Thom Van Dooren: The evolving cultures of the more-than-human world (ep385)
“That kind of ex-situ conservation, where we try to take animals into captivity and look after them, is just increasingly common and has a really low success rate around the world. [...] What is lost from the culture and lifeway of animals when they’re brought into captivity?”
In this episode, we welcome Thom van Dooren, a field philosopher and writer. Thom is Deputy Director at the Sydney Environment Institute and teaches at the University of Sydney and the University of Oslo. His current research and writing focus on some of the many philosophical, ethical, cultural, and political issues that arise in the context of species extinctions and human entanglements with threatened species and places. This research works across the disciplines of cultural studies, philosophy, science and technology studies, and related fields.
He has explored these themes in depth in three books: Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia University Press, 2014), The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds (Columbia University Press, 2019), and A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions (MIT Press, 2022).
Some of the topics we explore in this conversation include the evolving cultures of more-than-human communities, various stories at the edge of extinction, and more.
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Artistic credits:
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Lea Thomas
Episode-inspired artwork by Haruka Aoki.
Episode references:
Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction, The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds and A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions, books by Thom van Dooren
“Hospice earth”, an essay by Thom van Dooren
“Ethics from the Field”, an essay by Thom van Dooren
“Feral Atlas”, a digital humanities project curated and edited by Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou
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Transcript:
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Thom van Dooren: I was drawn into thinking about extinction, like so many people, by the fact that we are living in the sixth mass extinction on the planet. And I guess growing up watching David Attenborough documentaries and doing all of the other kinds of things that we do, I was aware that species were disappearing. So that was always part of my consciousness, as it has been for all of us, for decades.
The more personal academic story is that I came to it through thinking about agriculture, actually. I wrote my PhD thesis on agricultural plants and became really interested in the disappearance of crop varieties that so many diverse kinds of pumpkins or maize—that all of these crops that we grow were disappearing, and that really what we were encountering in the supermarket was a very impoverished version of what food once looked like. And so from there, I got interested in seed banking and some of the many ways in which agricultural diversity was being conserved.
So in that roundabout way, I then started thinking about the non-agricultural world, and thinking about plants and animals out in the wider world, and wondering about extinction and thinking about the conservation efforts going on around those species. So yeah, I came to it through agricultural plants, but really for the last fifteen years, I've been working mostly on birds, and more recently on snails, and thinking about what their loss means and how it matters.
Kamea Chayne: I'm really excited to dive into all of this here. And we could, of course, dedicate a whole series of conversations just on agro-biodiversity loss.
But here in your new book, A World in a Shell, which offers a collection of snail stories from Hawai’i, you note as a starting point that Hawai'i was once home to more than 750 species of land snails. Yet almost two-thirds have gone extinct. This actually is the first time we have taken a microscope to focus on snails in particular, so I would appreciate if you could first lay the grounds here by sharing some of the unique roles that snails play within ecosystems, and some of the most fascinating things you'd learned about these little creatures of Hawai’i while diving into their stories and ways of being.
Thom van Dooren: I guess it's not surprising that you haven't had an episode on snails before. They do get overlooked in most of the conservation world, and I myself have been very guilty of that, not just with snails, but with the whole invertebrate world. And that was really one of the things I wanted to do with this book, was to, after writing about birds in my last three books and realizing that I had spent very little time thinking about invertebrates at all. They make up 99% of the animal kingdom but are largely overlooked.
I wanted to use the snail stories as a way of coming at that broader invertebrate crisis, but also in the bias that directs our attention away from them, towards mammals, birds, and some of the other more charismatic species.
It was a real learning curve for me too, on snails. But I discovered that they are really remarkable creatures, up to all sorts of fascinating things. Ecologically, it really varies around the world, what they're up to. Some of the time they're really important decomposers of leaf matter and other things, helping to create soils. And that's certainly the case in Hawai'i, where until relatively recently, there were no earthworms, so snails and other invertebrates played these really important roles in these volcanic islands, helping to create the soils that the forests, and other things depend on.
Also, I guess, one of the big roles that snails have around the world ecologically, is as a source of food. It's not a very glamorous role, but they get eaten by things and in particular, they get eaten by birds a lot of the time. And their shells are made of calcium carbonate, so during breeding season for birds, those snail shells can be a really important source of calcium for birds that need a lot of calcium, to make their own eggs, for their young.
