Thom van Dooren

This article is an effort to dwell with the kinds of writing and thinking practices that we have been developing in our research, especially over the past seven years. This is an approach grounded in an attentiveness to the evolving ways of life of diverse forms of human and nonhuman life and in an effort to explore and perhaps restory the relationships that constitute and nourish them. Our aim is to develop “lively ethographies”: a mode of knowing, engaging, and storytelling that recognizes the meaningful lives of others and that, in so doing, enlivens our capacity to respond to them by singing up their character or ethos. Most of our work in this area has focused on extinction, but this approach might readily be taken up in a range of other contexts. This article alternates between two types of writing. One is expository and lays out an analysis of ethos, liveliness, storytelling, “response-ability,” and becoming witness. The second is performative, offering short ethographic vignettes that enact some of the qualities and approaches we have discussed. Here each of these vignettes is taken from our recent work in Hawai‘i, a deeply generative and often fraught field site that has inspired much of our thinking.

Scholars in the humanities and social sciences are experimenting with novel ways of engaging with worlds around us. Passionate immersion in the lives of fungi, microorganisms, animals, and plants is opening up new understandings, relationships, and accountabilities. This introduction to the special issue offers an overview of the emerging field of multispecies studies. Unsettling given notions of species, it explores a broad terrain of possible modes of classifying, categorizing, and paying attention to the diverse ways of life that constitute worlds. From detailed attention to particular entities, a multiplicity of possible connection and understanding opens up: species are always multiple, multiplying their forms and associations. It is this coming together of questions of kinds and their multiplicities that characterizes multispecies studies. A range of approaches to knowing and understanding others—modes of immersion—ground and guide this research: engagements and collaborations with scientists, farmers, hunters, indigenous peoples, activists, and artists are catalyzing new forms of ethnographic and ethological inquiry. This article also explores the broader theoretical context of multispecies studies, asking what is at stake—epistemologically, politically, ethically—in learning to be attentive to diverse ways of life. Are all lively entities biological, or might a tornado, a stone, or a volcano be amenable to similar forms of immersion? What does it mean to live with others in entangled worlds of contingency and uncertainty? More fundamentally, how can we do the work of inhabiting and coconstituting worlds well? In taking up these questions, this article explores the cultivation of “arts of attentiveness”: modes of both paying attention to others and crafting meaningful response.

For over a decade the Hawaiian crow ( Corvus hawaiiensis), or ‘alalā, has been extinct in the wild, the only remaining birds living their lives in captivity. As the time for possible release approaches, questions of species identity – in particular focused on how birds have been changed by captivity – have become increasingly pressing. This article explores how identity is imagined and managed in this programme to produce ‘authentic’ crows. In particular, it asks what possibilities might be opened up by a move beyond relatively static notions of how these birds ought to be, towards more performative understandings of species identity. This shift in focus prompts us to ask how we might take up the task of learning to be part of these birds’ own experiments in emergent forms of ‘crow-ness’, so that we might begin to craft vital new forms of ‘polite’ conservation in this era of incredible biodiversity loss.

Over the course of the latter part of the 20th century the notion that some animals might partake in a cultural form of life has gained growing support in the natural sciences. Iconic examples of tool using chimpanzees, sweet potato washing macaques, and milk bottle opening birds have captured scientific and popular interest alike. But at the same time that this effort to describe, define, and study animal cultures was developing, the global ecological crisis was deepening. This article explores this strange juxtaposition. It offers a critical overview of the concept of animal culture as it has taken shape in the natural sciences. Building on this foundation, the article explores how and why animal cultures matter at the edge of extinction, exploring possible roles for the environmental humanities, extinction studies, and philosophical ethology, in developing new approaches to the question of animal culture in a time of escalating biodiversity loss.

This article focuses on a small population of house crows in the town of Hoek van Holland in the Netherlands, likely descendants of two birds that arrived by ship in the mid-1990s. In 2014, after twenty years of peaceful co-existence, the government began the process of eradicating this population. Just across the water from Hoek van Holland is the Port of Rotterdam – Europe’s largest port – and an “engine” for the global patterns of production, trade and consumption that are today remaking our world, ushering in what many are calling “the Anthropocene.” Focusing on these crows and this port – in a way that is attuned to the broader placetimes that constitute our present – this paper explores the possibilities and limitations of hospitality as a basis for crafting shared worlds in difficult times.

