This is the slightly revised text of a talk that I have presented at a few conferences over the last couple of years. It draws substantially on stories told in my book A World in a Shell, but does so in an effort to draw out and clarify the particular approach to multispecies storytelling that I have taken in much of my larger body of research.

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I’m not sure how it happened, but I’ve somehow found myself captivated by snails. To be specific, my fascination really centres on the terrestrial snails of Hawai‘i. From the beautifully patterned Achatinella lila that make their homes in the trees, cleaning rather than eating leaves, through to the ground-dwelling species that consume and recycle dead matter, species like Laminella sanguinea – which, incidentally, is equally beautiful but you wouldn’t know it because it covers its shell with a thin layer of its own excrement, for reasons that aren’t really fully understood. Despite their differences, one thing that these two snails have in common is that they are both critically endangered.

The Hawaiian Islands were once home to over 750 species of land snails, one of the most diverse assemblages to be found anywhere on earth.[i] Sadly, however, almost two-thirds of these species are now thought to be extinct, and the vast majority of those that remain are headed swiftly in the same direction.

The causes of this ongoing decline are complex. In the past, these snails suffered from extensive habitat loss as land was cleared for farming, ranching, tourism, the military and more. For a hundred years or so a shell collecting craze, led my missionary sons, also decimated many species, a period that some locals at the time referred to as “land shell fever.”[ii] The remaining species today are threatened primarily by introduced predators including rats, chameleons, and most significantly of all, a carnivorous snail, Euglandina rosea, a meticulous and disturbingly efficient predator of other snails.[iii]

But the puzzle that first drew me into thinking seriously about Hawai‘i’s snails, the question that first captured my interest and curiosity, was: how did all these snails end up out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, on the most remote oceanic archipelago in the world? Land snails, after all, are not known for their propensity to undertake long journeys, not by land and certainly not by sea. When we add to this fact their intolerance for salt water, the situation becomes even more confounding. As Charles Darwin summed it up many years ago: “Land-Molluscs are a great perplexity to me.”^[iv]

I have started this paper with snails, and their mucus covered forms will weave a network of silvery pathways throughout what follows. My aim in this paper is to present a potted overview of multispecies studies as I have practiced it. The snails, I hope, will serve as guides and empirical ground for the points I’d like to make, drawing in particular on my recent book.

In this paper I’d like to slow down with three key topics. Firstly, what is it that characterises multispecies work. I’ll focus on ‘passionate immersion’ (drawing on Anna Tsing), and ask about the ramifications of such an approach for the way in which we take up and work with diverse knowledges about the lives of nonhuman others.[v] Secondly, I’ll focus in on storytelling, to ask what it is and what it does in a multispecies context. Two particular interests of mine in this context are the ‘ethical charge’ of storytelling, and the capacity for multispecies stories to create new openings into questions of intra-human inequality and oppression. Thirdly, and finally, I’ll offer some thoughts on the ‘species’ category – what might we mean by it in multispecies work and how might thinking with and against species as taxonomic units help us to see the world differently.

Taken together, my hope is that these three strands will provide a fuller picture of the possibilities opened up by a distinctively multispecies approach to storytelling in and for these ‘catastrophic times’ (to borrow a phrase from Isabelle Stengers).[vi] In the concluding section of this paper I will turn to that topic, considering the role of multispecies stories in understanding and responding to “disasters”.

PART 1: Passionate immersion

Attending to scientists as they attend to snails is one of the key ways in which I have practiced the art of what Anna Tsing calls “passionate immersion” in the lives of nonhuman others. I take this kind of immersion to be the hallmark of multispecies scholarship, as I argued in a co-authored paper with Eben Kirksey and Ursula Münster. This kind of immersion aims:

To provide “thick” accounts of the distinctive experiential worlds, modes of being, and biocultural attachments of other species. Immersive ways of knowing and being with others involve careful attention to what matters to them—attention to how they craft shared lives and worlds… In short, passionate immersion means becoming curious and so entangled, “learning to be affected” and so perhaps to understand and care a little differently.[vii]

This is a broad mandate, and one that can be taken up in diverse ways – drawing on diverse knowledge traditions. In my own work, the knowledges about other species of various scientists (from taxonomists and ecologists to cognitive biologists and biogeographers) has frequently been brought into conversation with those of Indigenous peoples. But other multispecies scholars have drawn in systematic ways on the other-than human knowledges of hunters, farmers, fishers, animal trainers, artists, and many others. 

