Wild Dog Dreaming:
love and extinction

(c) Deborah Bird Rose
August, 2008

Accepted for publication by University of Virginia Press.

How shall we bring our moral imagination to bear on the unimaginable? Where is wisdom to be found now that everything is changing? My new book is written to spark up our moral imagination as we attempt to find ethical relationships with more-than-human others in this era of loss. We are deeply into the sixth great extinction event on Earth, the first one to be caused by a single species, namely our own. Anthropogenic extinction, as it is called in Conservation Biology, is now un-making the world that has been making itself for four billion years,. In our current moment, the rate of extinctions is somewhere between one thousand and ten thousand times the background rate. At this time an unknown number of species is tipping into the ‘thin zone from the critically endangered to the living dead and thence into oblivion’ (Wilson 2002). There is no knowing how grave the problems will become or where the death work will start to level out. Once we consider how deeply we are implicated in the extinction process, we find that we also need to question how life-affirming human lives might be lived.

Wild Dog Dreaming calls for a moral imagination that is wise toward others (attuned to interaction with other creatures as well as our own), and that is also wise toward Earth (attuned to the condition of being a member of the Earth-based community of life). We of the west are situated in a curiously interstitial moment. Many of the major premises that have sustained our worldview over two or more millennia are no longer possible. We are seeing the end of a vision of certainty, which is to say that we are seeing the end of the idea that we are able to control the world around us. At the same time, we are seeing the end of the idea that humans are separate from nature. We are thus experiencing a shift into uncertainty and a shift into connectivity. These are new and unsettling ideas in mainstream western culture.

Moral imagination that is both other-wise and Earth-wise calls us into an ecological existentialism that speaks to this moment of crisis, change, and responsibility. Wild Dog Dreaming, enmeshed in the ecological humanities, works cross-culturally and across disciplines. I am drawing on Indigenous philosophical ecology, and most particularly on the learning I have enjoyed during the years in which I lived in the community of Yarralin in the Northern Territory of Australia.

Aboriginal people’s lives are enmeshed in multi-species kin groups. People whose kin include animals and plants find that their families are in dreadful peril in this era of extinction. Losing kin is not the same as losing the abstraction known as a species, and many of the people I have spoken with are clear about this. For example, Ngiyampaa man Paul Gordon (Bourke, NSW) explained it this way: ‘Some animals can’t just be classified as fauna…. They are my people, my relations…’

I’ve been learning from Aboriginal people for whom extinctions are up-close and very personal. Into this conversation I bring some of the philosophers of the west who have addressed questions of ethics and Earth – Emmanuel Levinas and Lev Shestov; Val Plumwood, Freya Mathews, Donna Haraway.

Another party to this dialogue are animals whose futures are being snuffed out. Many of our fellow creatures are facing extinction through negligence or ignorance. Some are actively being slaughtered.

The Australian dingo is one such creature, and is a key participant in my book. Many of my Aboriginal teachers, like Old Tim, were Dingo people. Tim’s Dreaming was Dingo, many of his primary responsibilities were to dingoes, and he told involved and fascinating stories about Dingoes. ‘Dog’s a big boss,’ Old Tim, the clever man, said. ‘You’ve gotta leave him. No more killing.’ He was speaking within a context in which dingoes are regularly poisoned and shot, and he knew, as did I, that the shadow of death falls heavily upon their future. They are not the first animal to be facing extinction, and they will not be the last. But they are one of the few whose extinction is actively being sought by some segments of human society. Their future thus raises the big questions of destruction versus ethics of care.

‘People save what they love’, says Michael Soulé, the great conservation biologist. He expresses an almost despairing concern over the current biodiversity extinction crisis, and he asks one of the most important question of our time: are humans capable of loving, and therefore of caring for, the animals and plants that are currently losing their lives in a growing cascade of extinctions?

My approach is a firestick, or dialogical, method: I bring big ideas, big stories, big questions together and work with the sparks that arise. Part anthropology, part philosophy, part theology, part cultural studies, Wild Dog Dreaming invites readers to bring their own lives into the conversation, to keep the stories moving in the world, and to keep asking questions that can only be answered through the way we live our lives. Answers will become apparent to the extent that we are able to facilitate the flourishing of other creatures’ lives.

Recently I gave a lecture in Melbourne at the Australian Catholic University as part of the 2008 Wednesday Lectures series, curated by philosopher Raimond Gaita. The series theme was "Rethinking Our Place in Nature". My lecture works with one of the chapters in this new book; it is available on slow TV.