So snails have a range of different ecological roles. And in Hawai'i, it's interesting because we we know that some of the species are decomposers of leaf matter and things like that. But there are a whole lot of other species in Hawai'i that live amongst the leaves, and then their diet is not actually eating the leaves themselves. Instead, they scrape this really thin layer of micro-organisms off the surface of the leaves. And this is actually quite common for snails around the world. Many snails that we see living on leaves, living in plants are actually not attacking or harming the plants at all, but they're sort of cleaning the leaves.
We don't really know what the ecological function of that is, [or] how that matters in the forest. Does it help to reduce plant diseases and pathogens by [creating] more diverse microorganism communities on plant leaves? And what impact might that have on the plants health, and the health of the forests? We really don't know, and we can't really study that anymore because, as you say, so many of the snails are gone in Hawai'i, and so many of the forests are also fractured and damaged in ways that really make it hard to understand what that ecological role was.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, there's still. There's still so much we've yet to learn, and there are certainly so many things that we may never come to know about what we've already lost.
And one of the core messages of your work, I think, is that these individual stories of species endangerment and extinction ought to be understood as windows into larger global processes and historical contexts. So with the particular case of two-thirds of Hawaiian land snails going extinct, what do you think is pertinent to highlight in terms of the key drivers of their plight, and how are they, when contextualized, entangled with Kānaka Maoli, or the native Hawaiians’ own realities in terms of their cultures, knowledge, lifeways, and connection to the land?
Thom van Dooren: So the snail story in Hawai'i is very complicated, and that's why I wrote a book about it. But the main drivers of their loss are many. And these days it's a range of introduced species, especially, actually, an introduced snail, the rosy wolfsnail, which is a cannibal snail that tracks other snails through their slime trails, and consumes them in huge numbers. So these introduced snails, that were brought to Hawai'i in the middle of the 20th century to try and control another snail that had been brought to Hawai'i decades earlier, are now sort of the biggest cause of the decline of snails.
But there are many others. And habitat loss, as we've already touched on, is a big one. Hawai'i's forests have been so damaged by all sorts of things, introduced ungulates, cows and pigs and deer that graze the forest down, but also, of course, just loss of forest for urban development for the military, especially in Hawai'i, for tourism. And then there was this really fascinating and disturbing period of shell collecting that was really kicked off by the missionary sons in the 1820s when they arrived in Hawai'i, who were just captivated by some of these beautiful tree snail shells and set about collecting them en masse.
So there are a whole bunch of historical and contemporary causes of snail decline in Hawai'i. My aim in trying to draw out some of that history and some of the contemporary conservation efforts and things, was sort of twofold. One of them was, [as] I've already mentioned, to try and draw attention to the invertebrate bias in particular, and the fact that 99% of the animal world is made up of invertebrates, [yet] most of us can't even name more than a couple of species of invertebrate species that have been lost.
For every charismatic mammal or bird that we can name that's disappeared, probably another 99 have disappeared from the invertebrates, from the insects and the snails and spiders. That's going on largely unseen.
The unknown extinction crisis is what I call it in the book, and it's an effort to story one part of that, the snails situation in Hawai'i as a lens, as you say, onto this bigger issue.
The second thing I really wanted to do with the book was to draw out the biocultural complexity of extinction. So that's the fact that extinction is not a just an ecological process going on over in nature, but it's one that's tangled up with human communities and histories in really complex ways. So I wanted to also take these snail stories as an opportunity to explore how histories and ongoing realities of colonization and militarization and globalization, have really caused and continue to cause the loss of species around the world.
So we often talk about the current period as an anthropogenic extinction crisis, as though it's Anthropos humans that are driving this. But in reality, of course, we know that it's very particular human communities, economic and social and cultural systems, that are giving rise to this loss of species. So by slowing down, with the snail situation in Hawai'i, I also wanted to tease out a lot of that and think about the use of specific human histories and practices that are driving extinction on the one hand, but also the way in which different human communities are very unevenly impacted on by the loss of species. And in Hawai'i, as you mentioned, Kānaka Maoli, Native Hawaiian people, are particularly impacted by the loss of biodiversity.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, so the significance of individual species last really goes far beyond the loss of that specific form of biological life.
