, the raptor wrangler Owen corrects him: “They are not extinct anymore.”42 The sequel, Fallen Kingdom (2018), highlights the unclear legal situation (and its moral and ethical implications). A long-dormant volcano becomes active on Isla Nublar, the fictional island where both the original Jurassic Park and Jurassic World were built, and which has become a haven for the last dinosaurs. “Geologists now predict that an extinction-level event will kill off the last living dinosaurs on the planet,” remarks a female BBC reporter. As the newswoman discusses the dinosaur situation, the news ticker at the bottom of the screen announces, “Earth warming at a pace unprecedented in 1000 years,” thereby suggesting that the impending re-extinction of dinosaurs addresses quite real issues on our planet. The reporter goes on to describe the potential re-extinction of the dinosaurs as “the flashpoint animal rights issue of our time” and explains that the U.S. Senate has convened a special committee “to answer a grave moral question: Do dinosaurs deserve the same protections given to other endangered species or should they be left to die?”43
Of course, Fallen Kingdom’s depiction of the situation could be said to satirize the media hype surrounding the potential disappearance of animals biotechnologically recreated from DNA samples more than sixty-five million years old, thereby ridiculing conservation efforts and the animal rights movement. Nevertheless, the movie also raises important questions: What would we do if a de-extinct species would turn out to be unfit for survival in a world altered by anthropogenic activities and their consequences? Consciously eradicate it again? Or follow an approach Jurassic Park creator John Hammond suggests in The Lost World film—to accept that “these creatures require our absence to survive, not our help”? The problem here, of course, is that in a world characterized by the entanglements between nature and culture, we cannot just “step aside and trust in nature,” as Hammond adds.44 “We cannot suddenly stop being involved,” because of our role in species’ extinctions (and possible de-extinctions and re-extinctions) and because our involvement will not simply end from one day to the next, even if our entire species were to vanish overnight.45 The main problem, however, is that no matter whether we decide to interfere, we cannot predict the long-term consequences of our measures and whether the actions taken would not further escalate the ever-increasing extinction rate.
Reversing Species Loss
In the paper in which José Folch and his team describe the bucardo de-extinction project, they conclude that
cloning is . . . not [a] very effective way to preserve endangered species, because [of] the complexity [of] handling the experimental wild animal and the insufficient knowledge on both the cellular mechanisms involved in the technique and on the reproductive characteristics of the animals. . . . However, [for] species [such] as bucardo, cloning is the only possibility to avoid its complete disappearance. The present work encourages to appropriately store somatic tissues and cells of all endangered species or suitable animals, as they may be useful for future cloning-based conservation programs.46
Besides the loaded word choice of “avoiding the complete disappearance” of an already extinct species, this short passage reveals that the scientists imagine the establishment of a global gene bank with an eye toward cryopreserving tissue samples and genetic information to guarantee future life by reawakening dormant (i.e., extinct) life. “Genetic information” proves key here, for the bioinformatic discourse surrounding life, defined by the decoding, resampling, and encoding of life, considers extinction not the loss of a species, an individual specimen, or even “life as such” but rather the loss of data and information.47 Having access to this information, on the other hand, allows scientists to decipher the code of life and, more importantly, to manipulate the code and change it according to their will, giving them control over life. Stephanie Turner has tellingly explained that “in genome time, evolutionary histories, including extinction narratives, are revised, forestalling or even reversing absolute endpoints in the endless reproducibility of the DNA code.”48 As a result, genetic engineering emerges as a vehicle for assuaging fears about biodiversity loss—indeed, a tool for reversing species loss.
