To live and die in an age of extinction: a conversation with Juno Salazar Parreñas

ABSTRACT

This article is a conversation between Marie-Thérèse Talensby, a doctoral student with the Extinction Studies doctoral training programme at the University of Leeds, and Dr Juno Salazar Parreñas, Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. Talking over Skype in July 2023, Dr Parreñas reflects on her current research, exploring the death of a tropical polar bear in Singapore Zoo, her work on Orangutan conservation, and the violence inherent in many methods of animal conservation. In doing so, she highlights the entanglements of human and more-than-human lives in what is being described by scientists and conservation organisations as the sixth mass extinction event. Weaving throughout the conversation are more personal reflections on loss and grief, vicarious trauma, and the transformative potential in moments of decolonisation. This article offers a rich reflection on the experience and impact of researching death and loss, encompassing themes of positionality, boundaries, and the broader socio-cultural context of fieldwork encounters, topics highly relevant to Mortality readers.

KEYWORDS:

• Animals
• conservation
• ethics
• decolonisation
• extinction
• eco-grief

Can we expand our imaginations to envision other ways of living and dying at the temporal and spatial brink of extinction? (Parreñas, 2018, p. 14)

I first came across Dr Juno Salazar Parreñas’ work as part of the 2-day ‘Crucible’ event, which runs as part of my Extinction Studies doctoral training programme. I was midway through the first year of my PhD, feeling overwhelmed, and unsure of how my own project, on eco-grief and faith-based climate change activism, fits into the broader field of Extinction Studies. Extinction Studies are broadly concerned with what extinction means – biologically, culturally, socially – in contemporary contexts of global crisis, encompassing themes such as species decline,¹ language loss, and the destruction of natural ecosystems. During Juno’s brilliant workshop, she posed the question of whether we could imagine a new way of dying in extinction. That question immediately grabbed my attention and seeded a question of my own, of whether we also need to imagine new ways of grieving in the age of extinction – a question which has been at the core of my project ever since. So, when Mortality invited me to interview a prominent thinker in my field, Dr Parreñas was one of the first names that came to mind.

Juno may seem an unusual choice to regular readers of Mortality’s ‘conversations with’ series, in that she is not specifically a death studies scholar. Her interdisciplinary work focuses on human-animal relations, gender and sexuality, environmental issues, and justice. Yet death and loss are threads that run throughout her work, most notably in her book Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation (2018). Here, Juno weaves together the complex layers that situate an Orangutan rehabilitation centre in Sarawak, Malaysia, by locating it within cultural and historical contexts, in a place shaped by colonialism and liberation. The rehabilitation centre is a place where the Orangutans and the local workers who care for them are often dispossessed from the same land and brought together in a constrained space demarcated by violence and economics. It is within this broader landscape that Juno examines the gendered dynamics intrinsic to Orangutan conservation, deftly teasing out the nuance of a world where animals and humans coexist in a place of both real and anticipated death.

Juno laughed easily throughout our conversation, with a real warmth and curiosity coming through, but there were moments when I could see powerful emotions coming up for her, particularly when talking about the losses she experienced during her research and the writing of her book. I have been conscious in my own research of the impact of the interview when exploring grief, in providing a space to explore meaning, and there’s a sense of this coming through in our conversation here. During Juno’s research in the Orangutan rehabilitation centre in Sarawak, a major flooding incident at the nearby Bakun Dam had a devastating effect on both the displaced local communities, and the wildlife in the region. This section of Juno’s book is incredibly powerful and brought up themes on the hierarchies of life for both humans and more-than-humans, in the rescue process. I had hoped to speak to Juno about this, but that event is now intrinsically tied to the loss of her key interlocutor, and Juno had a strong sense that she wasn’t quite ready to go back there yet, so we agreed to leave that question out of the interview.

This negotiation provided a subtle backdrop to our conversation, one that resonates with conversations I have had with my own interlocutors. It created a space to reflect on the blurred boundaries of loss that can occur in our fieldwork encounters, calling to mind the work of Borgstrom and Ellis (2017). What most struck me when reading Decolonising Extinction, was Juno’s ability to make visible the space between and around bodies and their environment. It feels fitting to include this unspoken element of our conversation, with Juno’s consent, as a nod to that awareness of the tangible and the intangible, of what sits alongside us. This feels like an essential element to carry into the wider conversations on death, grief, and extinction, but it’s also a beautiful way to draw out the complexities of these subjects on an individual and interconnected level. That interconnectedness, in allowing ourselves to really feel our entanglements with each other and with the more-than-human world, is at the heart of Juno’s work.