Of course, all of these ways of knowing, of taking an interest in what interests other species, are grounded in particular practices and systems of knowledge-making. Whether they’re those of the close observation of the ethnographer themselves, or those of others. As decades of critical scholarship in the humanities and social sciences has explored, these practices and systems of knowledge-making have their own histories and politics: none of them provides unmediated access to the lives of other organisms and species. And so, in engaging these literatures and approaches we are drawn into epistemic questions about how we, or others, know what we think we know about nonhumans. Of course, these epistemic questions are not just that. They are, in Karen Barad’s terms, ethico-onto-epistemic questions: requiring us to ask how what we think we know comes to matter, always unequally, in the lives and worlds of others.

I take this kind of situated interrogation of our knowledges about nonhuman others to be a core part of multispecies scholarship. But it cannot become the sole focus. Passionate immersion in the lives of nonhumans is not the same thing as a passion for what various humans think about the lives of nonhumans. Focusing exclusively, or primarily, on humans and their knowledge-making practices in relation to other species allows thenonhumans to fall into the background—as they have so often before for scholars in the humanities and social sciences—to become an always deferred object of empirical exploration. As Deborah Bird Rose was fond of summing up such a situation, we end up with humans talking about humans, talking about animals. And that’s if we’re lucky, many more degrees of deferral are possible in discussions of how the film critic, reads the philosophers’ discussion of the artwork, of the animal, etc.

While this kind of work certainly has an important place in multispecies scholarship, for me it is not what characterises it. Instead, passionate immersion asks us to also try to say something meaningful about the actual lives of nonhuman others – as Donna Haraway described it in When Species Meet, to take that tentative step of inter-species curiosity.[viii] In short, it is a scholarship that feels a need to keep coming back to, to be genuinely interested in, the lives of nonhumans: how they live, what matters to them, how they make meaning and relationships, how they make worlds. We must do so carefully, tentatively, critically, but we must also try to give an account of nonhuman modes of life.

In much of my own work on extinction, the effort to thickly describe the way of life of a given species is an attempt to capture in some way what is being lost—it’s uniqueness and its significance to diverse others. In this way, these descriptions aim to draw audiences into these nonhuman worlds and create spaces for wonder, appreciation, and care to bubble up.

I take Anna Tsing to be making a similar point when she noted in that same essay that I referenced a moment ago, written early in her mushroom work, that there is “a new science studies afoot” and that this passionate immersion is at its core:

Once such immersion was allowed only to natural scientists, and mainly on the condition that the love didn’t show. The critical intervention of this new science studies is that it allows learnedness in natural science and all the tools of the arts to convey passionate connection. In common with nature writing, its job is communication and mobilizing the public. It also takes on the task of asking hard questions, philosophical, social, and scientific, and, with the privilege of scholarship, lingering over each. Writers of this new genre, including myself, are excited by the chance to trespass across the boundaries between the natural sciences and the humanities.[ix]

Here, and in much of her other writing, Tsing is not abandoning the kind of descriptive, immersive, natural history work of the nature writer, but tweaking it—albeit in a significant way.

At its core is an effort to work with knowledges about nonhuman lives in a particular way. To sum things up too crudely, we might understand multispecies studies as an approach that combines the impulses of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and natural history writing. There are STS accounts that tell us an awful lot about the history of primatology, for example, the people involved, the cultural factors that drove their research, and more, but that tell us next to nothing about the primates themselves, how they spend their days, what matters to them. Then, of course, there are natural historical accounts, often written by scientists and science writers, that propose to tell us a lot about the lives of primates in precisely this way, but that bracket out any of the real questions and complexity related to how those understandings are produced and maintained. In my view, multispecies scholarship is that body of work that tries to do both of these things at once. There is, as Bruno Latour has framed it, a genre of “alternative natural history” emerging here in which “everything that had been excluded from ‘natural’ renderings of life is slowly brought back.”^[x] I take it that multispecies storytelling is one important strand of this effort to remake traditional genres of writing about the natural world in a way that insists that nature writing has always been, and must more accountably embrace its position as, a kind of naturalcultural writing.

