Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert’s paper focuses on “hypothetical species,” the IUCN designation for species for which no fossil remains have been found. Most such species are Caribbean parrots and macaws, the earliest victims of the colonial exotic-bird trade and of the deforestations that marked the development of the sugar plantations. Paravisini-Gebert investigates the dislocations and extinctions of species such as Dominica’s “hypothetical” Ara atwoodi, recognizable through travelers’ descriptions and Flemish paintings such as The Holy Family with the Parrot by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), A Variety of Birds by Paul de Vos (1596-1678) or Renaissance Interior with Banqueteers by Bartholomeus van Bassen (1590-1652). These and many other paintings produced during a crucial period for macaw extinctions in the Caribbean region illuminate the spaces where these species died while inserting their history of extinction into the very essence of early-colonial markets and exchanges.
Contributing to a larger project on the entwined histories of US empire, animal food systems, and mass extinction, John Barnard’s paper considers Atlantic and Pacific salmon across four centuries of colonization, resource extraction, and industrialization. Like the cod, the salmon has gone from abundance to extinction in New England’s waters. While some of the pressure of overfishing has been alleviated by the proliferation of global aquaculture, wild Pacific salmon populations are increasingly endangered, largely due to dams and climate change. Through a radically condensed literary and cultural history of salmon fishing in North America—from colonial accounts of New England’s abundance to Sherman Alexie’s indigenous prophecy of the creature’s return in the wake of decolonization—Barnard investigates the historical irony of the salmon’s predicament: that the survival of the species now largely depends on precisely the forces of industrialization and consumption that rendered it endangered in the first place.
Engaging with new research on Black feminism and marine mammals (Gumbs 2020), Alison Glassie’s paper brings the transgression of racialized binaries into conversation with marine environmental history through an analysis of Morrison’s Tar Baby (1981). The novel’s protagonist, fashion model Jadine Childs, luxuriates in a coat of “ninety perfect sealskins” that indexes her movement across color lines. Leaving behind the white patronage she has known for much of her life, the jet-setting Jadine returns to her benefactors’ household only briefly at the novel’s end—to pick up her coat. Perhaps counterintuitively, this plot invokes the selkie—the seal-human shapeshifter of Celtic myth who, in reclaiming her sealskin from human captors, reasserts her agency and returns to the sea. By resisting capture, Morrison’s selkies position Tar Baby beyond the literary archive of an extractive industry (e.g., Cooper’s Sea Lions; London’s Sea Wolf), exploring a color line that is both species line (Bennett 2020) and water line (Jenkins 2019).
Matthew Taylor’s paper investigates an often overlooked and troubling aspect of the Gaia concept: the way it enables fantasies of both human exaltation and human extinction. Born of none, mother to all—originally a myth, then a theory—Gaia has had a surprisingly long life in modern science and philosophy. Scottish geologist James Hutton’s 1785 proclamation that the world is a superorganism has been variously taken up by Gustav Fechner, Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopoldo, James Lovelock, Bruno Latour, and Isabelle Stengers, among others. To explore the unacknowledged historical and conceptual dangers of this worldview, Taylor turns to speculative fiction from the early 20th century. In works by Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Conan Doyle, the animate Earth becomes the ground upon which to stage fantasies suffused with eugenic and genocidal principles. These fictional precursors to contemporary Gaia discourse suggest that a living planet may be the death of us.