And I actually first came across your work while learning about the ʻalalā, which is the endemic Hawaiian crow found nowhere else in the world, who used to have one of the largest native bird populations in Hawai'i, but now primarily exist only in captive breeding programs. From the ʻAlalā Project, they share that there are currently 110 crows in captivity, with ongoing release programs since 2016—although with questionable levels of success, which you'd be better equipped to speak to, since this was one of your focuses of your previous book, Flight Ways.
And, specifically, I would love for you to share about the perspectives of Cynnie Salley, who you spoke with, who had fought so hard to keep the last wild crows on her land, due to a belief and humility and perhaps a more holistic understanding that indeed, a species becoming extinct means much more than just their biological bodies being endangered, and that it would also signify their cultural loss and loss of knowledge and even language loss, which means that there could be grave limitations to their ultimate abilities to live and survive in their same original habitats when captive breeding programs end up changing their cultures, social skills, knowledge, and upbringing.
What can you share with us about this story of species endangerment that could remind us that culture is not exclusive to the human domain, and that with the exception of maybe very last-resort solutions, we ought to develop a more holistic approach to protecting and enhancing the diversity of life?
Thom van Dooren: The ʻalalā, the Hawaiian crow first drew me to the Hawaiian Islands, too, and I've written about them in Flight Ways, as you mentioned, and also in my book, The Wake of Crows, which is about crows all over the world, one of which is the ʻalalā. And it's a really complicated story of their conservation. And they are beautiful birds, and as you say, ones that have lived in captivity for such a long time now, with some limited success in trying to release them.
I guess I'd zoom out from there, to think about that situation more broadly.
That kind of ex-situ conservation, where we try to take animals into captivity and look after them, is just increasingly common and has a really low success rate around the world.
It's so difficult to get species back out into the world once the last of them have been brought into captivity. And that's for a whole range of reasons. One of the biggest is just that the reasons we brought them into captivity in the first place are very often that their habitat is being destroyed. So getting back the kind of lands that they could go into and live sustainably, is often just really really difficult or impossible. And that's certainly been part of the story with the ʻalalā.
But the other part of it that you mentioned is one that really interests me. And that is…
What is lost from the culture and lifeway of animals when they're brought into captivity?
That is so different depending on the particular species we're talking about. There are ways in which the snails that I've been writing about more recently are likely impacted by having been raised in captivity. That does, in some way, we think, probably impact them, and their capacity to be socially with other snails, and to make sense of their world, and so on. But it's drastically different when we're talking about an animal like the Hawaiian crow, that is so cognitively advanced, if you like.
They're such intelligent birds. [They would need to] learn their calls and their songs, to learn about what kinds of foods they should eat, to learn to navigate the landscape, to learn where the safe places are, to learn different fruits that ripen over the year—all of these things are learnt on the land, they learn in relationship. Really there were decades, especially from the 1970s, 80s, 90s, decades of just disastrous captive breeding programs, where people basically took animals of all sorts, into captivity, all over the world, tried to breed them up, like chickens or like any other battery raised animals, and then released them, and wondered why they all died. And that went on for quite a long time.
There are all sorts of examples of that around the world. So it's kind of mysterious why it took so long [for] protocols [to begin] to be put in place to think about—and this has happened with the ʻalalā—how do we train them in captivity to avoid predators, for example? How do we train them in captivity, to find food throughout the year? And those are really imperfect efforts, but more and more of that work is being done now. And I think it's fascinating in a whole range of ways, partly because it really gets to a very impoverished notion of animal life, that was informing conservation projects for a long time, where we just sort of thought of animals as kind of wind up automaton robots, that could just pop out of an egg, or be born knowing everything they needed to know.
So, yeah, as you say, a richer notion of animal life, which is different between snails and crows. But nonetheless, the idea that there are animal cultures and there's now whole fields of biology focused on animal culture, and that there are inheritances that move between generations that need to be taught, that need to be observed and learned on the land.
That richer sense of animal life is becoming, slowly, part of the way conservation is done, and this is a relatively new field of conservation called conservation behavior, that's really about trying to integrate the behavioral sciences, behavioral ecology with conservation biology. But this is slow and difficult work that pushes against a lot of assumptions and dominant practices.
One of the things I think is most fascinating about it is just why this restorative work needs to be done in the first place.