‘We were driving through Death Valley, an American-Australian and two Aussies, taking the scenic route from Las Vegas to Santa Cruz.’ This multi-voiced account of multispecies encounters along a highway takes up the challenge of playful and humorous writing that is as well deeply serious and theoretically provocative. Our travels brought us into what Donna Haraway calls the contact zone: a region of recognition and response. The contact zone is a place of significant questions: ‘Who are you, and so who are we? Here we are, and so what are we to become?’ Events were everything in this ecology of play, in which the movements of all the actors involved the material field in its entirety. We were brought into dances of approach and withdrawal, dances emerging directly, to paraphrase Brian Massumi, from the dynamic relation between a myriad of charged particles.

In September 2011, a delicate cargo of 24 Nihoa Millerbirds was carefully loaded by conservationists onto a ship for a three-day voyage to Laysan Island in the remote Northwest Hawaiian Islands. The goal of this effort was to establish a second population of this endangered species, an “insurance population” in the face of the mounting pressures of climate change and potential new biotic arrivals. But the millerbird, or ulūlu in Hawaiian, is just one of the many avian species to become the subject of this kind of “assisted colonisation.” In Hawai'i, and around the world, recent years have seen a broad range of efforts to safeguard species by finding them homes in new places. Thinking through the ulūlu project, this article explores the challenges and possibilities of assisted colonisation in this colonised land. What does it mean to move birds in the context of the long, and ongoing, history of dispossession of the Kānaka Maoli, the Native Hawaiian people? How are distinct but entangled process of colonisation, of unworlding, at work in the lives of both people and birds? Ultimately, this article explores how these diverse colonisations might be understood and told responsibly in an era of escalating loss and extinction.

In the mid-1990s it was discovered that populations of three species of Asian vulture were disappearing at an unprecedented rate throughout India and the surrounding region. In attempting to convey the gravity of this situation we are often drawn to present it through numbers and data, to recount, for example, that 99 per cent of the Oriental white-rumped vultures are now gone. But is this an appropriately ethical response to the mass death of vultures and the likely extinction of their species? In contrast to these more conventional accounts of extinctions, this article takes up the pain of vultures and the claim for response and responsibility that this pain issues. Writing about pain brings individual vultures back into our accounts as ethical subjects. But inside the multispecies communities of life that we all inescapably inhabit, I argue that this responsibility requires a worldliness beyond discrete individuals, and consequently must be understood as a generative opening, drawing us into entangled accountabilities.

The collection of essays in this special issue of Environmental Philosophy addresses the role that temporality, or lived time, should have in environmental philosophy, and especially ethics. The role of time in environmental ethics has largely been restricted to an empty container for human agency to do good or ill. By understanding time as material, produced, constructed, maintained, lived, multiple, and a more-than-human concern, the authors in this collection are able to ask which times are liveable for humans and non-humans alike. Once the specificities of lived time are accounted for, it becomes clear that not all temporalities are identical and synchronous, and that environmental philosophy must attend to the ruptures in ecological time

A leading figure in the emerging field of extinction studies, Thom van Dooren puts philosophy into conversation with the natural sciences and his ethnographic encounters to vivify the cultural and ethical significance of modern-day extinctions. Unlike other meditations on the subject, _Flight Ways_ incorporates the particularities of real animals and their worlds, drawing philosophers, natural scientists, and general readers into the experience of living among and losing biodiversity. Each chapter of _Flight Ways_ focuses on a different species or group of birds: North Pacific albatrosses, Indian vultures, an endangered colony of penguins in Australia, Hawaiian crows, and the iconic whooping cranes of North America. Written in eloquent and moving prose, the book takes stock of what is lost when a life form disappears from the world--the wide-ranging ramifications that ripple out to implicate a number of human and more-than-human others. Van Dooren intimately explores what life is like for those who must live on the edge of extinction, balanced between life and oblivion, taking care of their young and grieving their dead. He bolsters his studies with real-life accounts from scientists and local communities at the forefront of these developments. No longer abstract entities with Latin names, these species become fully realized characters enmeshed in complex and precarious ways of life, sparking our sense of curiosity, concern, and accountability toward others in a rapidly changing world.