Bird strikes were catapulted into headline news in 2009 when US Airlines flight 1549's engines ingested a flock of Canada geese and lost all power, leaving the pilot no option but to ditch into the freezing cold Hudson River. Although everyone on board survived, thousands of birds were killed in the years that followed in attempt to redress aviation safety concerns. This article follows the story of Flight 1549 and considers the different stages of bird strike prevention at a variety of sites: the factory, the airfield, the sky and the accident aftermath. Drawn from empirical research and grey literature analysis of aviation safety documents, it unpicks the various assemblages that are formed at each site and how they are gathered together through inhuman air forces. Situated within theories of biopolitics, it moves beyond a materialist analysis of the solid and the visible and attends to the immateriality of air and its elemental properties which are integral to both life and death. Through an analysis of the aerial as a socio-material spatial categorisation, it considers bird strike management within a multispecies perspective by examining the frictions and entanglements of both human and non-human agency that are generated by differential air spaces. By highlighting the different forms of biopolitics produced by the aerial, it shows how configurations of life shift in relation to the dynamic and unpredictable inhuman forces of air, and how aviation safety practices attempt to harness these forces.

Woolly mammoth tusk hunting has become a black-market industry in the Siberian region of Yakutia, where thawing permafrost due to climate change is revealing the bodies of thousands of mammoths. They are often in a state of incredible preservation, and their accompanying tusks can be sold to China where they are carved into ornaments as a marker of status. Alongside tusk hunting, another potential industry has emerged: de-extinction. Many of the mammoths found on the tundra have potentially viable DNA that might be used to resurrect a mammoth through genetic technology. Mammoth de-extinction is a cryopolitical process – a focus on the preservation and production of life at a genetic level through cold storage. 'Cryobanks' have emerged as a way to safeguard endangered and extinct species' genetic material, and forms part of a turn towards pre-empting conservation crises during what some scholars are calling the 'sixth great extinction.' The mammoth's body is broken down into pieces – tusks form luxury commodity chains, whilst flesh and blood is parceled into frozen genes and cells. The mammoth in the freezer is indicative of a reorganization of cold life in a warming world, with the specific cryopolitics found in the cryobank an attempt at extending human control over planetary processes that are now seemingly out of control. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken at the Mammoth Museum in Yakutsk, Siberia, and at the Natural History Museum's cryobank in London, I follow the mammoth from permafrost, to freezer, to back outside, and consider how her de-extinction is a response to a particular sort of future crisis –that of our own extinction.

Scottish wildcat conservation is a tricky business, dogged by rampant hybridization, habitat loss, illegal poaching, and, more recently, calls from ecologists to declare the creature functionally extinct. While conservation bodies refuse to declare the fight over, the wildcat’s precarious position raises questions regarding extinction and its place in the wider conservation narrative. In this article the author tackles the possibly futile attempts by conservation bodies to save the Scottish wildcat from the brink of extinction in Britain’s “last wild place”—the Ardnamurchan peninsula in the North West Highlands. Through an analysis of past, present, and future configurations of the wildcat in the popular imagination, and an examination of its status as a “ghost species”—surviving on borrowed time due to anthropogenic intervention—this article aims to conceptualize the wildcat’s conservation as a sort of haunting. Existing as a wild emblem through a concentrated media campaign of inflated presence, it nonetheless remains hidden through hybridization and absence: a spectral being. The article therefore suggests that to truly save the wildcat is to account for its ghostliness and urge that conservationists instead accept the likely absence of wildcats in order to do the painful—but necessary—work of letting go.

On the Kola Peninsula in the Russian Arctic lies an innocuous iron disc about the size of a dinner plate. If one were to prise this disc open, they would find the remains of the world’s deepest vertical hole. Reaching a depth of over 12 kilometres, the Kola Superdeep Borehole was drilled in the pursuit of excavating scientific knowledges for a better understanding of the Earth’s crust. Whilst the borehole produced some important findings, and hosted an international delegation of researchers, once the Soviet Union collapsed, it fell into disrepair. Since its closure, the Kola Superdeep has become lost to history, but its existence as a ruin has generated new artistic engagements with the underground. This article uses the geological notion of discontinuity – a structural break in the rock – to imagine how discontinuity might be found within the borehole itself. It does this by identifying three access points: excavation through drilling and coring, collaboration through cross-border scientific work, and imagination through art and the weird. By resisting the notion that the subterranean can be objectively known through science, I reveal how the Kola Superdeep produces other relations, knowledges, and ways of sensing the subterranean.

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