I spoke with Dr Parreñas over Skype in July 2023, shortly after she had returned from a research trip for her forthcoming work on animal retirement and geriatric care. The following conversation offers a glimpse into her work and her thinking.

The conversation

MTT:

You’ve just come back from a research trip where you were researching the death of a tropical polar bear. Can you tell us anything about that, at this early stage in the process?

JSP:

The reason I decided to do research in Singapore Zoo was because they held a public funeral for their tropical polar bear, Inuka, in 2018 and I was really curious about two questions: Why mourn a tropical polar bear? And how was this a teaching moment about death, because it was such a public event? One of the surprising things for me was that death wasn’t something from which youth had to be shielded. There had been two public funerals in the past at the zoo for animals that they’ve held and both, in many ways, were like ancestors for people. The zoo holds memories for people, memories of their grandparents, of what it was like to visit the zoo with family members who are no longer there.

It’s really surprising when you go to Singapore Zoo how much you’re reminded of these iconic animals that were once there but have since deceased and that feels fundamentally different from zoos that I’ve visited or that I know about in the United States which are more like, ‘Okay, the animal dies’, and then you ignore it as quickly as possible. I think Cincinnati Zoo is probably the most iconic one for me because they had a very tragic killing of a gorilla named Harambe, and then soon thereafter a hippopotamus was born named Fiona, and so everything at Cincinnati Zoo became focused on the baby Fiona. It conveyed a kind of conservation argument, which is that you look towards the future, whereas, surprisingly, Singapore Zoo looks both towards the future, but they also look towards the past in the death of Inuka and an orangutan named Ah Meng, another iconic member of the Singapore Zoo. They are part of the ancestral ties of this place. So, it’s interesting, because it’s a place that looks at both the past and the future. When you do research, there’s other things that get uncovered. The field work is technically over but not really [laughs] because I realised there’s more questions, I don’t know the answers to. Why was it in the 1970s, the zoo in Winnipeg Canada wanted to give out polar bears to Singapore? Why was this a good idea in 1977, when Inuka’s father was sent over? I need to figure that out.

Another interesting thing about Singapore Zoo is that it’s located in a part of Singapore which is like the outskirts and it’s also near to the place where they process cremations. I’m indebted here to the work of Ruth Toulson,² Ruth is an anthropologist who also does field work as a coroner in Singapore. The location of the zoo in Singapore is a place that has historically been ‘the wild’, and just as it is in Singapore, it’s a common human phenomenon that we think of wild spaces as places that are somewhere between life and death. So, the area in which the zoo and the crematorium are located are exactly that, a liminal space between life and death.

MTT:

I haven’t encountered animal funerals at zoos here in the UK. Was that something Singapore Zoo had been doing for a while?

JSP:

Funerals have only happened for the iconic animals that they’ve held: for Inuka and for Ah Meng, who was a super-famous Orangutan. It’s funny because in 2023 the audio that you hear at the zoo is like, ‘Ah Meng was so famous’, and then it lists all these dead people who used to visit the zoo to see this Orangutan, such as Michael Jackson, Liz Taylor, or Prince Philip. So, for a child, it would require an understanding of who those people were! There’s a sense of historicity and upholding the past at the zoo that I don’t know happens anywhere else. Often at zoos if they talk about the past, it’s like deep ancestral past such as dinosaurs. But this is a different kind of ancestor. I don’t know enough about Chinese ancestral veneration, but it feels a lot like ancestral worship. I think it’s something analogous or related. They’re obviously not direct ancestors, but they evoke ancestors. The polar bear is not their ancestor, but there’s the sense of ancestry.

MTT:

I’m curious about how people might have reacted to that, whether it felt different for local people, than those from places where that might be less common.

JSP:

Singapore zoo is super multicultural and international. I’m not sure what the stats are, but their staff are very international, many coming from Europe. A lot of it is because of levels of specialisation. Veterinary knowledge isn’t well represented locally, so there’s a lot of international expert workers there. I don’t think I asked explicitly, ‘What do you think about this?’, but I was shown photographs of the funeral and there were lots of people at the funeral, and it was everybody, it was all the zoo staff.

