Academic Articles

This book considers how we encounter and make meaning from extinction in diverse settings and cultures. It brings together an international and interdisciplinary range of scholars to consider how extinction is memorialised in museums and cultural institutions, through monuments, in literature and art, through public acts of ritual and protest, and in everyday practices.

The early nineteenth-century extinction of Franklinia alatamaha is quite possibly the first species loss recorded on American soil. Beginning with William Bartram’s collection of the species at the end of the eighteenth century, and ending with Edgar Wherry’s ecologically informed searches for surviving Franklinia in the early twentieth century, this essay examines botanists who believed Franklinia might still grow naturally a century after its last sighting. Their rediscovery expeditions reveal a value in species wildness, even while acknowledging its habitat was not wilderness. This history extends extinction stories beyond animal species, to illuminate the origins of understandings of species loss through the voices and actions of botanists whose practice of propagation saved this species, but whose imaginations still wishfully envisioned Franklinia in the wild.

Whether stuffed remains in a museum case, inscribed tombstone, or stone wall perched on a cliff, memorials to extinct animals are timestamps representing human-animal relationships at particular moments in time. This essay analyzes the rhetoric and imagery of historical extinctions as seen in these memorials to understand the ways people struggled to understand the loss. Through examination of memorials to extinct species in U.S. museums, parks, and zoos my research has revealed a continuous struggle to identify the personhood of animals, define human-animal interactions, and locate human responsibility for environmental change.

This essay explores the use of rhinos in images selling automobile tires, examining the assumptions and projections people have made about the species.

Although the animal may be, as Nietzsche argued, ahistorical, living completely in the present, it nonetheless plays a crucial role in human history. The fascination with animals that leads not only to a desire to observe and even live alongside them, but to capture or kill them, is found in all civilizations. The essays collected in Beastly Natures show how animals have been brought into human culture, literally helping to build our societies (as domesticated animals have done) or contributing, often in problematic ways, to our concept of the wild.

As someone who became environmentally aware in the 1980s, I was surrounded with images of and information about an extremely fragile and endangered place called the rain forest. Within its dense vegetation roads were being built, trees were being cut, undiscovered animals were vanishing, all while doctors were searching its depth for the cure to fatal diseases. I collected spare change as a volunteer for the Rainforest Alliance in a plastic jar colored with cartoon images of monkeys, toucans, palm trees, vines, and elephants. I did not know then that the image of "rain forest" was the prodcut of a century of tropical forest representation, whose origins lay in a much different landscape.