How did we ever arrive at such a silly notion of animal life that we would have bracketed out all of these complex processes of learning and sociality? But we did, or at least dominant conservation practices did.
Kamea Chayne: So the low success rates of captive breeding programs, of course, has been a reflection of the many factors that led to their endangerment in the first place, which mostly are still present when they might be reintroduced. And then there's the added factor of their cultural loss, for the species, after a long period of being in captivity. And like you, I was really fascinated by this.
I want to bring in this quote that you share from Sallie. "They [the ʻalalā] were kind of like the kings and queens of the forest. They chased the hawks and the hawks had a healthy respect for them. As a matter of fact, it took four or five years of releasing young birds before the hawks realized that these were different than the ones that used to chase them around—and that they had fair game… I truly feel that whatever happens in the forest now with these birds, it’s a different species…. They’re going to have to relearn everything—including calls… So, from their language on up, they’re going to have a huge learning curve. It’s going to be a different bird."
So with that, I think this is also an invitation, like how we understand there to be different cultures of the human species and how they have different impacts on their ecosystems based on their knowledge and lifeways and relationality with other beings in community, that there are similar nuances in other species as well. So, we have something like the humanities concerned with learning or language to do with human culture—I think there ought to be an acknowledgment then of, I don’t know, floranity or faunanity, concerned with the learning and languages of the cultures of other beings, instead of a disproportionate focus on just their isolated biology or decontextualized ecology.
And ultimately I think this leaves me with the question of: what could it mean to practice wildlife protection, knowing that it's not just biological conservation we need, but bio-cultural conservation, and crucially, with that culture centered on the species themselves, and not just on their related human realm as that word biocultural typically speaks to.
Thom van Dooren: I think you're totally right.
The tendency to interpret bio-cultural as that—humans bring the culture and the rest of the world is the biology—is very dangerous. And yet that is the way that term is normally interpreted.
So we need to think about human biology in not the ways that socio-biology taught us to think about. And we also need to think about animal cultures and even the cultures of plants in different kinds of ways.
I think it's really complicated with the question about whether or not we can impact on animal cultures in the effort to conserve them. I think that's a question I'm really grappling with in some of my current work. We see it all over the place, in efforts to, for example, teach birds a new migratory route, so they're not flying over a warzone, or not flying over other areas that might be dangerous for them, or to teach them to nest in a different way that might be safer for them. Sometimes I think we can and should do these things—[though] they're very interventionist, and I think we need to be really mindful of that and respectful, and not try to overstep.
And yet, at the same time, it's sometimes the only thing that can be done, really, to hold on to some of these species. That's only because we've failed, or humanity has failed, or whoever has failed, in all of the other things we could have done earlier on, before this became a crisis. But I do resist the sense that, for example, the ʻalalā have changed their culture in some way or they've lost some of their songs, that they're not the same species. I think something has been lost. But the point that has been made by many anthropologists and others, and Indigenous activists about culture, about human cultures should be applied to animals too.
It was once famously put by James Clifford that cultures don't hold still for their portraits. I think this is true also of animal cultures—that what it is to be an ʻalalā is an evolving project.
It's one that was formed in the landscape, with particular trees and particular ecologies, but it's one that will change, and one that probably needs to change, in order to endure in the world, sadly.
We need a notion of animal culture that's not static, that allows for change and that allows for what we might sometimes want to call human forms of interference in animal culture, without assuming that its historical form is its pure, correct form, and that any kind of change is therefore a degradation of some sort. But without also, on the other hand, saying any change goes, however we want to impact on these species, saying that we can teach the ʻalalā to go and become dumpster divers like other crows—I don't think that's appropriate.
So it's walking that balanced line that says that change is okay, but what kind of change?
Kamea Chayne: Right. And especially as people become more aware of species endangerment and loss, there have been all sorts of solutions proposed and implemented to sustain particular species, like captive breeding programs, or otherwise to fight whatever it is that is endangering their collective wellbeing.
And that is particularly the case when we're talking about certain introduced species not having pre-existing predators in their new habitats and proliferating so well that they might take over or outcompete their more indigenous counterparts, compromising the abilities for other beings to live and sustain themselves in the ways they had known to. Or otherwise, of course, the introduced species bringing in new diseases that other more rooted and indigenous species have not adapted to have the immunity to manage would be a concern as well.