MTT:

Was the funeral just for the staff or was it a public event as well?

JSP:

It was both. I think the public knew that the funeral was happening, because there was so much media coverage leading up to the moment of the polar bear dying. The polar bear was very old, and it was an issue of euthanasia. So that was an interesting question too, of how we have come to accept euthanasia for animals but find it challenging for people. I don’t have much to say on that just yet, but I see euthanasia to be like a planned death, the way you can have a planned birth. So, a long story short, people from the public did show up for the funeral, but numerically I’m not sure if it was half and half zoo staff plus the public or if it was mostly the zoo staff.

For the zoo staff, it was a genuine sadness as far as I can tell. And the interesting thing is that there had been four polar bears at the zoo. All of them had died, but this polar bear got a funeral. Granted those deaths happened in, I think, the 1980s for the most part, and early 2000s. But there was something explicitly special about this particular polar bear. The special thing was that he was a tropical polar bear. He wasn’t born in the wild, nor was he born in Cologne, Germany, which is where his mother was born. I think that extra Singaporean belonging meant something, and I think there might be an ancestral argument there.

MTT:

It’s so interesting because I hadn’t really been aware of tropical polar bears as a thing.

JSP:

Inuka wasn’t the only tropical polar bear. Sri Lanka is technically subtropical but there was a polar bear in Sri Lanka at one point in the 1970s. It goes back to the question of what made it seem like a good idea to send polar bears to tropical places. I have a lot of hunches, and I need to find some evidence, but I do think there’s something about the mastery of nature in the 1970s, where you could pluck beings from the Arctic and transport them from far away and reproduce something akin to their native habitats with the help of air conditioning and modern technology, you know, and so then it becomes like the conceit of modernity. I don’t know, [laughs] it’s a hunch!

MTT:

A lot of your work explores human/animal relationships in the context of death and loss. Did you know you were going to be working in this area?

JSP:

No, not at all. I really thought that my first book project was going to be about adoption and interspecies relations, like how do we build a relationship across millions of years of evolution? I did not expect that death would frame my life so much as it did, from the time I finished my PhD to the time I had the book published. It was the personal experience of learning that my key interlocutor had died while doing his job of rescuing wildlife. That really shook me. It was like the entire book was written in this state of grief: Grief for the person who I learned a lot from in my research. The grief I experienced when my PhD advisor passed away within a few years of me finishing. And then the death of my nephew, who had a very untimely and unexpected death. So many questions of mortality were infused into the page.

And for me to just cope with my life, I read things like Renato Rosaldo’s (2013) book of poems about the passing of his wife Shelly when she was doing field research, and that really, profoundly struck me, knowing that the personal effects last way longer than the person. And it was also dealing with the materiality of grief. The entire project was about grief. It was unexpected, you know, and it did frame everything that I was thinking and feeling at the time. Even now I have a hard time talking about it. I have to deal with it by laughing, you know?

A lot of it becomes very difficult to speak about, because then it becomes this problem of whose stories are yours to tell? It’s a painful one because I don’t want to be … [long pause] … I want to be true to what I am feeling and experiencing, while respecting the experience of those for whom that death was extremely close and fundamental to their core being. But at the same time, it’s painful to have your own experience unacknowledged or disavowed. It ignores the fact that that person also had meaning for me too. So that’s hard and painful.

MTT:

Absolutely, that sounds a lot like disenfranchised grief, which is a very painful experience.

JSP:

Yeah, because then there’s also the self-correction that happens, of feeling bad for even feeling anything. God, but that’s been a hard decade [laughs], when I think about those losses. I feel like fundamentally a changed person from the time I was doing my research to the act of writing the work. The writing being a form of analysis. I haven’t read my dissertation, but I imagine it really wasn’t … I wasn’t so focused or obsessed about death, in the way that it felt like my life was so oriented towards it.

MTT:

Are you glad that you’re researching this area? Is there something about when you get into this subject unintentionally, but it becomes so interesting that you don’t necessarily want to stop?

JSP:

I think it becomes like one of the different colours that you can perceive. It’s no longer the central veil, it’s not the central shade in the colour spectrum of my sunglasses [laughs]. There’s a whole bunch of other things too, and so I appreciate it among other things that I’m sensing.

