Reconsidering Extinction in Terms of the History of Global Bioethics

Stan Booth, Chris Mounsey, Stan Booth, Chris Mounsey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000380279
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia moderna

Reconsidering Extinction in Terms of the History of Global Bioethics continues the Routledge Advances in the History of Bioethics series by exploring approaches to the bioethics of extinction from disparate disciplines, from literature, to social sciences, to history, to sustainability studies, to linguistics. Van Rensselaer Potter coined the phrase "Global Bioethics" to define human relationships with their contexts. This and subsequent volumes return to Potter's founding vision from historical perspectives, and asks, how did we get here from then? Extinction can be understood in terms of an everlasting termination of shape, form, and function; however, until now life has gone on. Where would we humans be if the dinosaurs had not become extinct? And we still manage to communicate, only not in proto-Indo-European, but in a myriad of languages, some more common than others. The answer is simple, after extinction events, evolution continues. But will it always be so? Has the human race set planet earth on a collision course with nothingness? This volume explores areas of bioethical interpretation in relation to the complex concept of extinction.

Part I

Delineating Contexts—Extinction

1 “Enough to Change a Planet”

Feeling Extinction in Contemporary Literature

Heather J. Hicks

When I was asked to share my thinking about extinction as a scholar of apocalyptic literature, I quickly realized that my thinking was really feeling. I grew up in a small rural American town in the western foothills of Maine, where my extended family has lived since the early nineteenth century. Now that I reside in a densely populated suburb of Philadelphia, I see more clearly how immersed we were in our natural environment during my childhood. The climate was severe—cold and snow stretched from October to May—and we were surrounded by meadows, swamps, and forest. My father selectively cut timber for our woodstove, maintaining the forest while others permitted clear-cutting by logging crews. In the summer, my parents mowed and baled the hay in our fields for my mother's two horses. I spent hours in the small swamp adjacent to our barn, where, over weeks each spring, I would attentively preside over the delicate transformation of tadpoles into frogs. My brother and I regularly walked with my grandmother to North Pond, a pristine body of water—the town's water supply—more than a mile up a dirt road behind her house, which neighbored ours. We would bring a picnic, and catch and release crawfish living under the rocks in the shallows along the shoreline. My mother and I would ride her horses for hours along old trails and dirt roads, with the only sounds of the clop of hooves and the drowsy buzzing of insects.

My parents were—and still are—extremely sensitive to changes in the natural world around them, noting if the bird population fluctuated, if trees were thriving or dying, or if there were more or less animal tracks on our property. Like so many men in our community, my father had been an avid hunter throughout his boyhood. After a “bad kill,” however, in which he wounded a deer and been forced to pursue it as it slowly died, he had sworn off this activity. In the otherwise restrained emotional dynamics of my family, the suffering of an animal elicited open and passionate expressions of distress, and thought or word of the extinction of an animal species was met with sorrow. My brother and I watched Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, a television show on one of the four networks then in operation, and any admonition by host Marlin Perkins that a featured animal was endangered would cause me a pang of grief.¹

That feeling of anguish is the starting point of this essay, the occasion for me to consider how human emotions—or what is often called affect in my discipline—have been portrayed in post-1945 literature about extinction, not as a helpless gesture but as a catalyst for change. In her groundbreaking 2016 study, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species, literary critic Ursula Heise argues that most contemporary texts concerning extinction communicate an underlying sense that “animals and, more rarely, plants and other organisms, are cultural tools and agents in humans’ thinking about themselves, their communities, their histories, and their futures.”² Heise and other scholars have identified feelings of sadness and grief as the primary affects—and elegy and tragedy as the major genres—that have been deployed to portray the human experience of extinction.³ Heise asks, “Is it possible to acknowledge the realities of large-scale species extinction and yet to move beyond mourning, melancholia, and nostalgia to a more affirmative vision of our biological future?”⁴ In what follows, I’ll suggest that, in the past half-century, literature about extinction has already offered complex affective alternatives to melancholy. I’ll also demonstrate that these emotions are represented not simply as individual, passive experiences, but as active means of changing our collective fate.

My exploration will begin with that reckless alchemist of literary forms and ideas, Philip K. Dick, and his masterpiece, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I’ll then turn to three more recent literary confrontations with extinction: William Gibson's Matrix Trilogy, Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam Trilogy, and Kim Stanley Robinson's Science in the Capital Trilogy, all of which owe debts to Dick's text. I will end with a brief coda concerning N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth Trilogy.⁵ Every literary critic and writer must at some point consider the way writing offers the possibility of a kind of immortality, an oblique hedge against human extinction: Humans doggedly live on through their books. Literature itself also lives on, evolving as generic traditions, narrative techniques, and even specific allusions are carried forward and adapted to new texts in new contexts. These transmissions are particularly evident in the literary genealogy I am undertaking here. Dick's prophetic novel, as well as Ridley Scott's 1982 film adaptation Blade Runner, inspired Gibson's trilogy.⁶ The hard-boiled vision of urban violence and invasive technologies Gibson perfected then shaped Atwood's novels. Robinson self-consciously wrote against the stylized dystopias of Dick and Gibson in his trilogy, and Jemisin reconsiders both the ethical risks and potential empowerment afforded by posthuman identities in terms shaped by what has come before. These authors are all writing about extinction and simultaneously nurturing strains of literary style and thought, shoring them against their own—and literature's—ruin.