Rather than just drawing on the natural sciences, however, this work is often an effort to bring diverse knowledge traditions together. Inspired by Haraway’s approach to ‘situated knowledges’, it aims to network partial perspectives—and in so doing to create fuller, more accountable, knowledges about and with others (storytelling is a key part of how this is done in practice, and I’ll say more about this in a moment).[xi] From one perspective, we might say that situating knowledges is only part of the work of multispecies studies. It must also include an effort to thickly describe—as best we can, however tentatively—the actual ways of life of other species. But I think it might be more accurate to say that this kind of thick description is itself part of an expanded sense of what it means to situate knowledges. In other words, in this time of extinctions, engaging responsibly with diverse knowledges about nonhuman lifeways is precisely to find new ways of helping these knowledges speak to and against this unfolding crisis. Of course, the effort to do so in practice sometimes means that we don’t take up, or we footnote, some of the more technical questions about how and why knowledges are produced. As such, I frequently find myself asking: do I want to slow down more with how that fact was produced, with the histories and practices it emerges from, or will that distract—in a way that is perhaps not really necessary—from the story I want to tell here, from the effort to convey some of what is precious and remarkable about this disappearing way of life, and so from the connections I want to foster between the reader and an endangered species?

PART 2: Storytelling

Amongst all of the fascinating stories that might be told about snails in Hawai‘i, those of Kānaka Maoli, or Native Hawaiians, stand out. Without doubt the most consistent theme across numerous Hawaiian mo‘olelo and mele (stories and songs), is the idea that snails sing in the forest. But they don’t just sing at any old time. Rather, their singing is deeply meaningful, often said to occur as a sign that after a series of adventures, changes, or turbulence, all is “pono” again—all is “righteous, correct, and good.”[xii]

In recent years, however, the cultural significance of snails has taken new forms in Hawai‘i. Of particular interest to me has been their role in efforts to resist the destruction of Kānaka land and culture.[xiii]  In this respect I have had the privilege of learning more about the work of the group Mālama Mākua. Since the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and subsequent colonisation of the islands by the United States in the late 19^th century, more and more land in Hawai‘i has been swallowed up by the U.S. military for bases and other facilities. For decades now Mālama Mākua have waged a sustained struggle against the Army to reclaim Mākua Valley on the Island of O‘ahu, a sacred place that has long been used for live-fire training and munitions detonations and dumping. Snails have been a key component of this work. While cultural sites in the valley long went unacknowledged, the U.S. Endangered Species Act gave these people a basis for a lawsuit, and the opportunity to bring the Army to the negotiating table. Navigating emerging forms of multispecies solidarity with snails and snail scientists, Mālama Mākua have been able to prevent any further destruction of this place for almost two decades, while the U.S. military has also, initially very reluctantly, become one of the largest funders of snail conservation in the islands.

My exploration of snail worlds in Hawai‘i—like my previous multispecies work—takes the form of a set of stories. This is by no means the only way to do multispecies scholarship, but it is one that appeals to me for a variety of reasons. Not least amongst these motivations for storytelling is the previously mentioned desire to draw wider audiences into a sense of appreciation for nonhuman life. But there is more to multispecies storytelling than the simple fact that narratives can be memorable, accessible, and engaging to wider audiences.[xiv]

Much of my effort to think through storytelling has been a collaboration with the late Deborah Bird Rose. In particular, we’ve explored how this approach might be an important ethical work – in our case, often in particular response to the multispecies communities that form, and are at stake, at the edge of extinction. We have argued for “lively ethographies”: stories that allow us to thicken the presence of these beings at the edge of extinction, to add flesh to the bones of the dead and dying. Our contention has been that as we learn more about, for example, snail biogeography and evolution, or about their reproductive and other behaviors, these creatures become something more than another Latin binomial on a long list. They emerge as distinctive ways of life.[xv]

At the same time, these kinds of stories are also able to draw out how these particular ways of life mattered for others; that as they disappear, they unravel whole constellations of relationships.In this way, the ‘focal species’ or group of species that animates our inquiries is a starting point rather than an exhaustive focus. Our stories ripple out from these forms of life to consider the wider worlds that they are co-constituted in and with.

For example, what becomes of the forest ecologies that snails contributed to as they disappear, the soils they helped to produce, the plants whose leaves they once cleaned? (Hawai‘i’s tree snails did not eat leaves but rather scraped the microbes from their surfaces). The answers to these ecological questions are actually a little bit of a puzzle, but that is a topic for another day. Or, we might also ask, what does the decline and disappearance of snails mean to Kānaka Maoli who have inherited stories of singing snails? What becomes of these stories when there are no more snails left in the forest? Extinction ripples out into the world in myriad ways, cutting across imagined distinctions between ecology and culture. Good stories help us to see and become responsible for these ripples.

In storying particular species losses in this way, we have worked to highlight that there is no singular extinction phenomenon: each species lost is its own unique happening. In fact, we have aimed to particularize the process of extinction even more than this, insisting that for any given extinction there is no singular meaning or experience – rather, there is a set of entangled, deeply unequal, unravelings (and, of course, reravelings, for better or worse).

