Beyond Biodiversity and Species: Problematizing Extinction

Species and Biodiversity

The concepts of ‘species’ and ‘biodiversity’ that dominate scientific and public discourses simplify the profound complexity of extinction, offering a common language and semiotics through which it can be defined, evaluated and, ultimately, managed. This is epitomized by the term ‘species’, which, according to Michael Agapow et al. (2004: 162), functions as the ‘currency of biology’. Indeed, the notion of ‘currency’ reflects the dual meaning of the term ‘species’, which refers both to taxonomic categories and to financial units that provide a common basis for exchange (Dillon and Lobos-Guerrero, 2009). It is particularly pronounced in contemporary discourses on conservation, which are dominated by financial language and concepts (see Sullivan, 2013, and below).

The concept of ‘species’ emerged from the fundamentally metaphysical practices of taxonomy and classification (see Ghiselin, 1997). According to John Wilkins (2009), ‘species’ have played a central (if protean) role in western metaphysics, appearing as Platonic eidos (‘forms’), Aristotelian essences, links in the ‘Great Chain of Being’ that shaped neo-Platonism and medieval Christian thought, and the basic units of modern species concepts based on sexual reproduction, evolution and genetics. However, despite this diverse genealogy – not to mention the existence of at least 20 competing species concepts (Agapow et al., 2004) – the currently dominant model is the ‘biological species’ concept. This definition frames species as ‘reproductively isolated’ communities – that is, genetic unities formed through restrictions on interbreeding (Mayr, 1988). According to this theory, the sexual boundaries that enable reproductive isolation constitute and maintain distinct categories despite the constant replacement of their parts (individuals). Alternative theories define species by criteria such as evolutionary lineage, morphological similarity,¹ phylogenetic status,² or the ability of members to recognize one another as breeding partners (Gaston and Spicer, 2004). Each of these approaches treats species as classes of which organisms form the members or parts. A competing definition frames species as ‘individuals’ in the philosophical sense – that is, as autonomous, structured wholes distributed across time and space that cohere by means of sexual reproduction and evolution (Ghiselin, 1997).

Despite the significant ontological differences between these definitions, they all treat species as categories that transcend the organisms, cells or genes that compose them, and that maintain their integrity despite the perishing of these components. Indeed, the concept of ‘species’ posits that there is ‘something more’ to earthly life than a collection of discrete organisms – and that this ‘something more’ is lost when the last member of a species perishes.

Just as the idea of ‘species’ simplifies the profusion of earthly life and posits the existence of ‘something more’ than individual organisms, the concept of biodiversity performs this function in relation to species. Indeed, it emerged from a conscious desire amongst biologists and ecologists to replace ‘species-by-species’ approaches to conservation with a higher-order concept that would enable more holistic assessments of earthly life (Takacs, 1996). Similarly to the processes discussed above, the image of ‘biodiversity’ derives from the abstraction of ‘species’ to a transcendent category. But whereas discourses on the definition of species hinge on the establishment of difference between beings and groups (Grosz, 2004), the emergence of ‘biodiversity’ was fuelled largely by the definition and abstraction of value.

In early debates, several prominent scholars advocate valuing biodiversity ‘for its own sake’ (Ehrlich, 1988), claiming that ‘the very existence of diversity is its own warrant for survival’ (Ehrenfeld, 1988: 215), or that biodiversity should be valued because it enables evolution (which is assumed to be a good) (see Soulé, 1985; Takacs, 1996). However, the bulk of writing on biodiversity stresses the anthro-instrumental value that can be abstracted from ‘biodiversity’. For instance, E.O. Wilson (1988) opens his seminal text on the concept of ‘biodiversity’ by stating that each species is a ‘repository’ of genetic information that might be used to enhance the human condition in the form of food, medicines and other products. Furthermore, it is increasingly common for policy discourses to claim that ‘biodiversity’ ensures human survival and economic development by providing ‘free ecosystem services’ such as food, fertile soil, water and the regulation of weather patterns (CBD, 2010, 2014). Other authors refer to ‘option value’ (the ability to exploit unknown properties of extant but unrecorded or unexploited species) and ‘bequest value’ (the value of these options to future human generations) (see Gaston and Spicer, 2004). Even qualitative, experiential aspects of biodiversity are understood in terms of value: for instance, moral value (Norton, 1988); aesthetic value (Heise, 2010); transformative or spiritual value (Soulé, 1985); knowledge (scientific or educational) value; and commodity or financial value (Wilson, 1988). As such, contemporary conservation increasingly frames extinction in terms of the loss, accumulation, production and extraction of value from ‘natural’ capital (Sullivan, 2013).