MTT:

Now it’s there, you can’t unsee it. It weaves through.

JSP:

Yeah. It’s no longer the focus, it’s no longer the dominant colour in the colour spectrum that I’m working in. The colour fades or it becomes brilliant in a different way. It feels good to me, and I think it might echo my own experience of grief, surprisingly. I never thought about it before, so thank you [laughs].

MTT:

Your book talked about extinction which, again, is a huge subject. What do you think the exploration and the study of extinction can offer – to academia generally, or to death studies specifically?

JSP:

Okay, there are a few things that it can offer to mortality studies. One is really thinking of scale because extinction operates on a planetary scale. That’s probably one of the biggest things. But also, the question of time and temporality and knowing that phases of the planet are temporalised entirely based on extinction events. That kind of intense planetary way of thinking about deep time is helpful for mortality studies, I think. If we’re in that moment where we’re really thinking through the evidence of somebody’s life, and the mortality of a human lifetime, then that scale is really quite small. But when you talk about extinction, it really gets you to think of human lives in a much smaller scale. And to me that feels very sublime.

MTT:

I feel like mortality studies is probably a good place to be working with that, because it’s a field well-used to grappling with concepts that can feel too big to hold. When people think about death and grief, it can often feel too big, too overwhelming. Ideas around the plurality of extinction can feel the same, almost too big to wrap your head around.

JSP:

Yeah. I also think that, when one faces their own mortality, they are thinking on a very profoundly personal scale, or they’re projecting into the future of a few decades. Whereas with extinction, we’re talking millions of years. It puts the personal experience in this other perspective. It’s not less important, it’s just differently important. It’s like moving up and down between a microscopic vision of the world versus a galactic way of thinking. It’s fun to go back and forth; that’s the ideal for me.

MTT:

In your book Decolonising Extinction, The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation you wrote about the commonalities of loss, highlighting how losses are often shared by the human and the more-than-human lives in the wildlife centres. Can you say a little about that?

JSP:

I feel like there’s a lot of different bodies of scholarship in human-wildlife studies. For the longest time, the dominant way of thinking about human-wildlife relations was to think through conflict and competition, you know, and to think of people as natural adversaries to wildlife. With this project I really felt that there was something else at stake, that there are shared experiences of loss, of habitat loss but also loss of a way of living, for both wildlife and for people. And then everybody being institutionalised and what that does to your day-to-day life for both people and animals that are held captive. The conditions of captivity are actually quite similar, you know. I really wanted to move away from conflict and see that there’s value in recognising shared experience. I think that value is in being empathetic towards others’ experiences.

MTT:

It makes me think a little bit about Donna Haraway’s (2016) work on entanglements, with just how closely woven together staff and animals in these centres are, often displaced from the same areas and then, to a certain extent due to economics, trapped physically in the same situation.

JSP:

Yes, and that felt very poignant, the fact that they’re actually from the same places, and these places are dramatically altered, such that a lot of people lost a lot of things and a lot of wildlife lost a lot of things.

MTT:

Was that something that people at the centre were aware of, do you think?

JSP:

The thing is, often when you encounter a sight of beauty, especially as a North American, it’s like there is a connection to loss, you know, there’s a connection to dispossession. With the case of going to Bakun Dam and seeing this large body of water, you also have to recognise there’s a lot of trees that are completely dead and waterlogged in there, which shows you that this body of water was imposed onto this landscape. I think many people ignore that violence when they want to take in beauty, you know.

I have to admit, I just went on like a hiking trip with friends in Switzerland and for me it’s one of the places where I don’t feel a kind of loss. Whereas in Southeast Asia and in North America you’re constantly surrounded by loss and dispossession. In Switzerland these are communal lands that nobody really wanted to live on, because it was intense and scary to live on it, so nobody lives there. So, then, it doesn’t feel like you’re actively participating in dispossession. In many other parts of the world where you go somewhere, your leisure is tied to dispossession and that’s hard to deal with, I think.

MTT:

I feel like people don’t think about it very often, don’t necessarily think about the space between and around bodies and what’s in that space. We don’t necessarily think about where we are, generally, unless it’s somewhere that’s really in the public consciousness. I live in Scotland and if I’m walking in the Highlands I don’t immediately start thinking about the Clearances. I do when I come across ruins, or a bit of archaeology, but I don’t necessarily think about it when I’m just walking around. It’s interesting to think about how there’s always more in that space than the nature itself.