The nonprofit organization Revive and Restore taps into the same idea. Its mission is “to enhance biodiversity through the genetic rescue of . . . extinct species.” Through collaborations with “the world’s leading molecular biologists, conservation biologists, and conservation organizations,” Revive and Restore seeks “to develop pioneering, proof-of-concept genetic rescue projects using cutting-edge genomic technologies to solve problems posed by inbreeding, exotic diseases, climate change, and destructive invasive species” with the final goal being “to restore ecological biodiversity.”49 Such a project, of course, raises a number of moral, ethical, and economic questions—and none of them can be answered unambiguously: resurrecting a species human beings (or the effects of anthropogenic activities) recently eradicated might seem like a well-intentioned act, but can we guarantee that humans will not, for example, kill a male northern white rhino (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) if one were to appear again? Would anyone actually own these bioengineered creatures? Even Beth Shapiro, herself a genetic engineer involved in resurrection science, has stressed “the high cost of resurrecting extinct species and the myriad risks of reintroducing organisms into the wild whose environmental impacts are—because they are extinct—necessarily unknown.”50 More important, with projects focusing on the de-extinction of species like the passenger pigeon (extinct since 1914) and the woolly mammoth (extinct for about four thousand years), Revive and Restore’s website uncannily (or consciously?) invokes the ghost of Dr. John Hammond:
My colleagues and I determined, several years ago, that it was possible to clone the DNA of an extinct animal, and to grow it. That seemed to us a wonderful idea, it was a kind of time travel—the only time travel in the world. Bring them back alive, so to speak. And since it was so exciting, and since it was possible to do it, we decided to go forward.51
Beyond apparently being too preoccupied with figuring out whether or not they could instead of thinking if they should, Revive and Restore scientists do clearly consider the question which animals they should resurrect. While the website offers detailed rationalizations focusing on the biological niches that the woolly mammoth and the passenger pigeon occupied, which try to explain why they should be among the species destined to walk upon the face of the Earth again, they, more importantly, make for very iconic representatives for de-extinction.
The mammoth, Matthew Chrulew has argued, “is the totem animal of postmodernity,” as it symbolizes “today’s ecological crisis,” which “push[es] the earth’s natural limits.”52 “It is [the] perception of human culpability for the mammoth’s extinction,” he continues, “that provokes the desire to simulate or even resurrect them today.”53 Inverting narrative blueprints of gothic tales, reawakening these ghosts of the past hence suggests that humanity’s past sins are atoned for (yet, in truly gothic fashion, they nevertheless haunt the future). The passenger pigeon, on the other hand, epitomized the natural abundance of North America when European colonists encroached upon the New World. Up until the American Civil War, hunters and early naturalists were awed by flocks counting millions of birds. While traveling along the Ohio River in 1813, John James Audubon, for example, reported that he saw a flight of pigeons so massive in size that “the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse.”54 Tellingly, “a flock that the eye cannot see the end of” even appears in James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Pioneers (1823).55
The idea behind reintroducing the passenger pigeon to the forests in the Northeast of the United States echoes the middle part of the Hammond quotation referenced above—the resurrection of the passenger pigeon evokes a nostalgic return to a place of natural resources aplenty and a time characterized by simplicity and living in harmony with nature while erasing the devastating effects of colonialism’s extractive and exploitative practices. Ursula Heise has diagnosed that this nostalgic harking back to an imagined past is “a curiously ‘retro’ way of moving into the future,” which raises a number of questions. After all, “the conceptual paradoxes of de-extinction are such that what emerges from this nostalgia might be something quite different from a reconstruction of the past. Would a de-extincted passenger pigeon be a passenger pigeon or an innovative product of biotechnology, a ‘Franken-pigeon’?”56 Bruno Latour has rightfully stressed that Victor Frankenstein’s “crime was not that he invented a creature through some combination of hubris and high technology, but rather that he abandoned the creature to itself.” Of course, Latour does not endorse a simplistic celebration of (bio)technology here; instead, he emphasizes the entanglements that define life on Earth and seeks to promote a “becoming ever-more attached to, and intimate with, a panoply of nonhuman natures.”57 Although Heise would probably agree with Latour on this issue, her conjuring of Frankenstein’s ghost suggests that no matter how hard we might try, in the incredibly complex system that is the planet we inhabit, we cannot control the long-term consequences of our actions. After all, irrespective of whether it’s climate change, ocean acidification, or biodiversity loss, none of this was planned. Similarly, no one can tell whether reintroducing a de-extincted species into the wild would not lead to the quick re-extinction of this species or maybe even the extinction of other species that have to compete with the de-extincted-turned-invasive species. And even if the reintroduction of a de-extincted species turned out to be successful, this success would not automatically mean that a different project trying to reintroduce another de-extinct species would be effective as well.