‘Humanity’

Ecological and biological accounts of extinction focus primarily on the direct extinction of nonhuman organisms. However, in the last few decades, the (possibly imminent) demise of ‘humanity’ has been announced from numerous stages by a range of actors, from respected scientists such as Stephen Hawking to celebrities such as Bob Geldof. An expansive literature documents the possible causes of the eradication of human life: climate change; artificial intelligence turned hostile; the out-of-control replication of nanotechnology; the use of nuclear, biological, robotic or nano-weapons by terrorists or rogue states; global pandemics; cosmic events such as asteroid strikes; and, of course, the processes of mass extinction discussed above (see Bostrom and Cirkovic, 2008; Rees, 2003). Assessing these threats, Sir Martin Rees (2003) has suggested that existing human civilization has approximately a 50/50 chance of surviving for another century. Such prognostications have inspired thought experiments about what the Earth would be like ‘without’ humans (Weisman, 2008; Zalasiewicz, 2008), while a barrage of films – such as The Road (Hillcoat, 2009) and Interstellar (Nolan, 2014) – depict the wretched lives of the last humans struggling to survive on an otherwise extinct planet.

Despite their tone of demise and apocalyptic dissolution, these discourses have exerted a powerful formative force on conceptions of ‘humanity’. One of their most salient effects has been to magnify the idea of ‘species being’. Indeed, the anthropologist Genese Marie Sodikoff comments that pondering the ‘sixth mass extinction’ prompts humans ‘to imagine ourselves … as creatures bound by species-being’ (Sodikoff, 2012: L73). As Michael Dillon and Julian Reid (2011) argue, regimes of security and global ethics are increasingly defined in terms of the well-being and scientific management of the ‘species as a whole’. These regimes are rooted in the Marxist concept of ‘species-being’, which suggests that humans construct themselves as a ‘universal species’ whose body is ‘all of nature’ (Marx, 1981: 67). According to Marx, the human-as-species is designated by its separation from animals – that is, from the ‘life processes’ that determine animalistic lives, and in which capitalist forms of production immerse humans. The idea of ‘humanity’ as a bounded species separate from ‘nature’ yet vulnerable to extinction has produced new images of it – not only as the hyper-agential, terraforming force that defines the Anthropocene epoch (Chakrabarty, 2009), but also as the threatened subject of (future) catastrophe (Evans and Reid, 2014).

The framing of ‘humanity’ as an endangered species has prompted significant discussion of its value and limitations. In a western secular context in which the human organism is framed as the exemplar of life (Colebrook, 2014), the stakes of human extinction are massive. Some authors warn that human extinction would mark the end of sentient and/or intelligent life in the universe, an outcome which is assumed to be a superlative and irreversible evil (Bostrom, 2013; Leslie, 1996; Singer, 2010). It has been claimed that ‘humanity’ is irreplaceable in the sense that there is insufficient time for a similar species to evolve on Earth before it becomes uninhabitable (in about 1.5 billion years), and that, even if it did, such a species might not resemble humanity as we know it (Bostrom and Cirkovic, 2008). In response to these assertions, there have been numerous calls to preserve ‘humanity’ in its current form. For instance, John Leslie (1996) argues that ‘humanity’ has a ‘strong duty’ to avoid extinction, and perhaps even to spread its particular life form throughout the universe through the colonization of other planets (Leslie, 1996; Newitz, 2013). These responses to the prospect of human extinction call for the consolidation of ‘humanity’ in the face of its possible demise.