JSP:

Yeah, or like when you go to somewhere in Germany where the forests were totally cleared in the 1600s, so the forests there are completely constructed. I think what makes it hard in Borneo is that it’s recent so, to me, it feels emotionally harder, you know.

MTT:

In the book, you make a powerful comparison between human hospice care and animal rehabilitation centres, in particular the difference in what care looks like in each, and I’m wondering what your thoughts are on that generally. Do you think hospice conservation is possible, or ethical, when we talk about endangered species?

JSP:

Oh, interesting question! I wish hospice conservation was a thing, I really do, because then it would be about welfare and about easing a transition period, but it’s a horrible idea to most conservationists because they really preserve the fact of life, and they fetishise future generations. It’s probably never going to happen, because there’s such a powerful draw towards babies and the future. I think it would be too painful for many to recognise, ‘Okay, some species are just not going to fare well in the wild’. I think polar bears are a better example than orangutans here, because their habitats are literally going to melt away. The polar bears that do exist in the wild, many are starving because they have to swim longer distances, and then they go to these human encampments, and they get shot and killed. That species would be a great candidate for the idea of hospice conservation.

Conservationists would probably want to say, ‘But birds, birds are a great example. Predatory birds have made an incredible come back from the 1970s when people were ready to write them off, as they were on death’s doorstep’. And it’s true, you know. I’m not 100% sure on this, but I do think that the kind of conservation efforts that are about trying to increase reproduction, I don’t think it’s as intensive or invasive with birds as it is with other animals. It, bird conservation, doesn’t require that the female of the species carry pregnancies entirely on their own. So, with Orangutans, if I could imagine what hospice conservation could be, it really would be about welfare. Welfare is not valued, and I think that’s the problem. I think a triage conservation model allows people to do all kinds of rash things and to not really exercise the care that is required when you’re really at the interface, considering the needs and wishes of a specific being, of what it would take to shepherd someone into this period of their life.

But part of it is also that the planet’s circumstances are such that we force wildlife to live under extreme heat and then we expose them to wildfires. And it’s not just the fear of being burnt to death, it’s the air quality and the inability to breathe and the formation of cancer from being exposed to all these burning toxins. It’s a totally messed up life that we are imposing on wildlife in the tropics. And so, hospice conservation should also be about reducing our impacts in that way. I get that it’s possible that climate mitigation could change things for wildlife and improve their lives, but I don’t think that people are willing to sacrifice enough of their own personal comfort knowing that such changes could actually improve the welfare of somebody else.

MTT:

Do you think that the violence that can often be part of animal rehabilitation would have a place in hospice care, or could we do things differently?

JSP:

Interesting … I see this question play out really differently amongst different people and, for me, euthanasia is a humane way to go. I think of that kind of death as a gift. I see friends who feel like they cannot murder their own pet, and so I see the animal suffering. You want to avoid the emergency death situation where your animal is dying under conditions of fear and you’re not with them. You know that you don’t get to be with them in their last parting moments, to make sure they’re actually comfortable, so instead you’re putting them through a hellish form of discomfort. I recognise that having to make the decision to euthanise an animal is extremely difficult, but I tend to feel like euthanasia is a gift. It’s a technological innovation that we’re able to do this. So, I concede to a number of people whose opinions I respect. I think that’s why it makes sense to have consultations in the immediate moment, where it’s not just one person but others saying, ‘Okay, I know this animal, this animal is not doing well, it is time and we have to do this in a responsible way where we give them a really nice dose of painkillers, and then the shot that will make them feel like they are falling asleep’. and then, that’s it. Instead of this agonising experience where you are faced with your own bodily mortality and all of its pain and all of its discomfort, and all of its humiliations.

So then if I extend that to this question of hospice conservation, I don’t think conservationists are like that. I think for the most part conservationists would recognise euthanasia as a gift under specific circumstances. I think if you let go of this idea that nature has to be out there, then you recognise your responsibilities. That would then correct that sense of not being fearful of that closeness or to feel accepting of that closeness. I do think this idea of wildness is so attractive, though. It’s so compelling and charismatic, I don’t see that being let go of any time soon.