More than simply recounting this complexity, we have argued that stories offer a particularly rich mode of grappling with it. In other words, as I noted a moment ago, that storytelling is, or can be, a fundamentally ethical work. The kinds of extinction stories we have advocated for have emphasized the importance of allowing multiple meanings to travel alongside one another, holding open possibilities and interpretations and refusing the kind of closure that prevents others from speaking or becoming.[xvi] While stories can certainly be crafted in an effort to shut down this kind of complexity and force through particular conclusions, they can also be vital technologies for other, more open and ongoing, engagements with the world.

It is this capacity of storytelling to summon up a thicker sense of the diverse, overlapping, and sometimes conflicting, meanings and consequences of extinction that we have found so ethically productive. Grounded in established critiques of ethics as a calculable and generalizable domain, we have worked to hold open questions of what or who matters and why—to relentlessly ask, with others, what does this loss mean, for whom, and what else is possible here?[xvii] In this context storytelling is an effort to draw ever more voices and perspectives into the discussion, to attend to the situated complexity of this extinction, this encounter, and in so doing craft a response—albeit one that is necessarily partial, contestable, and open to revision. As Stengers has put it: “What you are responsible for is paying attention as best you can, to be as discerning, as discriminating as you can about the particular situation. That is, you need to decide in this particular case and not to obey the power of some more general reason.”[xviii]

The point of telling stories like these, of course, is not simply to inform but to transform, and it is here that much of their ethical charge lies. As the philosopher Megan Craig notes: “the stories we tell and those we hear bear profoundly upon the texture of our lives and our openness or closedness to other forms of life.”[xix] In summoning up other beings and their worlds of relationship, stories draw us into a situated encounter, into new understandings and with them new response-abilities.[xx]

I take it that one of the key commitments of such an approach is the notion that storying with various plants, animals, and other nonhumans provides a unique and valuable vantage point on human lives and dramas, including systems of intra-human inequity and oppression. It is certainly possible for efforts to think through ‘the environment’, or take seriously the wellbeing of animals and plants, to end up homogenising humanity in problematic ways. There is a great deal of scholarship and activism that has done just this; and decades of scholarship on intersectional approaches to animals and environments that has critiqued such approaches. But as I understand it, the effort in multispecies studies to pay serious attention to the nonhuman is not an effort to abandon all of the good work in anthropology, cultural studies, and other fields that has attended to human difference, ways of life, and social and political structures, in complex and nuanced ways. Rather, it is an addition or supplement to those approaches. The goal is explicitly one of multiplication—of attending to human and nonhuman difference—multiplying voices, agencies, matterings, in an effort to produce better accounts of and possibilities for our unavoidably, even if only ever partially, shared worlds.

While multispecies scholarship must surely avoid simply putting other species in the service of better understanding and responding to human dramas—these other species also matter, in and of themselves—I am firmly of the view that if multispecies scholarship has nothing interesting or useful to say about process of colonization, militarization, globalization, and more, then something has gone very wrong. But I don’t think that’s the case. Across a growing body of multispecies work we are learning, for example, how working with elephants in India enables not only conservation outcomes, but creates and reinforces particular kinds of class structures (Ursula Münster); how a deadly fungus provides not only material aid but inspiration for resistance to emerging plantations for the Marind people of West Papua (Sophie Chao), how salmon farming in Japan has taken form through complex material-semiotic practices of comparison that have simultaneously shaped fish bodies and landscapes, but also notions of nationhood, of civilization, of masculinity, and more (Heather Swanson).[xxi] 

And, in my own recent work, I hope we are learning more about how snails might become allies for Kānaka Maoli in their struggles to protect Mākua Valley. As Uncle Sparky, a kupuna and leader of the group Mālama Mākua, put it in his response to an early draft of my writing on the valley, it is an effort to reweave a familiar tale, to draw attention to the profound role that snails have had, and in so doing “elevate one of Hawai’i’s smallest and slowest snails into Mākua’s greatest warriors.”[xxii]

In multispecies scholarship, passionate immersion in the lives of nonhumans does not simply travel alongside a discussion of and interest in questions of intra-human politics and justice. Rather, it becomes a vital new way into these topics. Offering new perspectives, new opportunities, new allies, and identifying possible obstacles and pitfalls.

Sometimes taking nonhumans seriously matters in these contexts because, as intersectional analyses have shown, diverse systems of oppression around categories of race, species, gender, and more are mutually reinforcing. As such, they are best understood and addressed in their interwoven, structural, forms—not one at a time. But these general structures take material form in myriad ways within diverse more-than-human landscapes—messy, uncertain, and sometimes surprising ways that don’t necessarily work out how anyone thinks they will. As such, what is needed is the careful work of tracking in detail—historical, ethnographic, ecological, and more—precisely how these relationships and possibilities are taking form, so as to create new entry points into alternative worldings.