However, some of the most influential contributions to this discourse do not warn of the loss of humanity-as-it-currently-is, but rather of humanity-as-it-might be. For instance, Nick Bostrom’s (2013) work suggests that ‘premature’ human extinction would preclude the possibility of shifting into a radically posthuman state. In this state, he claims, human and artificial intelligence would merge to produce increasingly powerful and resilient minds unhindered by fleshy bodies vulnerable to biological extinction. Bostrom’s prognoses are permeated with the fear of destruction, but also the techno-millenarian yearning for the transcendence of currently-existing ‘humanity’. Indeed, although they may converge and condition one another, the extinction of Homo sapiens and the extinction of ‘humanity’ are not identical phenomena – a point that Bostrom (2013) himself stresses. As such, it is important to distinguish between the disappearance of the (meta)physical species Homo sapiens and the ‘figural’ extinction (Colebrook, 2014) of the normative figure of ‘humanity’ produced by Western European humanism, modernity and capitalism (Braidotti, 2013; Yusoff, 2011). While the former denotes a species at a particular point in its evolutionary trajectory, the latter refers to abstract, transcendent categories in which ontological assumptions about this species are embedded. For Bostrom (2013), this means that it is possible for the biological extinction of currently-existing Homo sapiens to occur without requiring the extinction of ‘humanity’ (framed as ‘earth-originating intelligent life’).

Several authors have made the converse argument: that it is possible for the abstract category of ‘humanity’ to go extinct without necessitating the biological and cultural extinction of Homo sapiens, and the possibilities for future transformations it embodies. For these thinkers, the figural extinction of ‘humanity’ is already under way, despite the biological expansion of the human population. For instance, Donna Haraway (2008: L228) argues that the Cartesian subject of ‘humanity’ has received several fatal ‘wounds’ in recent centuries. This began, she claims, with the Copernican decentering of the earth within the cosmos, continuing through Darwin’s assertion of the evolutionary continuity between humans and other animals, through to Freud’s assault on the primacy of consciousness, and the more recent ‘cyborgian’ melding of ‘organic and technological flesh’. Others argue that the figure of humanity is disfigured by ‘cultural extinction’ – that is, the disappearance of languages, intangible or virtual traditions and artifacts (see Loh and Harmon, 2014; Sodikoff, 2012) that do not always correspond to the biological disappearance of human groups. For instance, K. David Harrison (2007) demonstrates that the ‘extinction’³ of languages involves the loss of unique worlds shaped by distinctive modes of counting, time-telling, story-telling, geography and, crucially, knowledge of ecosystems and their inhabitants. In this sense, it is possible to imagine the collapse of abstract categories of ‘humanity’ (see Braidotti, 2013, and below) without requiring the biological elimination of Homo sapiens. As I shall argue shortly, the eclipse of the humanist notion of ‘humanity’ may open up new opportunities for concrete political action.

However, while the figural extinction of ‘humanity’ (or conceptions thereof) does not necessitate human extinction, it is often directly linked to the extinction of nonhumans that co-constitute the lifeworlds of particular human groups. For instance, Deborah Bird Rose (2011) explores how the endangered and increasingly persecuted dingo is inextricably woven with the lifeways, kinship structures and cosmologies of the Aboriginal communities with which it has evolved. Similarly, Sodikoff (2011) explains how certain organisms (almost always animals) function as ‘cultural keystones’ for specific human groups. For instance, Ursula Heise (2010) argues that the grey whale is integral to the traditions of hunting that have sustained the Makah indigenous groups of the Pacific northwest for millennia, while the extinct Japanese wolf has come to symbolize the radical transformations of industrialization.

