Ecofeminism and extinction: a reading list

In what’s referred to by some as the Sixth Mass Extinction, species face an extinction rate 100 to 1,000 times higher than before humans entered the Earthly scene. Ecofeminism has much to contribute to actions taken on the Sixth Mass Extinction. All forms of feminism critique false dualisms that produce systems of oppression and privilege, including male/female, masculine/feminine, mind/body, and rational/emotional. Ecofeminists deploy their critiques to the false divides of nature/culture and human/non-human, arguing that oppressive systems also result in environmental destruction, non-human exploitation, and, consequently, extinction. However, extinction is also totally normative on Earth. Thousands upon thousands of critters went extinct for many reasons during the hundreds of millions of years before evolution had even conceived the ill-fated experiment that is Homo sapiens. The notion that extinction is a planetary norm has been used by climate denialists to argue that we do not need to do anything about, or even believe in, human-induced climate and environmental change. It’s hard for ecofeminists to grapple with the normative nature of extinction, but grapple we must. The following resources can help us do just this.

“Gendering Extinction” (2015)

Audra Mitchell summarizes intersections of gender studies with discourse and action on extinction. This blog entry is a foray into thinking critically about conservation, reproductive injustices, gender essentialism, and heteronormativity from feminist and queer perspectives. For example: “Extinction is almost always understood against the horizon of survival and the imperative to sustain it – at least for life forms deemed to be of value to humans. In many cases, this imperative takes the form of deliberate strategies for enforcing existence. [...] [Thus] extinction is gendered in dominant scientific and policy frameworks. […] [P]rogrammes of enforced survival can, in the context of sexual reproduction, disproportionately burden female organisms with the task of avoiding extinction.”

“Wanting All the Species to Be: Extinction, Environmental Visions, and Intimate Aesthetics” (2019)

Stacy Alaimo’s article addresses the longing for “an abundance of nonhuman species to continue to exist” – that is, the longing to prevent extinction – and the recognition that “we,” humanity as a whole and especially as a species, are the cause of the Sixth Mass Extinction. However, distinctions and differences in oppressions and privileges among the collective “we” of humanity are often overlooked when extinction is framed solely in terms of species loss, since only species, not individuals or groups, go extinct. Concepts like taxonomy, ecosystem, and habitat “cannot be separated from histories of colonial encounters.” Alaimo advocates for feminist, queer, and Indigenous situated understandings of tangible connections with the natural world: “the pleasures of intimate relationality with other species, whether they be immediate or mediated, literal or speculative, practical or aesthetic, could provoke the passionate desire for the continued existence of [a] multitude of other species and multispecies communities, as well as sparking political activism and inspiring creative projects and everyday practices that sustain imperilled creatures.” For the more cerebral reader, Alaimo explores the question: “why should feminists care about extinction?”

The Fossil Hunter Dinosaurs, Evolution, and the Woman whose Discoveries Changed the World (2009)

Paleontology is the scientific study of organisms that lived and went extinct during any geological epoch before the current Holocene (or Anthropocene). In other words, the central topic of paleontology is the normative extinction that ecofeminism moves us to consider. Shelley Emling’s book details the sexist and racist history of paleontology. In The Fossil Hunter, we learn about Mary Anning, a poor woman of 19th-century England who lived in Lyme Regis, now known as an incredibly rich Jurassic fossil site. Her fossil discoveries, such as the ichthyosaur, heavily influenced theories of evolution embraced today – but she was never given credit for them beyond a pittance, and died in abject poverty. Feminist themes of resilience, struggles for recognition, and the erasure of women’s contributions in male-dominated fields emerge, as many of Anning’s findings were stolen by “learned” men. In reading this book we can appreciate the following questions: How would the lives of women be different if they were not excluded from science? How would science be different if it included women as full participants? 

The Gilded Dinosaur: The Fossil War Between E.D. Cope and O.C. Marsh and the Rise of American Science (2000)

Mark Jaffe’s The Gilded Dinosaur shares the story of the so-called Bone Wars, a period of intense rivalry and competition in American paleontology during the late 19th century between two men who unscrupulously competed to discover and name dinosaurs in the American West, such as the famous triceratops. Theft, bribery, destruction, and sloppy science were among their strategies, which will strike the reader as especially masculinist. Paleontology has a deeply colonial history but also continues to colonize through its participation in oil and gas industries, resource management, extraction and holding of natural historical artifacts, and land management and ownership. The masculinist and colonial nature of science is highlighted to full effect in this book; most of what we know about extinction has been collected by a science that has not adequately examined and addressed this history. 

 

An Object at Rest (2015)

This animated short film directed by Seth Boyden follows a mountain over thousands of years as it is ground down to a grain of sand by various geological and anthropogenic forces, then built back up into a mountain on a different celestial body. The mountain/rock/sand grain is reshaped by its environment but the film most acutely highlights the violence that the rock experiences at the hands of humans, who craft it into a grinding stone, fire it in a cannonball, and then rocket it into space as a piece of glass. This literal objectification resonates with ecofeminist concerns about violence against marginalized groups, lives, and other beings, including the environment and non-humans. Throughout, the rock entity changes, shrinks, and grows, but it also remains constant, embodying resilience but also representing endless, long cycles of geologic time – what might be called deep time. Humans are but a blip in the life of planet Earth – 4,500 million years or so. Seemingly both permanent and impermanent, the rock entity represents nondualism from a geologic perspective. As ecofeminism moves us to dismantle the false dichotomies between human and non-human lives, perhaps it and other forms of feminist thought can begin to tackle the division between living and non-living things as well.