PART 3: Species

Through my snail research I have been increasingly drawn to the science of taxonomy; to the fine-grained work of specialists studying snail shells, anatomy, and genetics in order to piece together an understanding of who is who. This is fascinating work that moves between museum collections, laboratories, and the field, and draws on a range of resources to carefully construct these entities we call species. In the worlds of snails, species certainly cannot be readily distinguished by the lay person – perhaps not even by the specialist without the use of sequencing or dissection. They are pieced together and contested in fascinating ways.

In much of my former work, mostly focused on birds, taxonomy sat quietly in the background. Everyone seemed to be largely in agreement about what, or who, the endangered species in question was. To be sure, every now and again questions popped up about the threat of hybridisation, or possible sub-species, or even whether a new behaviour might undermine the ‘authenticity’ of the species that conservationists were trying to hold onto. But in snail worlds, taxonomy is present in a very different way. Some of my interlocutors call it ‘triage taxonomy,’ identifying species as an integrated part of efforts to save them, and of course focusing on describing species that there is still time to help.

There are many questions to be asked here, including, whether or not conservation should be so species-centric in its thinking. But in so far as it is, official taxonomic designations—even with all their contestations and shifts, especially once we get beyond the worlds of mammals and birds—carry most of the weight. And so, how different scientists, with a focus on different taxa, define what a species is and go about describing it, matters – and of course, these practices and species definitions are multiple (Eben Kirksey’s work on the praxiography of species offers a lovely discussion of this[xxiii]).

But I resist the suggestion that ‘species’ is simply a western scientific, or a Eurocentric, category. Haraway has already charted the much more complex and much broader etymological histories and possibilities of this term. I want to hold onto these. As such, I read the term ‘species’ as an invitation to take seriously all manner of different practices of distinguishing and difference making, human and not.

These include Indigenous and other cultural modes of taxonomizing. The many, beautiful, evocative, names for snails in Hawai‘i highlight the close attention and the profound significance that these beings hold for Kānaka Maoli. Amongst them, some of my favourites include pūpū-kani-oe, literally translating as “shell sounding long” (referencing the snail singing I mentioned a moment ago), and pūpū-moe-one, “shell that sleeps in the sand”, and “hinihini‘ula” the “shell with beautiful rainbow colors.” But Kānaka taxonomy is not simply a question of names. It is also a detailed system of ordering kinds. Sadly, we don’t have information on how this was traditionally done for snails—although I hope it might one day be found in the voluminous database of Hawaiian language records from the missionary and early colonial periods. But we do have details on the birds, carefully synthesised by Noah J. Gomes, in a text that highlights some of the different ways in which avian life was traditionally categorised into higher order taxonomic groups around considerations such as utility to people, the environments in which birds were found, and the ecological function of the bird.[xxiv]

Attending to different ways of naming and categorizing snails and other species matters. Not least because it allows us to see how scientific approaches to taxonomy have been—and in some ways continue to be—implicated, or at least complicit, in the colonising process. Here, old names and ways of ordering the world are forcefully overwritten by the distancing, unfamiliar, languages of the newly arrived – frequently in ways that celebrate the colonizers by attaching their names to ‘newly discovered’ kinds. For Hawai‘i’s snails, Achatinella dolei is a case in point. Named in 1895—two years after the overthrow of the Hawaiian queen and her government—the published species description notes: “We take pleasure in dedicating this beautiful shell to His Excellency S. B. Dole, First President of the Republic of Hawaii.”[xxv]

But, importantly, it is not just other humans making what we might think of, expansively, as taxonomic distinctions. Vinciane Despret, for example, urges us to consider how it is that lions understand lion-ness, how they decide who is and is not a lion.[xxvi] Eben Kirksey reminds us about how wasps align themselves with particular “kinds” of fig trees. As their key pollinators, the way in which wasps identify appropriate figs matters for the future of these species, allowing pollination, but sometimes also “cross”-pollination between what might be thought about as different species of fig tree. But perhaps they are not different species from a wasp’s perspective and so will not be able to be for much longer from other perspectives either, that is if wasps continue their “cross-pollinating” work.[xxvii]

Even amongst the snails, all sorts of fine-grained divisions are being made about others. For the most part these seem to be mucus-centred, with snails using their chemoreceptive senses to read cues in the mucus trails laid down by others. On this basis, research has shown, they’re generally pretty good at determining who is and is not one of their kind—and so who might be a potential mate, predator or prey, or perhaps just a good guide to a suitable spot to seal up during the heat of the day. How knowledges of these snail practices of slime trail reading and following are themselves pieced together is itself a fascinating story—what cues do different species pick up on, how, and why?