MTT:

A recurring theme in the book is about alternative ways of living and dying and extinction. I got the sense that you intentionally don’t offer answers in the book, you instead pose questions to start conversations. It felt, to me, like an invitation to imagine alternatives. I found myself wondering what you might imagine, yourself?

JSP:

Thanks for asking! Okay, my answer is that what I would love to see is female choice-oriented conservation, female choice-oriented physical spaces. My dream would be to get a think tank going to explore the architecture and physical space of what a rehabilitation site could actually look like if it did foster female choice. The other thing that I would really like, and I know it’s an impossible wish, is that I wish people really were oriented towards the lives of others, genuinely oriented towards the animals under their care. Most people aren’t. There are rare individuals, who are willing to sacrifice so much of their own personal safety sometimes, and I totally admire that. I wish it was more common, and it just isn’t. Instead, I get these horrible reality checks, the news articles that people send me, like that BBC story of people online paying to see tortured baby monkeys. What is it about humanity that there’s such a thirst for horrific violence against extremely vulnerable creatures?

I’m wondering if I’m becoming more and more misanthropic as part of my work [laughs]. I’m grateful I can have a research career in studying animals, and human-animal relations, but it’s the human part that’s the most upsetting part of the human-animal relationship. I’m grateful if I meet humans who I feel do right by the animals, and so Singapore Zoo is a great example because my god, I feel like I’m with my people, you know, [laughs].

MTT:

I’m conscious of centring human – and often privileged – experiences with this question, but as a practicing therapist in my non-student life, I found myself thinking often about vicarious trauma whilst reading the book, given the repeated exposure to incidents and narratives of trauma, violence, and loss. If you feel comfortable talking about this, can you say if this was something you noticed in the staff and volunteers, and whether you experienced this, yourself?

JSP:

Yeah, there was an incident, of witnessing what might have become an act of sexual violence, when I knew I was freaking out, and I think that was vicarious trauma. I think the other women in the group were also freaking out. That’s the thing about triggers: you don’t know when it’s going to happen; it can suddenly happen. I suppose the surprise of the book was how much sexual violence frames the entire project. But that’s the problem of conservation, it naturalises sexual violence, so I had to bring it up. I think it’s important to point that out, to not sanitise that experience.

Another moment where vicarious trauma could have happened was in just listing how ubiquitous death was at the rehabilitation site, and the different conditions under which animals died – and often under horrifically stupid circumstances, because of mistreatment from humans. Like this sad proboscis monkey who ate a sugary cake that a human gave it. Their bellies only process specific kind of leaves, and so it was a horrific way to die. The levels under which negligence and ubiquitous cruelty happens. It’s painful because it’s ubiquitous. The [current] book that I’m working on, there’s other forms of this kind of stupid death, death out of negligence, in ignorance of not really caring for the animals under your care, and it’s just so sad to me because these deaths don’t have to happen.

And it’s not just the fact of dying, it’s the conditions surrounding those deaths, because they’re often horrific. There are ways to prevent horrific death and it’s upsetting to have that repeatedly happen. So, yeah, there’s a lot of vicarious trauma because of these episodes, that I feel like I needed to share [in Decolonizing Extinction]. It really pains me, and so I feel like I need to write about it, to maybe let it go, but also, gosh, maybe if there was more consciousness of it, it wouldn’t happen so often, you know?

MTT:

Was there any kind of awareness of the potential impact on people there, or was it just accepted as inevitable?

JSP:

I think the force of being there is about accepting it, or if you can’t accept it, then just kind of get over it, just forget it happened, ‘move on, move on’. You can’t deal with it, so you have to suppress it. For many, it’s difficult to move on. It just shows the unequal burdens that we carry in life, that some have more to accomplish just to function.

MTT:

My own research explores experiences of eco-grief in climate change activism, which is understood as grief in response to the climate crisis. You teach on environmental ethics, justice, and animal-human relations, which I expect involves wrangling with some significant and challenging climate-related issues. Do you see eco-anxiety and particularly eco-grief manifesting amongst your students? If so, in what ways?