The (potential) extinction of these beings undermines the continuity and identity of human groups whose integrity derives from their relations with these other beings. The extinction of these significant other beings marks not only the loss of human links to ‘nature’ (Heise, 2010) but also the destruction of everyday worlds (co-)inhabited by humans. In this sense, the extinction of nonhumans may negate particular possibilities of ‘being human’. This, in turn, suggests that there is no firm boundary between the biological extinction of other beings and the figural extinction of humans.

Unloved Subjects of Extinction

Despite E.O. Wilson’s (2002) famous claim that humans are ‘biophilic’, most humans do not love life per se but rather specific manifestations of it – most often, those that confirm their identities in the ways discussed above. Other forms of life are framed as ‘disliked and actively vilified others, those who may be specifically targeted for death’ (Rose and Van Dooren, 2011: 1). These beings may be unloved because their radically different morphologies seem repulsive to certain human groups, because they compete with these groups for resources, or because they threaten the lives or health of humans through predation or parasitism. Rose’s (2011) account of the dingo provides a good example. Amongst the indigenous communities with whom she worked, dingoes are understood to be family members, even ‘big bosses’ commanding the respect of humans. Yet, from the perspective of white Australian farmers and governmental agencies, they are persecuted and eliminated as ‘pests’, sequestered behind barbed-wire fences thousands of miles long and shot with impunity. Indeed, Rose’s work links the effort to ‘control’ these ‘pests’ with the ethos of colonial domination that courses through Australian nationalist narratives and endangers Aboriginal lifeways.

Perhaps the most salient of these ‘unloved’ subjects of extinction are so-called ‘invasive species’. Shunted between ecosystems through the networks of human transport and trade, these beings successfully adapt to their surroundings in ways that threaten ‘native species’, whether by crowding out or killing the latter. ‘Native species’ – those beings deemed to be endemic to a place – often play an integral role in the figural existence of a human group. In contrast, ‘invasive species’ are treated as ‘unnatural’ (Brown and Sax, 2005) and framed in terms of the racialized, gendered and xenophobic language of criminality and hyper-fertility often targeted upon human immigrant groups (Subramaniam, 2001). Unlike the previous two categories, ‘invasive’ species are not defined by trophic or morphological characteristics; any set of beings can be characterized as ‘invasive’ by flourishing in the ‘wrong place’. Similarly, being common and numerous may exclude many beings from human love or attention. As Kevin Gaston (2008) points out, the value placed on species by humans is largely contingent on their rareness; common beings tend to be taken for granted or even regarded as pests. Very common beings create a sense of abjection in humans by displaying their prowess for survival – that is, by threatening to out-survive humans and beings to which they are positively attached. For instance, Sean Nee (2004) argues that the current mass extinction event probably has little effect on bacteria, which have weathered billions of years of geological upheaval and thrive in so-called ‘dead zones’ where little else can live. Yet bacteria are not featured as poster-children of ecosystemic survival; more often, they are pathologized as threats to the health of humans and the other beings with whom they are more positively bonded.

Absent Subjects

Absence is the predominant phenomenological feature of extinction, and the register in which it is most often imagined and described. Counter-intuitively, absence does not only erase subjects but also proliferates them. Amongst the absent subjects produced by extinction are those that we might call ‘gone but not forgotten’. These are charismatically extinct beings: the dinosaurs and dodos, thylacines and Neanderthals whose traces bear witness to vanished worlds. Despite their absence from, and inaccessibility to, human experience, these beings insert awareness of extinction into everyday cultural discourses. As Kolbert (2014) points out, the extinction of the dinosaurs is one of the first scientific concepts to which many young children are exposed through storybooks, toys and museum exhibits. These objects function as touchstones through which humans make sense of their own origins (Heise, 2010), and confronting them can be an affirming experience. Specifically, fossils, models and dioramas make present the absence of extinct life forms. This affirms the idea that ‘we’ no longer have to share the planet with deeply threatening beings such as dinosaurs; it is ‘our’ world (for) now. Moreover, images and fragments of these ‘gone but not forgotten’ beings make extinction relatable in human terms. Indeed, in natural history museums it is common to see a silhouette of a dinosaur juxtaposed with a human figure or artifact (e.g. a bus) to demonstrate comparative scale – and thus to translate the extinct being into terms relatable to modern humans. These absent subjects of extinction link contemporary humans and the ‘chains of bodies’ and life processes that have driven evolutionary processes (see Clark, 2011). This enables contemporary humans to ‘locate’ themselves within the trajectory of evolution, affirming their own sense of subjectivity against the accumulation of absent others.