In Hawai‘i, they are also highly consequential stories, as the most significant threat to most of the remaining species is predation by Euglandina rosea, the recently introduced carnivorous snail. Although brought to the islands in an attempt to control other introduced snail pests in agricultural contexts, these predatory snails were more than capable of adding the native species to their menu, and of picking up on—and it seems preferentially—following their slime trails and consuming them, rather than the supposed ‘target species’.

How nonhumans make these kinds of taxonomic distinctions matters profoundly. And so, tuning into it matters in our storytelling. As Genese Marie Sodikoff has noted in her work on plague in Madagascar in which she aims to investigate what she calls “nonhuman taxonomies”, that is, “the preferences and ranked choices of nonhuman life forms.”[xxviii]

In short then, I take ‘species’ as an invitation to pay attention to how diverse humans and other species interact with different kinds—how they make consequential cuts in a world of differences that hold significance for them in one way or another, often different differences to the ones that ‘we’ might be focused on.

Here we see that the question of species—understood in this broad sense as an attention to the different modes of life that we share and make worlds with—leads back to passionate immersion. To ask about what makes a particular mode of life distinctive to ask how a particular being does its worlds, is to begin the process of passionate immersion. Of course, to immerse oneself in a particular nonhuman ‘mode of life’ is not necessarily to attend to the way of life of a biological species. The way of life of the Achatinella tree snails—the whole genus of them—might be similar enough, at least from my perspective, that it is impossible to attend to species level differences. Meanwhile, the distinctive cultures of different groups of foxes living in rural and urban environments, or the stark differences in lifeways between a migratory whooping crane and another bird of the same species raised in captivity that has never even flown, might be understood to be distinct ways of life in ways that really matter.[xxix]

Thinking about these different modes of life as ethea (ethos in the singular), Deborah Bird Rose and I have described our storytelling work as ethography.[xxx] We have argued for the need to disrupt any assumed correlation between ēthea and the biological species of scientific taxonomists. Instead, how these cuts are made—what is recognised as a distinctive ethea—depends in large part on who is looking (or sensing), for what purpose, and to address what questions or issues. Attending to these difference making apparatuses—to which kinds of life are understood, differentiated, and valued in what ways, and which are lumped together or ignored entirely—is itself part of this work.

And yet, wherever, and however, these cuts are made—and the where and how matter profoundly—the fact remains that we inhabit a world of startling diversity, a world in which much of that diversity is threatened—and not piece by piece, but in its intergenerational capacity to sustain itself. Learning to understand that diversity is essential both to more fully appreciating others and our obligations to hold open room for them, as well as to the practical cultivation of actual modes of life and spaces in which these diverse others might themselves thrive, that is in creating the particular contexts that make life both possible and meaningful for them.

In this way, the threat of extinction also need not be, must not be, reduced to losses that register through the lens of the taxonomic sciences. Instead, or as well, we might ask about the loss of a particular behaviour: say the end of migration for those creatures whose lands are now crisscrossed by fences and other barriers. Or the loss of a particular population that brings about the unravelling of an ecological relationship or a traditional cultural practice. In these cases, the fact that a given species goes on living in some other part of the world—perhaps only in captivity—does little to stem this loss. And, of course, we might also ask after what extinction means for other-than-humans, how it might, for example be experienced by those last individuals of a kind, perhaps as a growing cloud of isolation and loneliness in which calls go unanswered, familiar scents disappear from the air.

In all of these ways the notion of an ethea, a way of life, might be relevant—might be thought with and against—to explore relationships and their breakdown—processes of worlding and unworlding—that are not constrained by biological species categories, not constrained by scientific modes of biological difference making, not even constrained by human modes of differencing.

