Extinction and the Human: Four American Encounters (Alembics: Penn Studies in Literature and Science) - Hardcover

Buch 3�von 4: Alembics: Penn Studies in Literature and Science

Sweet, Timothy

9780812253429: Extinction and the Human: Four American Encounters (Alembics: Penn Studies in Literature and Science)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812253426 ISBN 13: 9780812253429

Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021

Alle Exemplare dieser ISBN-Ausgabe

0 Gebraucht

4 Neu

Von EUR 49,37

The Americas have been the site of two distinct waves of human migration, each associated with human-caused extinctions. The first occurred during the late Pleistocene era, some ten to thirty thousand years ago; the other began during the time of European settler-colonization and continues to this day.

In Extinction and the Human Timothy Sweet ponders the realities of animal extinction and endangerment and the often divergent Native American and Euro-American narratives that surround them. He focuses especially on the force of human impact on megafauna—mammoths, whales, and the North American bison—beginning with the moments that these species' extinction or endangerment began to generate significant print archives: transcriptions of traditional Indigenous oral narratives, historical and scientific accounts, and literary narratives by Indigenous American and Euro-American authors. "If the Sixth Extinction is a hyperobject, an event so massively distributed in space and time that it cannot be experienced directly," he writes, "these cases of particular megafauna have nevertheless consistently commanded our focus and attention. They form a starting point for a coherent, approachable history."

Reflecting on questions of agency, responsibility, and moral assessment, Sweet engages with the consequences of thinking of humans as fundamentally separate from the rest of the natural world. He investigates stories of a lost race of giants at the time of the first encounters between Europeans and Indigenous Americans; culturally distinct ways of understanding the extinction of the mammoths; the impact of the Euro-American whaling industry and the controversial revitalization of Native American whaling traditions; and the bison's near-extermination at the hands of white market hunters and today's Euro-American and Native American efforts on behalf of the animal's preservation. He reflects on humans' relations with animals through models of divine preservation, competitive extermination, evolutionary determination, biophilia, and treaties with animals. Ultimately, he argues, it is the critical assessment of ideas of human exceptionalism that provides a necessary counterpoint both to apologies for human mastery over nature and deep ecology's attempts to erase the human.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

�ber die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Timothy Sweet is Eberly Family Distinguished Professor of American Literature, West Virginia University and author of American Georgics: Economy and Environment in Early American Literature, also published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Auszug. � Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Introduction
From the Pleistocene to the Anthropocene

In 2017, a team of Harvard University scientists announced that they were close to creating a hybrid elephant-mammoth embryo. Whether this creation could eventually lead to the successful de-extinction of the mammoth depends on the criteria by which we measure success. The closest hybrid that is hypothetically possible according to current science is an animal that is "capable of living where a mammoth once lived and acting, within that environment, like a mammoth would have acted" but that remains genetically "more elephant-like than mammoth-like." We may be interested in cloning the mammoth for various reasons. For some, "it would be cool!" For others, it would advance our understanding of reproductive biology; it might enable the restoration of the Arctic tundra ecosystem; it might bring back a species that we humans likely had a strong hand in exterminating. The Harvard team members are interested in ecosystem restoration and may be motivated by these other factors as well, but their immediate goal is to help preserve, albeit in altered form, the endangered Asian elephant by adapting it to a different environment. Their project is thus an attempt to use an extinct creature to intervene in our current crisis, often termed the Sixth Extinction event. In this context, the Harvard team's work mixes responsibility, atonement, and assumptions about agency in one particular form of engagement with nonhuman beings. They hope to repair the results of human excess by caring for a species and, by extension, an ecosystem.

The mammoth may be the original charismatic megafauna. Large, fascinating animal species onto which we can project humanlike qualities and with which we have a significant history of (often violent) interaction, megafauna invite us to reflect on human exceptionalism. The question of the human is more visible here than in cases of the endangerment or extinction of less charismatic animals, however important to human purposes (such as coral polyps), or plants, however beautiful or useful (such as the American chestnut). By human exceptionalism I mean any account of a distinction between humans and nonhumans that we use to deal with a troubling practice or to negotiate difficulties concerning our relation to nonhumans. Human exceptionalism in this fairly broad sense is not necessarily unique to the modern West. All humans who eat animals, for example, mark the distinction in one way. Even so, a particular version of the human/animal distinction and its exceptionalist corollaries is specific to the modern Western separation of Nature from History. The present study's focus on humankind's relations with certain large animals is one means to provoke reflection on this separation, its consequences, and its prospects. Rather than mount yet another theoretical critique of the human/animal distinction, however, Extinction and the Human brings some of this distinction's motivating concerns—morality, communicability, historical destiny, sovereignty—to case studies of human-animal relations in which animal species have become extinct or endangered.