As I reflect on my memories, the title of that classic television show, Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, becomes another circuit to follow into these texts. The mellifluous but enigmatic phrase “Mutual of Omaha” meant nothing to me as a child, and I never gave its relationship of possession to the so-called “Wild Kingdom” any thought. Yet human's paradoxically proprietary conception of “the wild’ emerges as a recurrent concern in contemporary narratives that treat species extinction. The influential literary works I will analyze here are unanimous in their indictment of capitalism and market forces as drivers of extinction, to which human emotion becomes a means of resistance. Within the economy they portray, grief is a luxury that humans cannot afford in the face of mass extinction. Other affects become more strategic avenues toward hope.

Extinction − Empathy = Entropy

The 1960s was a decade in which the twentieth-century environmental movement was taking shape in the U.S., so it is not a coincidence that one of the works of fiction of my acquaintance that most viscerally engages with the topic of species extinction was written in that period. In Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, set in San Francisco in 1992, most animals have become extinct as a consequence of radioactive fallout from a global nuclear war.⁷ The postapocalyptic setting—which puts to rest any doubts about humans having entered the Anthropocene—permits Dick to foreground the human emotional landscape as the only meaningful habitat left for endangered species. In Do Androids Dream, what matters is how animals make people feel—and specifically their capacity to make humans feel alive—in a context in which a nuclear conflict has brought home the fundamental, physical inevitability of the extinction of all life. For Dick, extinction is symptomatic of a cosmic struggle between life and death. The avatars of this struggle are two quite modern concepts—empathy, the purest affirmation of life as a collective experience, and entropy, the sinister telos toward which individual deaths converge. Empathy is presented as an egalitarian expression of care and engagement with biological life of all species, and as the emotional register that distinguishes the “human” as a positive manifestation of the abstract force of life which Dick presents as sacred. While the inevitability of entropy requires that the existential battle be fought primarily at an emotional rather than material level, there are also human impulses that can overshadow or derail empathy and accelerate entropy in Dick's cosmology. If empathy can forestall entropy, market forces and proprietary claims advance it, extinguishing the life force Dick presents as sustainable only when allowed to pass freely between organic beings.

While Dick's cold war preoccupation with nuclear fallout does not precisely align with the present environmental drivers of the sixth extinction, his novel is nonetheless powerful as a literary bellwether. With his trademark prescience, Dick imagines a huge die-out of birds as the first harbinger of the mass extinction event that befalls the Earth, a detail that eerily anticipates recent news reports of a catastrophic global shortfall in bird populations.⁸ Dick's protagonist, Rick Deckard, recalls the unfolding extinction, first evinced by the abrupt species collapse of owls:

A thousand thoughts came into his mind, thoughts about the war, about the days when owls had fallen from the sky; he remembered how in his childhood it had been discovered that species upon species had become extinct and how the ‘papes [sic] had reported it each day—foxes one morning, badgers the next, until people had stopped reading the perpetual animal obits.⁹

It is striking that Dick foresees not only the vulnerability of birds as the first sign of a mass extinction event but also the routine reporting of new instances of extinction of species. In his suggestion that humans could no longer tolerate reading these reports, Dick begins to suggest the significant emotional and psychological ramifications of extinction of animal species for the remaining humans.

Dick amplifies on heightened importance of endangered species to human's emotional well-being in his portrait of a post-war religious movement known as Mercerism, in which the death of animals is a crucial mythic element. Using a virtual reality-like device called an “empathy box,” followers merge with the enigmatic figure of Wilbur Mercer as he attempts to climb out of a pit while being pelted with rocks by faceless “killers.” According to the faith, Mercer himself was an animal lover with a mystical ability to bring creatures back to life, but his enemies stripped him of this power, and he is condemned to “the tomb world,” a hell littered with the bodies of dead animals.¹⁰ In a startling model of the sort of human-animal alliance often promoted in contemporary ecological discourse, Mercerism teaches that its prophet must find a way to relate to other species in order to escape from his damnation: “He could not get out until the bones strewn around him grew back into living creatures; he had become joined to the metabolism of other lives, and until they rose, he could not rise either.”¹¹ According to the ritual, the animals are eventually resurrected, and Mercer ascends the hill. Humans who interface with the empathy box “experience [themselves] as encompassing every other living thing.”¹² In this collective religious experience, “As long as some creature experienced joy, then the condition for all other creatures included a fragment of joy. However, if any living being suffered, then for all the rest the shadow could not be entirely cast off.”¹³ These religious practices suggest that mass extinction has placed the surviving humans in a state of emotional peril that can only be rectified by an affective interface among all living beings.

Yet, Dick takes this notion further still, implying that under the apocalyptic conditions that humans have created for themselves, compassion for animals becomes essential to sustaining the condition of humanity itself. The devastations of the war inspire the creation of artificial beings—both very life-like electronic animals and highly refined biological androids designed to work as slaves in outer-space colonies. Rick's job is to destroy andro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Is Extinction a Thing of the Past?
• PART I Delineating Contexts—Extinction
• PART II Applying Contexts—Extinction Does Not Lead to an “End”
• PART III Creating “New” Contexts—Evolution
• Contributors
• Index