Paradoxically, human relations with long-extinct beings may be much more intense than relations with still-existing beings threatened by extinction. These beings are defined by their non-relationality to humans. In biological discourses they are called ‘anonymous species’, and we might also think of these beings as ‘forgotten (or never known to humans) but not gone’. Some of these life forms are what Sodikoff (2013) calls ‘zombie’ species: life forms of which only one (or very few) individuals exist, which are thought to be extinct until they resurface in untimely ways. These life forms may be ‘anonymous’ because they not yet have been ‘discovered’ by humans – that is, categorized and documented as abstract subjects. In other words, they are potentially relatable to humans, but have not (yet) been captured within human processes of knowledge production (Yusoff, 2013). However, some of these ‘forgotten but not gone’ subjects are known to humans, but are simply not constructed as potential subjects of extinction.

For instance, the IUCN’s Red List contains very few reptiles despite the importance of these organisms in multiple ecosystems (Smith, 2011). Similarly, the Red List does not include invertebrates, which, as Claire Régnier et al. (2015) suggest, has caused scientists significantly to underestimate rates of extinction (which, the authors claim, are 7% of existing species rather than the 0.4% cited by the IUCN). Other ‘forgotten but not gone’ subjects are insensible to humans precisely because they are too intimate to humans, or because they exist at scales that are not immediately accessible to the human senses. For instance, as Dunn and his colleagues point out, no parasite is included on the Red List, despite the fact that these beings are facing a ‘co-extinction’ along with their larger and perhaps more charismatic hosts (Dunn et al., 2009). The ‘unrelatability’ of these beings seems overdetermined: not only are they usually despised as ‘unloved’ or dangerous beings, but their relations with humans and other beings are too intimate to fit within the framework of external relations between subjects.

These absent or non-relational subjects of extinction subvert the focus on presence and contact – and on the extension of human forms of intelligibility to all forms of life (Yusoff, 2013). They call on humans to recognize absence not only as a sign of surfeit and decline, but also as a reflection of the excess of life – and its negation, which far exceeds the scope of human relationality.

Species and Biodiversity

As abstractions designed to simplify the concrete profusion of life, the concepts of ‘species’ and ‘biodiversity’ are maintained through numerous exclusions. Attuning oneself to the beings and processes excluded from these concepts, and to the conceptual means of exclusion, can help to open up ethical debates about what goes extinct and what should be protected. As discussed above, the concepts of ‘species’ and ‘biodiversity’ are neither ‘natural’ nor neutral; they have been forged through centuries of (western-centric) philosophical and scientific debate. While these concepts help to enable scientific and public debate about extinction, they reify life in a number of ways. For instance, the definition of ‘biodiversity’ in terms of its perceived value to humans reifies it as a resource for (future) exploitation and present financial speculation (Sullivan, 2013). In this regard, reliance on these concepts promotes the logic of extractive consumption that is driving up extinction rates. This is particularly true of the increasingly dominant concept of ‘ecosystem services’ (see CBD, 2015; WWF, 2014). Within this paradigm, the motivation for protecting particular species or ecosystems is based on calculations of the financial replacement value of ‘natural’ processes (for instance, the regeneration of soil and the production of oxygen by plants) or their value as commodities. This approach treats complex life systems as interchangeable units of exchange and stocks of ‘natural capital’, while encouraging speculation against the possibility of extinction (see Sullivan, 2013).