Necrocapitalism
In addition, de-extinction projects like Revive and Restore might be driven by noble ideas and might want to steer clear of Dr. Frankenstein’s mistakes. However, one cannot suppress the feeling that the invisible hand of hypercapitalism will soon take control of such ventures. When Revive and Restore’s website envisions that “exciting collaborative projects in genomic conservation are rapidly emerging,” including “the production of commercially viable synthetic alternatives to wildlife-derived products,” the capitalist, business-oriented language jumps at you.58 Indeed, Revive and Restore’s mission makes explicit that capital has been shifting into “a new space of production—molecular biology.”59 Giant corporations may soon literalize “the exploitation of past extinctions” Justin McBrien considers characteristic of capitalism.60 De-extinction will then not only become a money-making machine but lead to ever-new extinctions that will be undone, as extinct species are constantly and repeatedly brought back to life, only to be eradicated again.
The fate of the Indominus Rex in Jurassic World exemplifies this serialized cycle of predetermined extinction. As Jurassic World’s operations manager Claire Dearing stresses early in the film, to guarantee continued growth, Jurassic World’s “asset development” must respond to market demands—“consumers want them [i.e., the dinosaurs] bigger, louder, with more teeth”—and hence their bioengineers “designed” the Indominus Rex.61 Even if the Indominus had not been killed in the film’s conclusion, it would soon have been replaced by an updated version—and the Indominus hence made extinct. Fallen Kingdom makes this capitalist logic explicit through the introduction of the Indoraptor, which is a “direct descendant” of the Indominus and which embodies “potential for growth [that] is more than you can fathom.”62 This “potential for growth” is founded upon the future substitution of the Indoraptor by a new “product.” The flurry of extinctions leading to de-extinctions leading to re-extinctions exponentiates the “accumulation of extinctions” that defines the Necrocene.
In the end, the very concept of de-extinction bespeaks humankind’s hubris, as it “will . . . make us into gods by allowing us . . . to resurrect extinct life-forms . . . according to our needs.”63 As such, de-extinction embodies the Anthropocene: de-extinction is inextricably tied to the mass extinction event into which humankind maneuvers this planet; de-extinction produces monstrous abominations (as the bucardo experiments showcased); and de-extinction exposes that the ghosts of lost species—past, present, and future—haunt us today. In the Anthropocene, our (Western) scales are simply off—the global is entangled with the local; individual human acts are simultaneously implicated in global anthropogenic activities and rendered meaningless in view of the insignificance of individuals within the context of global phenomena such as climate change; the differences between geological deep time and human history have faded away; and past, present, and future extinctions—along with future de-extinctions and re-extinctions—haunt the present moment.
Man-made extinctions of the past ten thousand plus years have depleted and deprived planetary life. Paradoxically, the de-extinction of these creatures simultaneously perpetuates human technological imperialism and seeks to atone for it. De-extinction promises Homo sapiens a tool to reassert dominion over the planet and embellishes human exceptionalism by signposting that humankind can develop beyond, can out-evolve, evolutionary processes like extinction. However, this ideal of control cannot be but an illusion, as it suppresses the realities of life on a planet whose resources dwindle away and which barrels toward environmental catastrophe at an alarming rate. In the Anthropocene, anthropogenic activities can no longer not impact the more-than-human world. The (potentially paralyzing) question thus becomes, how can humans intervene in planetary systems at this point in an attempt not only to stop ecocide but also to remediate past and present ecologically destructive anthropogenic activities?
Notes
Stephen Jay Gould, Eight Little Piggies: Reflections on Natural History (London: Vintage Books, 2007), 46.
Stuart L. Pimm et al., “The Biodiversity of Species and Their Rates of Extinction, Distribution, and Protection,” Science 344, no. 6187 (2014): 1246752.
See Francisco Sánchez-Bayo and Kris A. G. Wyckhufys, “Worldwide Decline of the Entomofauna: A Review of Its Drivers,” Biological Conservation 232 (2019): 8–27; William R. T. Darwall and Jörg Freyhof, “Lost Fishes, Who Is Counting? The Extent of the Threat to Freshwater Fish Biodiversity,” in Conservation of Freshwater Fishes, ed. Gerard P. Closs, Martin Krkosek, and Julian D. Olden, 1–36 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); David Tilman, Michael Clark, David R. Williams, Kaitlin Kimmel, Stephen Polasky, and Craig Packer, “Future Threats to Biodiversity and Pathways to Their Prevention,” Nature 546 (2017): 73–81; Kathy J. Willis, ed., State of the World’s Plants (London: Royal Botanic Gardens, 2017). Note that animal and—at a distant second—plant species are dramatically overrepresented in discussions of extinction numbers. Barely any studies have investigated fungi, not to mention the other four kingdoms. Nevertheless, as early as 2010, studies suggested that at least 10 percent of European macrofungi are also affected by the Anthropocene extinction. See Anders Dahlberg, David R. Genney, and Jacob Heilmann-Clausen, “Developing a Comprehensive Strategy for Fungal Conversation in Europe: Current Status and Future Needs,” Fungal Ecology 3, no. 2 (2010): 50–64.
