Extinction Stories from Oceania

How does extinction shape the contours of local lives and landscapes in Oceania? How is the loss of species an inescapably biocultural process, tangled up with ongoing processes of colonisation, globalisation, militarisation, and more?

Oceania has some of the highest rates of extinction and biodiversity loss in the world. This project seeks to understand and respond to this situation through a particular focus on the biocultural significance of extinction. Far from being a purely ecological concern, the loss of species is inescapably bound up with human lives: centrally shaped by our varied ways of understanding, valuing, and living, while also profoundly reshaping our possibilities for life, impacting on everything from livelihoods to traditional cultural practices. In Oceania, as around the world (albeit in different ways), the loss of species cannot be separated out from the ongoing and unequal impacts of colonisation, globalisation, climate change, and militarisation. As such, any effort to understand the meaning and significance of extinction, or to ethically address this ongoing unravelling of lives, must grapple with this biocultural complexity.

This project utilises storytelling in diverse media to better understand and communicate the biocultural complexity of extinction in Oceania. To date, the project has produced a variety of essays and articles for popular audiences, a cross-over book titled A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions, an audio documentary (co-produced with Jane Ulman), and a community storytelling portal that provides a space for people from the region to tell their own stories about what extinction means to them.

This projects is funded by the Australian Research Council.

PUBLIC STORYTELLING PORTAL

The Living Archive: Extinction Stories From Oceania
A multimedia space that provides a platform for people to tell their own stories, in their own ways, about what extinction means and how it matters in their lives and places. The Living Archive is grounded in the understanding that personal narratives have the potential to explore local complexity in ways that are relatable and meaningful, and that generate engagement, connection and attentiveness in this time of great loss. The archived project website is available here.

AUDIO DOCUMENTARY

The Disappearing Voice of the Forest: Snail Stories from Hawai’i
Exploring the disappearing land snails of Hawai’i with a focus on the entangled cultural, ecological, political, and ethical significance of their decline. This project produced an audio documentary with Jane Ulman, available here.

Excerpts from this audio documentary were utilised, alongside interviews with Thom van Dooren and David Sischo, in the production of an excellent episode of ABC Radio National’s Science Friction: “His snailyness,” 17 July 2022. Produced by Natasha Mitchell.

BOOK

van Dooren, T. (2022) A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions, (MIT Press).
Further details are available at the publisher’s website.

POPULAR ESSAYS

  1. van Dooren, T. (2021) “Smoke and Song: On the Unravelling of Regent Honeyeater Life,” in An Endangered Menagerie, Plumwood Mountain.
  2. van Dooren, T. (2019) “Moving Birds: Translocation in an Unraveling World,” Los Angeles Review of Books.
  3. van Dooren, T. (2019) “Hospice Earth.” Overland.
  4. van Dooren, T. (2015) “The Last Snail: Loss, Hope and Care for the Future,” in Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin (eds.) Land & Animal & Nonanimal, Haus der Kulturen der Welt: Berlin. (PDF)

Header image courtesy of David Sischo.