But here I want to shine a light on this pattern that I've seen exist across the work of species conservation—or the attempted work sometimes, which is when some new species is introduced intentionally as biological control agents for other previously introduced species that have become problematic in various ways, but then there being un-foreseen impacts and even unhealthy ripple effects into the ecosystem which aggravates or creates another set of problems, in the lens of enhancing biological diversity.
So, whether it's the introduction of various snails to Hawai'i and the new introduction of other snails to address those or some other issues, what stands out to you on this topic that you feel called to bring into this conversation?
Thom van Dooren: Yeah, there are so many examples of the kind of thing you're talking about, where we, whoever this we is, conservationists try to correct one mistake by introducing another species. And the example from the Hawaiian snails that I mentioned a moment ago is a classic one, and one that I think is really instructive, in some ways, in that the rosy wolf snail, was introduced not only to the Hawaiian Islands, but introduced all through the Pacific Islands, all through the Indian Ocean islands, all over the world. And really, very little work was done in Hawai'i, or really most of those other places, to ask what impact would it have on the native species? And that's really problematic.
People have been studying these Hawaiian snails for a long time. Kānaka Maoli had and have an intricate cultural knowledges in stories and chants and songs about snails. It's not like it was a surprise that the islands were incredibly rich in snail diversity.
And yet when there was a problematic effort [to get rid of] the giant African snail, [they thought that] bringing in a carnivorous snail just seemed like the right thing to do, at least to the group of people who got to make that decision. They really just didn't care, I think is the takeaway from this story. And they didn't care again and again, all over the world. And sadly, that continues.
[It] doesn't continue on quite the same scale, thankfully. In most parts of the world, there's a much healthier skepticism about what's often called biocontrol initiatives. But I think the underlying psychology is really interesting, that… these questions just weren't asked most of the time. Who else will be impacted on by this?
And that's really, I think, about a sort of resourcification of the world. That there was an agricultural pest, this is a solution to an agricultural pest.
If you're another snail in the forest who's not sort of pulling their weight economically, then you're sort of not factored into the equation at all.
That's the particular really damaging mindset that animates a lot of our most destructive behaviors, in a whole range of different ways. And biocontrol initiatives and the introduction of species in those ways is just one manifestation of that really damaging mindset, I think.
Kamea Chayne: I definitely have recognized this as a pattern, that when certain "solutions" are implemented to take care of one very specific issue, there being unforeseen consequences in other ways. And maybe in this scenario, that later introduced snail did help to lower the population of the species that they did that they wanted to control. But then, of course, it also caused a lot of destruction to all of the other diverse native snails as well, so it created a whole host of other issues. So this speaks to the dangers of reducing problems and looking at them in very isolated ways.
And this would be a tangent, but right now, I have concerns with climate change being reduced into a problem of CO2 levels, because there are a lot of ways to lower CO2 levels, that creates a whole host of other issues. So people could be called "successful", if they implemented some solution that lowered CO2 levels, but then I think we need to take a step back to look at the bigger picture, of like, what other impacts does this "solution" ultimately have, beyond that one measurement that we're looking at.
And then, of course, beyond all of these ways to protect what still remains, you've also explored the ethics and question of how far do we go to bring back lost species?
Like a lot of what we'd just discussed, I know your thought process is one that really looks at the nuances and the bigger context rather than the one-dimensional question of how far we go. So I wonder if you can take us through some of the considerations you've made on this subject and perhaps your non-conclusive questions that you still have and encourage people to hold onto.
Thom van Dooren: [To speak to] the first part of your question, I am in complete agreement. I think how we frame the problem really matters for the kinds of solutions that we get at. The ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood is a great teacher of mine, called this tendency for what she called minimum rethink, where we really tend to frame the problem really narrowly, and then come up with some really impoverished solutions to it. And there are so many examples of that. Your climate change example is a great one. I think we see that writ large in the Ecomodernist Manifesto, I don't know if people have read that, but you can Google it.
It's this drive to solve problems through the further intensification of things like nuclear power and desalination and more intensive agriculture, that somehow that is the solution to climate change and other environmental crises, in a way that doesn't ask about not only all of the carbon emissions and the other externalities associated with those intensified technologies, but also all of the animal welfare issues associated with intensive agriculture, and social justice, environmental, animal welfare issues—they get compounded often, by those intensifying, industrializing solutions to big environmental problems. So that effort to turn those into externalities in our problem thinking, not just in our economic accounting, is really dangerous and very common.
