Animal Archives At The End of the World
Thinking about biodiversity databases and the past, present, and future of mass extinction
Hello friends,
Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to present some research on biodiversity archives and species extinction at ASLE and AESS’s Biennial Conference. Since my actual presentation and our subsequent roundtable discussion were only open to conference registrants, I wanted to take this opportunity to share an extended version of my presentation with all of you.
Defining The Animal Archive
Before I dive into these different case studies, I feel that it’s worth explaining what I mean when I use the phrase “animal archive.” These kinds of archives are comprised of physical and/or digital collections of preserved specimens, biological data, and other information pertaining to different species. Some of the archives I’ll be discussing have institutional backing, others created by concerned peoples or groups to study various species, and there are others that have become accidental records of biodiversity throughout history.
I will be focusing specifically on archives that track past, present, and future animal extinctions, either as their central subject of study or an unintended consequence of their long-term collecting. Beyond looking at the sheer volume of this data collection and the biological materials that comprise these archives, I’m interested in how these stories of extinction are told and how choices such as narrative writing, artistic interventions, and aesthetics end up eliciting emotional reactions from the people who interact with these archives. These archives emerged as ways to collect and share information about the world around us, yet the way these ecological histories are expressed offer us alternative ways of comprehending this moment of mass extinction.
Taxidermy As The First Extinction Archive
On the third floor of Paris’s natural history museum, the Grande Galerie de l’Évolution, you’ll find a dimly-lit room, far less visited than the newer exhibitions. Known as La Salle des Espèces Menacées et des Espèces Disparues (The Room of Endangered and Extinct Species), this gallery, one of the museum’s originals, houses 257 taxidermy specimens collected from the early 20th century.
What makes this room so peculiar—besides the fact that some of the animals appear in different states of taxidermic completion—is that all of these species have either been gone for over a century, are no longer found in the wild, or are still on the brink of extinction as they were many years ago. Visitors to this room have described it as an eerie one, with its dim lighting and dusty display cases. Among the animals you might see there are the Sumatran Tiger, the Cape Lion, the Saint Lucia Giant Rice Rat, the Martinique Muskrat, and the Xerces Blue Butterfly.
I bring this kinda creepy natural history museum gallery in as my first case study because it represents one of the earliest kinds of animal archives that emerged within the 19th and 20th centuries as Western colonial expansion and industrialization began to decimate ecosystems around the world. In her analysis of Carl Akeley and the African Hall at the AMNH titled “Teddy Bear Patriarchy,” Donna Haraway notes that taxidermists working at the time went on expeditions (oftentimes in nations actively being colonized) in order to kill and preserve certain prized species before they were hunted to extinction or displaced from their native habitats. While many of these early taxidermists were directly participating in the mass extinction of these animals (such as birds collected for their feathers or megafauna prized in big-game hunting), they believed that their taxidermic preservation would enable the animal’s legacy to live on even if wiped out by humanity. In a twisted logic of early environmental conservation, many, such as Akeley himself, believed that, if visitors were to see these specimens staged in the museum, that this was foster a greater desire to preserve habitats.
As flawed and infused with ideas of domination and extractivist supremacy as these views were, this notion that we should document, catalog, and preserve some part of, or an entire, endangered or extinct animal in order to share its story with concerned publics is one that continues to exist in environmental science research and conservation practices to this day.
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