Moreover, by positing ‘species’ as bounded units, dominant discourses on extinction efface not only the profound entanglement of life forms, but also their synchronic and diachronic plasticity. They fail to reflect the relations between humans and nonhumans that Joanna Latimer (2013) calls ‘being alongside’: fluid relations of partial connection and division that defy the possibility of sovereign subjects. In order to cohere as a concept, the notions of ‘species’ and ‘biodiversity’ impose firm categorical boundaries better suited to inorganic beings (Grosz, 2004). For instance, the concept of ‘biodiversity’ does not include dead or nonliving beings, or phenomena such as soil which, though not strictly living, is the basis for many life forms (Smith, 2011). Nor does it include ‘invasive’, ‘non-native’ or ‘artificial’ life forms (see below). These exclusions not only erect artificial boundaries between life forms but erase the internal diversity of their members (Grosz, 2004), which Donna Haraway (2008: L27750) characterizes as a ‘multi-species crowd’. In other words, the abstract concepts of ‘species’ and ‘biodiversity’ are out of joint with the creative promiscuity and proliferation of life forms.

As a result, these abstract concepts may impose severe normative restrictions on what is considered to be integral to life, survival and their attendant processes. An important example of this can be found in the restrictions imposed by the biological species concept and its emphasis on sexual reproduction. This concept engrains a fundamentally hetero-normative and significantly gendered notion of life and evolution. Specifically, it predicates the existence – and therefore the value – of species on the basis of biparental sexual reproduction requiring male and female species. Yet reproduction entails a diverse set of processes which should not be evaluated against the standard of heterosexuality (Hird, 2008). As Haraway has pointed out, bacteria pass genes back and forth without resolving into species (see Haraway, 2008). Likewise, many common ‘domestic’ plants such as strawberries and potatoes are capable of reproducing asexually; and several forms of fish, amphibians and reptiles reproduce through parthenogenesis, which does not require sexual fertilization. Other beings, such as slugs and snails, reproduce hermaphroditically, while hybrids such as mules cannot reproduce. In this case, the (hetero-)sexual conception of species obscures many forms of reproductive labour through which female, hermaphroditic, non-reproductive and other beings bear the burden of survival, propel evolution and struggle to maintain life in the face of extinction. Reflecting on the exclusive definition of the biological species concept can help to affirm the presence of these beings and processes in the cosmopolitical arena. Moreover, critically examining the exclusions of these beings can help to problematize, and spark ethical debate, about what counts as ‘life’ and which kinds of difference are deemed worthy of preserving.

Moreover, attending carefully to the concepts of ‘species’ and ‘biodiversity’ can help to uncover the modes of violence through which they are often forged and sustained. A prime example of this is ‘ex situ’ breeding programmes that are increasingly integral to conservation practices. As Thom Van Dooren (2014) and Matthew Chrulew (2011) have recently argued, these efforts to ensure ‘species survival’ often blur the boundary between care and coercion. Van Dooren explains how initiatives to breed whooping cranes conscripts certain members of this species (and sometimes other species such as sandhill cranes, which may act as surrogate parents) into programmes of biopolitical management. While these programmes are intended to ensure the persistence of the species, he contends that they actually sever the ties between these individuals and the collective historical patterns of relationality, reproduction, inhabitation, migration and other forms of world-making in which they engage. Submitted to intensive forms of scientific management, these individuals are sacrificed in order to ensure the persistence of the species. What Van Dooren’s case study illustrates clearly, I contend, is that the desire to maintain the category of ‘species’ is prioritized above not only the wellbeing of individuals but also the continuity of their distinctive worlds. In other words, the qualitative diversity and collective life of actually-existing beings is sacrificed in order to ensure the existence of an abstract ‘species’. Attending to this dynamic can help to identify the violence that undergirds abstract scientific concepts. It also highlights the need for alternative approaches based on the protection of the diverse, multi-species worlds of actually-living beings (Mitchell, 2014), rather than abstract concepts of ‘species’ and ‘biodiversity’.