We do need to be relentlessly asking about how a problem is being framed and how that framing is narrowing the scope of solutions that we can see or imagine.
The second part of your question is an example of that. The question of how far we should go to bring back lost species? That is a kind of solution that emerges, and is becoming increasingly popular, to talk about these de-extinction projects.
Resurrecting extinct species is itself, I think, deeply problematic. That is where some people think we ought to be going in the current crisis. So there's a whole range of different ways in which people are proposing to de-extinct species. Some of them get called cloning, things like somatic cell nuclear transfer. There's other genetic technologies and breeding technologies that are being proposed here that might do this work.
I think it's a really dangerous line to be heading down for a whole range of different reasons. People have made all sorts of arguments about the potential to undermine the rhetorical power, if you like, of extinction, if it's not forever anymore, that that might undermine conservation efforts. I think that's something to think about.
One of the really big issues that isn't talked about at all in the literature is where these de-extincted species would go. Very often, the same things that led them to go extinct, especially when we're talking about more recent extinctions, are still out there.
Quite often, human persecution is part of it.
In Australia we talk about the thylacine, the Tasmanian tiger, as a species that should be resurrected. But they were basically killed out of existence by farmers. Where would they go if they were brought back? How would that not just happen again? I think when we start to ask those questions, we see that often what is animating these projects is an imagined future of these species living in a zoo. Some people even talk about them being pets.
We very quickly begin to see that what's going on here is often not about ecological restoration at all. It's about technological hubris. It's about people wanting to do cool stuff with genetics.
I'm not opposed to cool stuff with genetics, but I am opposed when it comes with a whole lot of false promises, a whole lot of captive breeding and animal suffering. And when it's being presented as a solution to a problem that it's actually not trying to intervene in, an ecological problem, I think that's often just dishonest. So, yeah, it's a complicated bundle of questions, I think.
Kamea Chayne: Right. I think it is important, though, to sit with this question of whether all of this work is about the restoration of the health of the planet, or something else. Because everything we talked about earlier, the conditions that led to their endangerment or extinction, in this case, all of their cultural and knowledge loss, and then the problems with introduced species to an ecosystem leading to unforeseen consequences in ever-transforming landscapes that are very different today, compared to when those species were still here and in their exact forms, depending on how far back they went extinct. So I think there is a lot of this consideration, and to me it does suggest that a lot of this curiosity and work isn't really about healing the planet and could be about something else.
And, oftentimes, the stories that get told of different issues often get portrayed as this versus that, the good versus the bad. Yet you've noted the importance of complicating the narrative in this case of conservationists and those struggling and resisting the loss of particular species and habitats, versus those enacting and bringing forth that loss and destruction. What are some of the complexities here that muddy the binary that we should keep in mind, and what do they reveal about how connected the processes of ecosystem destruction are to historical and ongoing dynamics of dispossession?
Thom van Dooren: I think there is a tendency to tell our stories in that way. And I think we see that in a lot of popular writing about extinction and the environment, those two key roles, I think, that go on in a lot of that writing. You've got the kind of salvational figures who are often scientists or conservationists, but sometimes Indigenous people, activists who are struggling to save species. And then you've often got this amorphous humanity that is the threat, the poachers or the people who are causing climate change, and so on. And we really tend to tell stories in that kind of a simplistic way.
What I have tried to do often in my writing, and I think that sort of comes naturally, if you go out and actually talk to people on the ground, and take a real interest in a particular case study [or] site, is to tease out the complexity that there are no simple heroes and villains.
There's all sorts of complicity and compromise involved in what drives species to extinction and in all of the efforts to conserve them.
So trying to flesh a lot of that out, that complexity, I think, is just a more nuanced account of what's going on. But it is also an account, as you say, that takes into consideration these bigger processes that we're all embedded in historically and today, that shape and constrain our possibilities for action, certainly, but also for imagination and response. So trying to draw that out, too, I think really matters in the way we tell these stories.