JSP:

It’s been 15 months since I last taught the class, so it’s kind of foggy. But what I do remember, in terms of atmosphere, I think there’s anger, and a lot of that is generationally orientated, and I think there’s frustration. Those are the more powerful feelings. I don’t think they would call it anxiety necessarily. When I think about it now, even though those feelings of anger and frustration are forms of anxiety, right? Part of me wonders, would they be embarrassed to feel worried? But then I also feel like anxiety is such a common way of being, it’s almost a normalised way of being. I think the university life fosters anxiety, I think it thrives on anxiety and it attracts people who are anxious. It’s a hotbed of anxiety, so eco-anxiety must also fall into the regular anxiety of deadlines. That’s my feeling, but I don’t really know!

I kind of take Rebecca Solnit and Young-Lutunatabua (2023) position which is that we shouldn’t grieve too much, that we have things to look forward to because people are working to change some circumstances. Change happens in incremental steps, so whether that’s changing a council so that they’re more climate-orientated or going to protests to be with others who also feel similarly. All those things matter, and all those things are changing the atmosphere. Instead of thinking of natural resources on the planet as fundamentally scarce, there’s innovation. Humans innovate and use resources anew, so I do think that there will be ways to mitigate against climate change. However, there’s the painful problem that mitigation can also exacerbate social inequalities. I felt that in Singapore, where I noticed the difference between Singapore and Kuching [in Malaysia], which is across that body of water. Kuching is much cooler because there are more trees, whereas Singapore is more concrete, so it bakes itself. People can mitigate with air conditioning, but those who are poorest cannot. So, with any kind of innovation, we also need to account for, or try to figure out how to not exacerbate, already standing social inequalities. I think that there needs to be a combination of innovation and democracy that takes into account all kinds of society and that also includes animal society. Doing a combination like that, there’s hope in that for me. Thankfully there are political theorists like Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson (2013) who talk about animals as part of citizen society, and so I think there really does have to be this combination of thinking of ways to innovate for climate change, while also taking into account all sectors of society that are affected.

I do think that people care more about wildlife then, I suppose, 30 years ago. When I think about regular people, animals are more important to them now than they have been before. I think it’s like the eco-oriented self and the ego-oriented self.³ I do think that eco-orientation is gaining more common traction where it’s becoming a societal norm. That does change things in the long-term. So, there are things to be positive about, it’s not all doom and gloom [laughs]!

MTT:

Do you have any thoughts on the conversations happening around de-extinction?

JSP:

I don’t like the active choice that’s being made of the singular species that selects one species over everything else. There’s news of the woolly mammoth coming out of extinction, but it’s like for what? It’s probably for rich people to shoot, you know what I mean [laughs]? I feel like the two possibilities would be that the woolly mammoth is going to get hunted, for trophy hunting or eaten, for people to say, ‘I am eating like my paleo ancestors’. That’s me being cynical, but it’s like ‘To what end?’. The European climate is no longer in the Ice Age, so why revive this animal?

MTT:

You did an online interview a few years ago (Island Songs, 2017), where you talk about the need to break down categories between human and more-than-human, as part of the work of decolonisation. Can you talk a little about this? Do you think this has been achieved yet?

JSP:

Yeah, the short answer is no [laughs]. There’s this body of scholarship that I feel aligned to, which is that the category of human was imposed in such violence, of treating other humans as non-human, and this is like the work of Sylvia Wynter,(2003) but then also of mistreating animals and humans as not being fully-fledged human. It justifies violence done unto animals. I think of decolonisation as an ongoing process and so it’s something that isn’t achieved, although I do feel like there’s an ethos of decolonisation where we start really thinking about environments and all that constitutes the environment, instead of just imposing this sense of environment as natural resources to exploit and naturalising exploitation.

The thing with decolonisation is that it wraps up a lot of different and competing visions. For me, the attraction and the charisma of thinking of decolonisation is its alterity; the possibilities of something different, when life as it is, is just not tenable or its impossible to continue. So there needs to be something else and that’s where it gets exciting, when it can be anything. There’s this exciting moment when the future is totally open because the past is sealed. There’s been an event that ends it, but that’s the best part, where there’s a lot of different forms that can exist. But sometimes the answer, or what emerges at the moment of decolonisation … sometimes the people who come to power are people you don’t want. We have to recognise that sometimes when there is a change of what has been in the past, what happens in its place may not be what you want. Instead, sometimes you have horrific counter-revolution and then you have to deal with that regime instead of the hopeful optimists that you wanted to pair up with, you know? So, what I hold onto with decolonisation is that moment of uncertainty. That’s the best part, before it shakes out. And then it could go great, or it could go terrible, we just don’t know. And we only get there once it’s impossible to continue on.

