Thom van Dooren

Matthew Chrulew

Deborah Bird Rose

Extinction Studies focuses on the entangled ecological and social dimensions of extinction, exploring the ways in which extinction catastrophically interrupts life-giving processes of time, death, and generations. The volume opens up important philosophical questions about our place in, and obligations to, a more-than-human world. Drawing on fieldwork, philosophy, literature, history, and a range of other perspectives, each of the chapters in this book tells a unique extinction story that explores what extinction is, what it means, why it matters—and to whom.

Stories of Time, Death, and Generations

Extinction Studies

Wild Dog Dreaming explores what constitutes an ethical relationship with nonhuman others. Deborah Bird Rose asks whether we, as humans, are capable of loving and caring for the animals and plants that are disappearing in a cascade of extinctions. An inspiration for Roseand a touchstone throughout her bookis the endangered dingo of Australia.

Love and Extinction

Wild Dog Dreaming

Sharon D'Amico

Nancy Daiyi

This book provides an introduction to the connections between Aboriginal people and the land that has sustained and nurtured them for generations. Through the wonderful photographic images and the stories of the MakMak clan women (white-breasted sea eagle), readers are led into the heart of country: the people, the animals, the plants, the ancestors, the seasons -- and the intimate relationships which tie them together. The story is told through the voices of Indigenous academic, Linda Ford, and her family, the traditional custodians of Wagait country. Their story includes the challenges her people continue to meet to maintain the health of 'country'. As Ford says: 'Country gives us our identity'.

An Indigenous Australian Homeland

Country of the Heart

We are living in the midst of the Earth’s sixth great extinction event, the first one caused by a single species: our own. In Wild Dog Dreaming, Deborah Bird Rose explores what constitutes an ethical relationship with nonhuman others in this era of loss. She asks, Who are we, as a species? How do we fit into the Earth’s systems? Amidst so much change, how do we find our way into new stories to guide us? Rose explores these questions in the form of a dialogue between science and the humanities. Drawing on her conversations with Aboriginal people, for whom questions of extinction are up-close and very personal, Rose develops a mode of exposition that is dialogical, philosophical, and open-ended. An inspiration for Rose—and a touchstone throughout her book—is the endangered dingo of Australia. The dingo is not the first animal to face extinction, but its story is particularly disturbing because the threat to its future is being actively engineered by humans. The brazenness with which the dingo is being wiped out sheds valuable, and chilling, light on the likely fate of countless other animal and plant species. "People save what they love," observed Michael Soulé, the great conservation biologist. We must ask whether we, as humans, are capable of loving—and therefore capable of caring for—the animals and plants that are disappearing in a cascade of extinctions. Wild Dog Dreaming engages this question, and the result is a bold account of the entangled ethics of love, contingency, and desire.

Discusses the nature of Indigenous peoples' relationships to country, including sea and sky; idea of wilderness and "wild"; Dreaming; totems; sacred sites; responsibilities to country; caring for country, including firestick farming.

Deborah Bird Rose

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