Extinction and the Human focuses on mammoths, whales, and the North American bison beginning with the moments that these species' extinction or endangerment began to generate significant print archives. These archives include transcriptions of traditional Indigenous oral narratives, historical narratives, scientific narratives, and literary narratives by Indigenous American and Euro-American authors. If the Sixth Extinction is a hyperobject—an event so massively distributed in space and time that it cannot be experienced directly—these cases of particular megafauna have consistently commanded our focus and attention. They form a starting point for a coherent, approachable history. Before Enlightenment naturalists identified the fossil bones of mammoths as differing from those of living elephants and established extinction as a geohistorical fact, those bones were often said to be the remains of extinct races of beastly giants, destroyed either by a deity or by a group of civilized humans. Thus the book begins with a prehistory of the extinction concept, as manifest in early Spanish colonial historians' transcriptions of Nahua and Inca narratives and taken up in cross-cultural dialogs in eighteenth-century New York and New England. The mammoth became a national icon in the early U.S. republic because it connoted power and indigeneity, even as it was often characterized as a tyrant deserving of extinction. The mammoth did not maintain this iconic status, as the fact of its extinction became firmly established, probably because its fate augured ill for the young republic's future. Later, the mammoth's fate was taken up as an object lesson for European settler-colonists. Whales and buffalo were threatened by extractive industries during the nineteenth century and became objects of both instrumentalist concern and preservationist activism. For millennia prior to this modern trajectory, they had been subjects of human social engagement—and still are, especially in tribal traditions. Throughout these cases, various accounts of the distribution of agency and responsibility give rise to different accounts of the human role with respect to nonhumans. Analyzing these cases, I hope to inspire further reflection on this question of the human place and the related question of belonging.

Megafauna provide a focus because, as my opening example suggests, they have been perennial sources of fascination. Easy to anthropomorphize, they are limit cases for the human/animal distinction and thus can provide particular insight into the problem of exceptionalism. Animals can seem especially humanlike if they engage in ostensibly moral behavior, as for example the white whale does in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick or the mammoth does in Joseph Nicolar's Life and Traditions of the Red Man. Accounts of animals' moral behavior and humans' moral judgments regarding that behavior, important components of many of the interactions examined in this study, are more frequent in stories of megafauna than in stories of, say, insects or plants. The focus on megafauna is not meant to discount whole ecologies, however, but rather to suggest larger networks of relations. In many instances, megafauna are key environmental shapers. Pleistocene-epoch megafaunal herbivores such as the mammoth, for example, were "constant gardeners," keeping forests in check and thereby producing a diversity of ecosystems including savannah and various kinds of woodland, depending on rainfall, temperature, soil, and other factors. After their larger Pleistocene kin became extinct, the buffalo (Bison bison) "cultivated the prairie . . . ecosystem" in the North American west. On the other hand, the vast forests of precolonial eastern North America, in which the passenger pigeon flourished, may well have been an effect of the Late Pleistocene extinctions.

The project focuses on the Americas, primarily North America and its oceanic environs, because the Americas were the site of two distinct waves of human migration, during the Late Pleistocene epoch and the modern time of European settler-colonization, both associated with anthropogenic extinctions. Of course, there is no doubt about the second wave's acceleration of extinctions and endangerments caused by market-driven hunting, the intensification of agriculture, and other kinds of habitat destruction. While this second wave has become part of the global Sixth Extinction with the carbon economy's alteration of the earth's geophysical processes, the present study focuses on cases whose histories began prior to the development of the carbon economy and, for whales and buffalo, continue into the present. While the causes of the Late Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions...

��ber diesen Titel� kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
Sprache: Englisch
ISBN 10: 0812253426
ISBN 13: 9780812253429
Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten: 190
Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verf�gbar
Verantwortliche Person: preigu
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabr�ck
49078
Deutschland