Humanity

The framing of ‘humanity’ as a potential subject of extinction creates important opportunities for ethical reflection and political critique in the face of extinction. On the one hand, claims that humanity may soon go extinct create a ‘climate’ of catastrophe (see Colebrook, 2014; Evans and Reid, 2014) that demands urgent response and entrenches existing conceptions of human planetary dominance. Several of the proposed responses to the threat of human extinction – including the technological transformation of (post-)humanity and the colonization of other planets (see Newitz, 2013; Bostrom and Cirkovic, 2008; Rees, 2003) – magnify perceptions of human agency. Within these discourses, human extinction is treated as ‘unthinkable’ – that is, as a possibility that should not be considered, and should be avoided at any possible cost. Here, the term ‘unthinkable’ is not so much a statement of fact as a prohibition or taboo: those who ponder human extinction may be labelled as macabre, if not malicious.

Yet several critics of hyper-humanism have broken the taboo of ‘unthinkability’, engaging with the possibilities of human extinction as a source of ethical innovation. Indeed, I want to argue that ‘humanity’ as a subject of extinction engenders a productive dynamic of abjection in which humans must confront the possibilities of becoming-otherwise. That is, confronting the possible demise of humanity may eject the human subject outside of herself, forcing her to confront what has ‘settled in place and stead of what will be “me”’ (Kristeva, 1982: 10). In this vein, Claire Colebrook (2014) argues that it is important to question whether the existence of ‘humanity’ (in its material and figural forms) is desirable or even justifiable (Colebrook, 2014). Rather than an expression of misanthropy, Colebrook’s question urges humans to think how they might become otherwise; in fact, she suggests that doing so might be necessary in order to attain some form of survival. Specifically, Colebrook suggests that ‘a species can only survive by mutation and by not being itself’ (Colebrook, 2014: 129) – that is, by embracing abjection – and that questioning the value of ‘humanity’ is a powerful means for doing so.

In a similar sense, Braidotti (2013: 6) offers concrete, everyday forms of action that can connect the figural extinction of ‘humanity’ to political transformation. Specifically, she suggests that thinking and writing as if ‘humanity’ were already extinct is the ‘ultimate gesture of defamiliarization’. Engaging in defamiliarization, she argues, compels humans to ‘think critically about who we are and what we are actually in the process of becoming’. This, she contends, offers alternatives to the entrenchment of essentializing, exclusivist and often violent strands of humanism on the one hand and, on the other, the rush towards forms of techno-transcendence that obliterate existing forms of humanity in the pursuit of survival. Braidotti believes that engaging in this kind of ethico-political action can produce new modes of community and solidarity based on an ‘enlarged sense of inter-connection between self and others, including the non-human or “earth” others’ (Braidotti, 2013: 49–50). This, in turn, can lead to a ‘zoe-centred’ understanding of life that affirms and accommodates not only those forms of life that currently exist, but also those to come. From this perspective, attending to ‘humanity’ as a subject of (multiple modalities of) extinction can create the potential for an affirmative politics of transformation and novelty. This may counter-act the oppressive and often depoliticizing messages of catastrophe, and retrenchments of existing, exclusive forms of humanism, that are often prompted by public discourses on extinction (see Evans and Reid, 2014).

Unloved Subjects

Furthermore, attending to the processes of subjectification that produce ‘unloved’ subjects of extinction helps to illuminate how the ethical impulse of love can enfold beings in the protective circle of ethics – or banish them from it. Rose (2011: L107) begins her exploration of extinction by reframing as a question Michael Soulé’s statement that humans ‘protect what [they] love’. Rose wonders if humans are ‘capable of loving, and therefore of caring for, the animals and plants that are currently losing their lives in a growing cascade of extinctions’ (Rose, 2011: L107). However, as she briefly notes, love is problematic and may produce perverse outcomes. Indeed, I want to argue that the dynamics of inter-species love produces vast inequalities and stark exclusions. For instance, the construction of ‘invasive species’ is based not only on disgust for these species in themselves, but perhaps primarily on love for, and the desire to protect, the other species which they threaten to displace. Similarly, love for a particular normative image of the human (or human-like animals) can underpin revulsion of beings that are radically different to humans in their morphology, life processes or goals.