One of the really central things that I've tried to do is to think about how extinction impacts unevenly on different human communities. I started thinking about that when I was in India, thinking about the vultures, the decline of the vultures there, and talking to members of the Parsi community, the Zoroastrians who've traditionally exposed their dead to vultures inside these Towers of Silence; that they could no longer do this. That whole funerary system, with all of its really significant religious meanings was breaking down because the vultures had all but disappeared. And there were worries that a common pharmaceutical, one that even I was taking at the time, an anti-inflammatory diclofenac, that when the vultures consume that it kills them. So it also wasn't safe for them to eat the bodies of Parsi people.
You could tell that the story of the decline of the vultures in a whole lot of different ways. But from a Parsi perspective, it was very different and it impacted profoundly on people's sense of whether they could take care of their dead relatives in culturally appropriate ways. And we see that again and again around the world. And in my more recent snail work, as I mentioned a moment ago, a lot of that effort has been to think about what the decline of snails means for Kānaka Maoli, who have these beautiful stories about how the snails sing in the forest at night and beautiful cultural significances and stories that these snails hold in the world, in a really significant way.
And so to ask how the disappearance of snails impacts differently on people who live in that world, who inhabit a world where snails sing in the forest at night. That's different. So the effort to draw out those differences and to make them questions of justice in a way that attends to unequal impacts, I think, has to be key to how we think about biodiversity loss as it is with all of our environmental challenges.
Kamea Chayne: Absolutely. And your work has looked at species extinction in various parts of the globe, though the key examples we focused on in this conversation, both the snails and the ʻalalā have been in Hawai'i.
So I would love to wrap up this thread by exploring some of the acts of resistance and solidarity, as you note, "in at least a few places in Hawai‘i and the broader Pacific, Indigenous peoples and snails are engaged in vital practices of solidarity—with each other and with scientists, lawyers, and other concerned people—to protect their lands against the destructions wrought by the military and others." What are some of these collaborative and multispecies processes of resistance and creating alternate possibilities that have really inspired you?
Thom van Dooren: There are so many, but the one that I really spend time with in the snail book, is the work of the group of Mālama Mākua, who have been working on the Waianae coast of Oahu to resist the US army's destruction of the Mākua Valley, which is a sacred valley—[and] I mean, all valleys are sacred in important ways, but—"Mākua" means parents and this is an important site of creation, in some ways. But this is a valley that since the Second World War has been used by the Army and routinely blown up and used for live fire training and weapons dumping and detonation. So it's been really destroyed and that's impacted, of course, on the snails and other species that once lived in the valley, but also on cultural sites.
So I got really interested in that work, talking to folks from Mālama Mākua and visiting the Valley, which was itself just a real privilege and a kind of strange experience, in that it's still an army facility. And yet, as a result of lawsuits and struggles by Mālama Mākua, they now have cultural access to the valley. When people started to visit and see the place and connect with it, [it] really changed the struggle in really vital ways, [which is] something that Uncle Vince Dodge from Mālama Mākua really emphasized, in my discussions with him. And these cultural access visits to this valley are really strange, because you've got to be led by army personnel around the valley, so that you don't go off the path and you don't potentially tread on unexploded ordnance that could still be lying in the environment.
And in yet in the midst of all this, there's this group of people trying to connect and reconnect with this valley, and have this cultural visit. It's a really strange situation. And so I got obviously very interested in that, but also interested in particular in the work that the snails had done in that and how this kind of solidarity with snails and with the power of the Endangered Species Act to halt the US military in interesting ways, how the Mālama Mākua had been able to operationalize some of those laws where Indigenous people weren't protected by law, but endangered species were, in more significant ways and how they and their lawyers, Earthjustice really worked with that system and worked with the information we have about snails and their histories and presence in the valley to achieve what is really a great outcome in many ways, although one that's still quite uncertain in that valley.
Kamea Chayne: The last thing is—a lot of your work has this interplay between applying a microscopic lens on one particular species and their plight of endangerment or extinction, and then a zoomed out landscape view to connect those often siloed issues with broader global and historical contexts.
This has been an underlying theme throughout this discussion, but as we come to a close here, what message ultimately do you think this zooming in and out with scale and timescales tells us? And what are some of your remaining calls to action or inquiry for our listeners?