I know there are competing discourses of what decolonisation is. In the UK a lot of it is like, ‘Oh we need to change who’s doing the scientific practice’, but for me the decolonisation part is actually questioning the entire conception of the practice, not changing who’s doing the practice. In this case, I’m talking more about politics, in that very delicate moment when a system totally changes, and you really do have to inhabit a totally different way of being. And it can be horrific, but it can also be genuinely open, you know. I’m romanticising the open parts, because there is the horrific part of not knowing what will shake out. I’m thinking about Indonesia in 1945: it certainly was exciting for the nationalists and certainly horrific for those who sided with the wrong people.

MTT:

This resonates with my therapeutic work, where often the anxiety for people is in that place of not-knowing, so the work becomes about building tolerance for that uncertainty, to better explore what possibilities might come out of it, but you make a good point about this being a privileged position. The ability to tolerate uncertainty can depend on what the risks are.

JSP:

Yeah. I feel that a lot of historical regimes that think of themselves as no longer colonised, but as free, liberated: ‘we’re decolonised but now we’re going to totally exploit ourselves, exploit our own resources and get rich’, and then it creates new kinds of inequalities. That happens and that is the part of decolonisation that you have to accept, because that’s how it happened. I think of that as official decolonisation and not the genuine transformation of recognising that these are not resources but part of the life that we lead.

MTT:

That idea of entanglements again, and that weaving together. Of thinking about things in a different way.

JSP:

Yeah. But it gets tied to capitalism and forms of exploitation that just becomes normalised and not really questioning, ‘Okay, can’t there be other ways of doing things?’, you know? Just because you are anti-capitalist doesn’t mean you’re necessarily anti-colonial. You have to recognise that what is at the heart of decolonisation is liberation. You can’t just impose your anti-capitalist beliefs onto people who have long felt that they have no control over their lives. So, for me, I just hesitate at prescribing anything because to me it just feels like an extension of colonisation, and I don’t want to do that, but I do hold on to that exciting moment of uncertainty and to think of uncertainty not as scary but as something that’s genuinely experimental and transformative.

MTT:

Which again brings us right back to the book and what I think you do so beautifully of just opening up a space for people to imagine possibilities and alternatives.

JSP:

Thanks so much!

MTT:

We’ve come to the end of our time here, but I’ve really enjoyed getting to speak to you about this, so thank you.

JSP:

Thanks a lot, yeah, it was a pleasure. I’m so excited about your research because there really is a hunger in terms of scholarship for talking about eco-anxieties and eco-grief. I cannot wait for you to publish and when you do, share it with me because I’ll stick it straight into my syllabus.

MTT:

I’m delighted you were up for doing it. Well, I know that it’s early for you, so I hope the rest of your day goes well.

JSP:

Yeah, have a good evening!

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marie-Thérèse Talensby

Marie-Thérèse Talensby is a counsellor/psychotherapist in private practice, and a 3rd year doctoral researcher with the Extinction Studies DTP at the University of Leeds.

Juno Salazar Parreñas

Juno Salazar Parreñas is an Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University.

Notes

1. A mass extinction event is when species and ecosystems disappear faster than they can be replaced, leading to ecological cascades. There have been five extinction events in the earth’s history, with the last taking place 66 million years ago. Based on current levels of species decline and ecosystem loss, there is a growing body of research suggesting we are now in the sixth mass extinction event. For an introduction to theories on the sixth mass extinction, see Elizabeth Kolbert ‘The Sixth Extinction’ (2014, Bloomsbury), and Natural History Museum’s ‘What is a mass extinction?’ (https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/what-is-mass-extinction-and-are-we-facing-a-sixth-one.html).

2. Dr Ruth E. Toulson is a sociocultural anthropologist and coroner whose research focuses on the dead body and death’s material culture in Southeast and East Asia.

3. Stefan Lehman visualises ‘ego vs eco’ in his article, ‘Reconnecting with nature: Developing urban spaces in the age of climate change’ in the journal Emerald Open Research. The image can be seen here: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Diagram-Ego-Eco-Humankind-is-part-of-the-ecosystem-not-apart-from-or-above-it-This_fig1_330697869 [accessed April 5, 2024].