James Hatley (2012) confronts this issue by engaging with the example of the tick, an animal which survives by drinking the blood of humans and other warm-blooded mammals with whom they feel affinity. While it might be tempting actively to desire the demise of the tick in favour of these more frequently loved beings, Hatley contends that the real ethical challenge is to ‘keep faith’ with its existence. That is, he argues that humans should embrace the sense of abjection prompted by the tick’s hunger for human blood, which engenders ‘faith in the fabric of our co-evolved existence’ (Hatley, 2012: 73). This account suggests that it is important to reflect carefully even on what seems like a simple and positive response to mass extinction – love – in order to gain awareness of the exclusions and violences it might enact. In this sense, engaging with unloved subjects, and the distribution of love between humans and other beings, can help to enlarge and pluralize existing boundaries of ethical response. Moreover, it suggests that it may be necessary to re-think the notion that humans should ‘save what they love’. Instead, Hatley’s approach raises a more profound ethical challenge: that of protecting and responding to beings that humans may not love.

Absent and Non-relational Subjects

Attending to absent and non-relational subjects of extinction can help to highlight the processes through which certain beings come to be seen as non-existent and therefore as ethically irrelevant. Crucially, the other processes of subjectification discussed above play a central role in producing absence. No being is ‘naturally’ anonymous; rather, certain beings are made anonymous to humans through their exclusion from the realm of intelligibility (Yusoff, 2011). Rather than being intrinsically inaccessible to human experience and responsiveness, these beings simply have not been constructed as ‘matters or concern’ that help to determine the production of scientific knowledge (Puig de le Bellacasa, 2011). In this sense, the unequal distribution of love or care discussed above is mediated through the processes of knowledge-making. ‘Anonymous’ and ‘zombie’ species are pre-emptively rendered pre-emptively extinct by these exclusions. They are defined by the possibility that they may disappear from the earth before they are ‘discovered’ by humans, rated in terms of their vulnerability and, perhaps, brought under the umbrella of human protection. Reflecting on the processes of subjectification that produce these subjects heightens human awareness of the exclusions created by processes of knowledge-production and scientific responses to extinction.

Moreover, the absent subjects discussed above prompt important questions about the boundaries of ethics – in particular, is it possible for humans to respond ethically to beings to which they cannot relate? Indeed, Mick Smith (2011) asks what it could possibly mean to care for such beings. He demonstrates how grappling with this question can multiply the possibilities of human ethical response to extinction, most importantly by refusing to ground ethical responsiveness solely in phenomenal experience or ‘appearance’. Instead, he argues that an ecological ethics must acknowledge that there is more to ethics than human experience, of which humans can gain a sense by attending to those beings that do appear to them. In other words, he reasons, to grasp a being that ‘appears’ – for instance, the body of a plant at the soil’s surface – is to intuit the existence of the many subterranean beings and relations that enable and constrain its survival. This makes it possible to imagine an ethos of ethical responsiveness even to beings that seem to evade human experience. It also holds great promise as a basis for thinking about how humans might respond to extinction as such. According to Timothy Morton (2013), humans cannot apprehend phenomena like mass extinction as a whole; they can only engage with particular instantiations of it – for instance, the disappearance of a beloved life form (see Morton, 2013). For Morton, the inability to grasp extinction as a whole significantly limits humans’ ability to respond to it. However, Smith’s approach suggests that it is not necessary for humans to experience extinction as a whole in phenomenological terms in order to respond ethically to it. Rather, one’s response to concrete manifestations of extinction can tap into an intuitive ethical register that acknowledges and responds to the broader phenomenon without needing to apprehend it directly. This line of thinking might help to overcome the argument that extinction is ‘too large’, ‘unthinkable’ and thus too unrelatable to engender meaningful collective human responses.