Thom van Dooren: I think that zooming out is really important, and it's important all the time, zooming in and out, as you say. But perhaps particularly important when we think about extinction, because I don't think we can really appreciate what species are, unless we do that work of deep time thinking, of understanding a species as an intergenerational process that is stretched over evolutionary time, that has been holding itself in the world, in myriad different ways and not in a static form, but evolving and shifting, and as different challenges arise, adapting. That…
Species are these remarkable, often hundreds of thousands or millions of years long projects in the world. When we take that lens on them, it opens up new avenues of appreciation that are not there if we just think about them as a collection of individuals who happen to be on the planet with us right now.
I think we can be drawn into a deeper sense of our obligations as well to look after the ecological community that we happen to be lucky enough to be sharing this moment of Earth's history with. And those are not incidental relationships. The species that we happen to share the planet with are the ones who nourish and provide for us, who have shaped our cultures and our languages and our ways of thinking. And this community that we have grown up in, as a species and as individuals, of course, and cultures.
This community has made us and we have, I think, this profound obligation to try to hold on to as much of it as we can. So that's one of the big things that I think that kind of zoomed out, deep time thinking has done for me in my work. And at the same time, of course, when we zoom back in, to the present day, we see how quickly and violently those evolutionary lineages can be snuffed out, in a matter of just a few human generations. In the case of the snails, we can take these multi-million-year evolutionary achievements, and we can in a hundred years, just destroy them. I think, again, I'm using the word we, in deeply problematic ways—some humans much more than others, some processes of destruction more than others.
So that's one of the things I've really tried to do with the zooming in and out, in a temporal way. But there are so many different insights that come from shifting our perspective. I guess this links back to your earlier point, about how we frame the question and the way that limits imaginative possibilities—again, how we frame things temporally and spatially constrains or opens out new possibilities.
So being, I guess, a bit promiscuous maybe, in our temporal and spatial orientations and humble at the same time, about which ways of knowing, which cultural lenses, which languages we think through, as Donna Haraway has put it, drawing on Marilyn Strathern, and the stories we use to tell other stories with.
By attending to those, I think we open up new possibilities for seeing issues and struggles anew.
~ musical intermission ~
Kamea Chayne: What has been an impactful book that you've read or a publication that you follow?
Thom van Dooren: Well, just recently I finished reading Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene, by Anna Tsing and Jennifer Deger, and their colleagues, and I think that's a totally brilliant book, it's sadly not out I think until next year, but definitely one to keep an eye out for. And in the meantime, I think their shared project, the Feral Atlas, which is online, is a great place to go looking for those kinds of really complex, nuanced, multi-layered, multi-temporal stories about our world.
Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra or practice you engage with to stay grounded?
Thom van Dooren: I meditate, and for the last year or so I've been trail running, and I've been finding that to be very grounding in a whole lot of ways I wasn't expecting. So for those who can, who have access to trails, and are able to run, which hasn't always been my case, but is at the moment... I'm finding that really grounding.
Kamea Chayne: What is your or one of your greatest inspirations at the moment?
Thom van Dooren: I think it's always my collaborators and my students who are a seemingly bottomless source of creativity and passion and insight. I think working with people, which is not always the way that artists and writers and humanities scholars and others, work. I think we're often taught to be these kinds of solo individuals, who are struggling on their own to create great insight—I think that's a real shame. And as I get on in my career, I work more and more collaboratively, and it's both stressful and frustrating, in some ways, but when you find the right people, it is just a remarkable gift.
Kamea Chayne: Thom, thank you so much for joining us here today. Really, really fascinating conversation. And I'm really looking forward to continue leaning into and sitting with everything that we discussed here. For now, though, what final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Thom van Dooren: Well, I think the thing that has really inspired and guided me, is to do as much as possible in life, to seek out the people and places and jobs where you can that really inspire your creativity and passion. I'm firmly of the view that long-term, sustainable, inclusive, life-afirming change can only come from directing those kinds of relationships and energies at the problem, from people sort of mobilizing the things that they're passionate about and that inspire their creativity. So rather than seeing that as a guilty pleasure, whatever it is that inspires your creativity and passion, I think, in the midst of so much crisis, we can sometimes do that, to find ways to channel it towards change.
So I hope I'm right. But for now, I think it's a way of continuing to contribute to so many of the big issues, while still having a life worth living. And I think especially for younger people who are growing up in the midst of climate anxiety and the climate crisis, I think it's so important to simultaneously be working to have a life that you find joyful and rewarding, and one that contributes to change in a positive way. So finding ways to bring those things together is, I think, a challenge and yet, really vital for people.