Conclusion

This kind of multispecies storytelling has much to offer in responding to the unfolding catastrophe of our time. Refusing neat distinctions between humans and everyone else, it offers a vital mode of understanding and communicating the complex, entangled, naturalcultural reality of life and death on this planet: of how all of us come into and out of being; of how we together make and unmake worlds. In short, as Eben Kirksey, Ursula Munster and I noted in a co-authored paper: “Only-human stories will not serve anyone in a period shaped by escalating and mutually reinforcing processes of biosocial destruction—from mass extinction to climate change, from globalization to terrorism.”[xxxi]

This kind of multispecies analysis might provide a foundation from which to prepare for and respond to disasters of many kinds, from extinction events, and the floods, fires, droughts and more connected to escalating processes of climate change, to the accumulating impacts of a growing number of toxicants. All of these disasters are unavoidably multispecies stories. This is true even if we limit our concept of ‘species’ to biological taxa, but even more obviously the case if we deploy the term expansively. Here it bears noting that I, like many other scholars working in this space, don’t think that multispecies studies ought to limit itself to the living world. Scholars like Kim TallBear and Hugo Reinert have thoughtfully sketched the ‘way of life’—or perhaps ‘way of being’—of stones, rivers, viruses, and other supposedly nonliving entities.[xxxii] This is not to say that there aren’t differences here—between a stone and a snail, for example—but rather that there are also differences between different stones: the way of being, of formation, erosion, ecological relation, of sandstone is not that of granite. Importantly, these are differences that often make a difference; that consequentially influence what is possible in their presence.  In short, the point is that multispecies approaches need not limit themselves to the modes of being that some people consider to be alive.

Importantly, in storying disaster, multispecies approaches must emphasise the inescapably biocultural nature of these events. This is a point that has been made well by others, attending to the social, economic, and political contexts within which all disasters emerge and are experienced, and consequently insisting that there is no such thing as a ‘natural disaster.’ But the complexity also exists in the opposite direction. Supposedly ‘human made’ disasters also, always, involve diverse nonhumans in their origins and impacts. We might think of mangroves sheltering—or failing to shelter—urban developments from storms; viruses mutating and proliferating to evade human efforts at containment; or the way in which water hyacinth have taken advantage of the conditions created by engineering projects to spread throughout riverine ecosystems causing significant damage and disturbance to diverse human projects (Anna Tsing). In all of these cases, and countless others like them, nonhumans exert a vital agency in producing what is seen by many to be a “disaster”—but, of course, taking nonhuman perspectives seriously also reminds us that what counts as a disaster for some, is anything but for others.

A multispecies approach holds this complexity together, exploring the many forms of more-than-human agency that co-produce so-called disasters. But importantly, it also aims to multiply our sense of who a given event, or change, is a disaster for and how. In short, it aims to attend both to the agency of nonhumans and to diverse impacts on nonhumans, so as to better articulate the significance of these events for a diversity of beings, how they matter to them, and how their needs might be more fully considered.

Importantly, however, a multispecies lens would also push us to situate any given disaster within the broader context that we might think of today as our “catastrophic times.” In borrowing this phrase from Isabelle Stengers, I aim to remember that the many disasters we face today ought not to be understood as occasional interruptions in an otherwise peaceful world. While I’m sure there are many ways to think disaster, to my ear it has this connotation of event, rupture, interruption. In contrast, the ‘catastrophic times’ that Stengers describes are now unavoidably with us. They are not going anywhere, there will be no “return to normal”—whatever this might mean. As Stengers puts it, Gaia has been awakened “we cannot ignore her, we cannot send her away, we cannot put her back to sleep.”[xxxiii] In framing our situation in this way, Stengers pushes beyond a fixation on singular crises or disasters. Whether we’re thinking about this flood, this fire, this species extinction, or thinking at a larger scale about global climate change or the biodiversity crisis more generally, we are still thinking too small, too simply, too disconnectedly. The catastrophe of our times is multiple, and it cuts across supposedly natural and cultural domains.

This is very much how I understand the Hawaiian snail stories I have shared with you today. The ongoing extinction of snail species is not a disaster, or even a set of disasters. It is not something that is neatly separable from the broader disaster of biodiversity loss in Hawai‘i (one of the extinction capitals of the world), or from the many disasters of a changing climate, or from the ongoing disasters of colonialism, militarism, and gross economic inequality that characterise life in these islands, and on and on we go. Any adequate understanding of this situation, and any meaningful effort to imagine and enact alternatives, must be able to hold this kind of naturalcultural complexity together. I take it that this is a key part of what Stengers aims to do when she draws our attention to the fact that we are living in catastrophic times. Good storytelling, multispecies storytelling, aims to do precisely this.

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[i] To put this in some sort of context, Hawai’i had two-thirds of the number of snail species that are found in the whole of North America, a landmass roughly 1,700 times the size.

[ii] D.D. Baldwin, “The Land Shells of the Hawaiian Islands,” Hawaiian Almanac and Annual (1887). 55-56

[iii] These carnivorous snails are able to track the slime trails of native snails, using the specialised elongated lips to read chemical traces (lips that look quite a bit like an overside moustache).