Ashley Dawson, Extinction: A Radical History (New York: OR Books, 2016), 16.
David Farrier, Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils (London: 4th Estate, 2020), loc. 315.
Richard Grusin, ed., Introduction to After Extinction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), loc. 54.
Stewart Brand, “Opinion: The Case for Reviving Extinct Species,” National Geographic News, March 12, 2013, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/3/130311-deextinction-reviving-extinct-species-opinion-animals-science/.
My use of “humankind” (and its derivatives) and “we” follows Dipesh Chakrabarty, who has argued that humans “can become geological agents only historically and collectively.” Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 206. The sweeping generalization typical of the Anthropocene discourse “challenges traditions of thought that have relied, over the past half century, on the assumption of some foundational difference—whether it be gender, sexual orientation, class, or race.” Ursula Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), loc. 4450. Of course, rather than “challenging” these differences, one may also argue that the Anthropocene discourse, in fact, erases them. See, e.g., Jason W. Moore, “The Capitalocene, Part 1: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis,” Journal of Peasant Studies 44, no. 3 (2017): 594–630; Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019); and Duncan in this volume.
Justin McBrien, “Accumulating Extinction: Planetary Catastrophism in the Necrocene,” in Anthropocene or Capitalocene: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, ed. Jason W. Moore, 116–37 (Oakland, Calif.: PM Press, 2016).
Jeff VanderMeer, “Hauntings in the Anthropocene: An Initial Exploration,” Environmental Critique, July 2016, https://environmentalcritique.wordpress.com/2016/07/07/hauntings-in-the-anthropocene.
Nigel Clark, “Panic Ecology: Nature in the Age of Superconductivity,” Theory, Culture, and Society 14, no. 1 (1997): 88.
Dolly Jørgensen, Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age: Histories of Longing and Belonging (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2019), loc. 443.
Justin L. Penn, Curtis Deutsch, Jonathan L. Payne, and Erik A. Sperling, “Temperature-Dependent Hypoxia Explains Biogeography and Severity of End-Permian Marine Mass Extinction,” Science 362 (2018): 5.
Anthony D. Barnosky, Nicholas Matzke, Susumu Tomiya, Guinevere O. U. Wogan, Brian Swartz, Tiago B. Quental, Charles Marshall et al., “Has the Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction Already Arrived?,” Nature 471 (2011): 56.
Douglas Erwin, quoted in Peter Brannen, “Earth Is Not in the Midst of a Sixth Mass Extinction,” The Atlantic, June 13, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/the-ends-of-the-world/529545/.
Barnosky et al., 56.
Earl Saxon, “Noah’s Parks: A Partial Antidote to the Anthropocene Extinction Event,” Biodiversity 9, no. 3–4 (2008): 5–10.
Claire Colebrook, Death of the Posthuman: Essays on Extinction (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Open Humanities Press, 2014), 28.
Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?,” Ambio 36, no. 8 (2007): 614.
Annalee Newitz, Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (New York: Doubleday, 2013), 242.
Joanna Zylinska, “Photography after Extinction,” in Grusin, After Extinction, loc. 1274.
Paul K. Saint-Amour, Tense Future: Modernism, War, Encyclopedic Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 24–25.
Saint-Amour, 25.
Jussi Parikka, “Planetary Memories: After Extinction, the Imagined Future,” in Grusin, After Extinction, loc. 1064.
Christopher Belshaw, Environmental Philosophy: Reason, Nature and Human Concern (London: Routledge, 2014), 163.
J. David Archibald, Dinosaur Extinction and the End of an Era: What the Fossil Record Says (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 70–72.
Paul B. Wignall and Michael J. Benton, “Lazarus Taxa and Fossil Abundance at Times of Biotic Crisis,” Journal of the Geological Society 156 (1999): 453.
See, e.g., Peter Forey, History of the Coelacanth Fishes (London: Chapman and Hall, 1998).
Ewan R. Fordyce and Felix G. Marx, “The Pygmy Right Wale Caperea marginata: The Last of the Cetotheres,” Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series B 280 (2012): 20122645.
Paulina D. Jenkins, C. William Kilpatrick, Mark F. Robinson, and Robert J. Timmins, “Morphological and Molecular Investigations of a New Family, Genus and Species of Rodent (Mammalia: Rodentia: Hystricognatha) from Lao PDR,” Systematics and Biodiversity 2, no. 4 (2005): 420.
Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 8.
Emmanuel Fara, “What Are Lazarus Taxa?,” Geological Journal 36 (2001): 291.
Jeffrey A. Weinstock, “Introduction: The Spectral Turn,” in Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination, ed. Jeffrey A. Weinstock (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 7.
Weinstock, 5.
Robert M. Webster and Bruce Erickson, “The Last Word?,” Nature 380 (1996): 386. Today, taxidermied Celia welcomes visitors at the reception center of the National Park of Ordesa and Monte Perdido in Aragon, Spain.
Paulino Fandos, La cabra montés (Capra pyrenaica) en el Parque Natural de Cazorla, Segura y Las Villas (Madrid: ICONA–CSIC, 1991), 36.
Alberto Fernández-Arias, J. L. Alabart, J. Folch, and J. F. Beckers, “Interspecies Pregnancy of Spanish Ibex (Capra pyrenaica) Fetus in Domestic Goat (Capra hircus) Recipients Induces Abnormally High Plasmatic Levels of Pregnancy-Associated Glycoprotein,” Theriogenology 51, no. 8 (1999): 1419–30.
TEDx Talks, “The First De-extinction: Alberto Fernández-Arias,” YouTube, April 1, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eMqEQw9Fbs.
Carl Zimmer, “Bringing Them Back to Life: The Revival of an Extinct Species Is No Longer a Fantasy,” in Animal Ethics Reader, ed. Susan J. Armstrong and Richard G. Botzler (New York: Routledge, 2017), 479.
Piers Anthony, The Source of Magic (New York: Del Rey, 2002), 273.
Michael Crichton, The Lost World (New York: Ballantine Books, 2012), 102–3.
Colin Trevorrow, dir., Jurassic World (Universal City, Calif.: Universal Pictures, 2015).
J. A. Bayona, dir., Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (Universal City, Calif.: Universal Pictures, 2018).
Steven Spielberg, dir., The Lost World: Jurassic Park (Universal City, Calif.: Universal Pictures, 1997).
Bruno Latour, “Love Your Monsters: Why We Must Care for Our Technologies as We Do Our Children,” in Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene, ed. Michael Shellenberger and Ted Hordhaus (Oakland, Calif.: Breakthrough Institute, 2011), 412.
José Folch, M. J. Cocero, P. Chesné, J. L. Alabarta, V. Domínguez, Y. Cognié, A. Roche et al., “First Birth of an Animal from an Extinct Species (Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica) by Cloning,” Theriogenology 71 (2009): 1033, italics added.
See, e.g., Eugene Thacker, The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005).
Stephanie S. Turner, “Open-Ended Stories: Extinction Narratives in Genome Time,” Literature and Medicine 26, no. 1 (2007): 59.
Revive and Restore, https://www.reviverestore.org/.
Beth Shapiro, How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-extinction (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015), x.
Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park (New York: Ballantine Books, 2012), 305.
Matthew Chrulew, “Hunting the Mammoth, Pleistocene to Postmodern,” Journal for Critical Animal Studies 9, no. 1–2 (2011): 34.
Chrulew, 41.
John James Audubon, Ornithological Biography; or, An Account of the Habits of the Birds of the United States of America (Philadelphia: E. L. Carey and A. Hart, 1832), 321.
James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers; or, The Sources of the Susquehanna: A Descriptive Tale (London: Routledge, 1852), 213.
Heise, Imagining Extinction, loc. 4265.
Latour, “Love Your Monsters,” loc. 271.
Revive and Restore.
Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 23.
McBrien, “Accumulating Extinction,” 117.
Jurassic World.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.
Ashley Dawson, “Biocapitalism and De-extinction,” in Grusin, After Extinction, loc. 3633.
We use cookies to analyze our traffic. Please decide if you are willing to accept cookies from our website. You can change this setting anytime in Privacy Settings.