[iv] Charles Darwin, in a letter to Alfred Russel Wallace in 1857

[v] Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2012. “Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species.” Environmental Humanities 1 141–54.

[vi] Stengers, Isabelle. 2015. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Open Humanities Press.

[vii] van Dooren, Thom, S. Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster. 2016. “Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness.” Environmental Humanities 8 (1): 1–23.

[viii] Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

[ix] Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2012. “Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species.” Environmental Humanities 1 141–54.

[x] Bruno Latour made this point in his endorsement of A World in a Shell, see: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262547345/a-world-in-a-shell/

[xi] Haraway, Donna. 1991. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 183–202. New York: Routledge.

[xii] Sato, Aimee You, Melissa Renae Price, and Mehana Blaich Vaughan. 2018. “Kāhuli: Uncovering Indigenous Ecological Knowledge to Conserve Endangered Hawaiian Land Snails.” Society & Natural Resources 31 (3): 320–34.

[xiii] For further information on the work of Mālama Mākua see https://www.malamamakua.org.

[xiv] Griffiths, Tom. 2007. “The Humanities and an Environmentally Sustainable Australia.” Ecological Humanities, Australian Humanities Review 43

[xv] van Dooren and Rose, “Lively Ethography”; Rose, van Dooren, and Chrulew, Extinction Studies. For a discussion that seeks to complicate the distinction between narratives and databases of extinction, see Heise, Imagining Extinction, 62-86.

[xvi] Smith, “Hermenuetics and the Culture of Birds.”

[xvii] Lawlor, This is Not Sufficient; Haraway, When Species Meet; Rose, “Slowly”; Stengers, “The Cosmopolitical Proposal”; Ginn, Beisel, and Barua, “Flourishing With Awkward Creatures.” 

[xviii] Stengers, Isabelle. “Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices.” Cultural Studies Review 11, no. 1 (2005): 183–96.

[xix] Craig, Megan. 2014. “Narrative Threads: Philosophy as Storytelling.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 28 438–53.

[xx] Haraway, When Species Meet, 86-90.

[xxi] Münster, Ursula. 2014. “Working for the Forest: The Ambivalent Intimacies of Human–Elephant Collaboration in South Indian Wildlife Conservation.” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 81 425–47; Chao, Sophie. 2022. In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-human Becomings in West Papua. Durham and London: Duke University Press; Swanson, Heather Anne. 2022. Spawning Modern Fish. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

[xxii] Van Dooren, Thom (forthcoming) “Military Snails: Multispecies Solidarities in Hawai‘i” in Roman Bartosch, Ursula K. Heise, and Kate Rigby (eds) Unsettling Extinction: Biodiversity Loss and the Environmental Humanities.

[xxiii] Kirksey, S. Eben. 2015. “Species: A Praxiographic Study.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21 758–80.

[xxiv] Gomes, Noah. 2020. “Reclaiming Native Hawaiian Knowledge Represented in Bird Taxonomies.” Ethnobiology Letters 11 (2): 30–43.

[xxv] van Dooren, Thom. 2022. A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

[xxvi] Despret, Vinciane. 2008. “The becomings of subjectivity in animal worlds.” Subjectivity 23 123–39.

[xxvii] Kirksey, S. Eben. 2015. “Species: A Praxiographic Study.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21 758–80.

[xxviii] Sodikoff, Genese Marie. 2012. “Totem and Taboo Reconsidered: Endangered Species and Moral Practice in Madagascar.” In The Anthropology of Extinction: Essays on Culture and Species Death, edited by Genese Marie Sodikoff, 67–87. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

[xxix] van Dooren, Thom, Matthew Chrulew, Myles Oakey, Sam Widin, and Drew Rooke. 2025. “Animal Cultures at the Edge of Extinction.” Theory, Culture & Society 42.2 3–23.

[xxx] van Dooren, Thom, and Deborah Bird Rose. 2016. “Lively Ethography: Storying Animist Worlds.” Environmental Humanities 8 1–17.

[xxxi] van Dooren, Thom, S. Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster. 2016. “Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness.” Environmental Humanities 8 (1): 1–23.

[xxxii] Reinert, Hugo. 2016. “About a Stone: Some notes on geological conviviality.” Environmental Humanities 8 95–117; TallBear, Kim. 2017. “Beyond the Life/not Life Binary: A Feminist-Indigenous Reading of Cryopreservation, Interspecies Thinking and the New Materialisms.” In Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World, edited by Emma Kowal, and Joanna Radin, MIT Press.

[xxxiii] Stengers, Isabelle. 2015. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Open Humanities Press.

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Featured image courtesy of David Sischo.