An Arkansas Parable for the Anthropocene

Abstract

The claimed rediscovery of North America's rarest bird, the ivory-billed woodpecker, in the early 2000s, was one of the most high-profile events in global ornithological history. The reappearance of the bird in a remote locality in eastern Arkansas seemed to vindicate belief in the innate resilience and adaptability of nature, yet within a few months the claims became shrouded in doubt and uncertainty. This article argues that the reasons for the bird's likely extinction in the early 1940s go beyond the usual parameters of conservation biology to include the violent impetus toward nature unleashed by settler colonialism and the plantation system. The changing ecologies of the Delta are explored through a dialogue between critical landscape studies and emerging perspectives on race, masculinity, and violence that have been extensively occluded under the burgeoning interdisciplinary fascination with the Anthropocene. I conclude that the story of the ivory-billed woodpecker gives credence to a modified reading of the Plantationocene as an alternative conceptual framing for global environmental change.

Listening for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker: Sonic geography and the making of extinction knowledge

“…In exploring just some elements of specific searches, I offer this article as a contribution to a growing body of critical research regarding the ivorybills' contested extinction (e.g. Gandy, 2022;Lynch, 2011).…”

Postextinction Geographies: Audiovisual Afterlives of the Bucardo and the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker

“… 2005 ). Although imaginations of the bird’s appearance seem close to reality—calibrated by at least 400 museum specimens—its behavior, range, and cause of decline remain fiercely debated (T.Gallagher 2005 ; Hill 2007 ; Snyder 2007 ; Gandy 2022 ).…”

“…Not only are field recording practices linked to wider structures of colonial extractivism (Traisnel 2020 ; Hui 2022 ; Kanngieser 2023 ), but some have speculated that it was the proximity and interventions of recordists that drove those remnant ivorybills away from their nest in 1935 (M. Michaels, personal communication, 2022). Indeed, the colonial culture of collection, in part, led to the ivorybills’ decline in the first place: Although the birds’ bills and feathers had long been used by Indigenous groups, hunting in the nineteenth and early twentieth century by predominantly White settler scientists and commercial collectors, combined with habitat loss, reduced the population significantly (Tanner 1942 ; Snyder 2007 ; Gandy 2022 ). As Gandy ( 2022 ) argued, the disappearance of the species in eastern Arkansas was part of the systematic assault against nature bound up with the White masculinity of settler colonialism and the plantation system.…”

“…Indeed, the colonial culture of collection, in part, led to the ivorybills’ decline in the first place: Although the birds’ bills and feathers had long been used by Indigenous groups, hunting in the nineteenth and early twentieth century by predominantly White settler scientists and commercial collectors, combined with habitat loss, reduced the population significantly (Tanner 1942 ; Snyder 2007 ; Gandy 2022 ). As Gandy ( 2022 ) argued, the disappearance of the species in eastern Arkansas was part of the systematic assault against nature bound up with the White masculinity of settler colonialism and the plantation system. An ahistorical, placeless conjuring of ivorybills through technology thus potentially occludes these histories, including the fact that the very trace facilitating ongoing relation itself was likely collected in a way that disturbed some of the last individuals of the species.…”

“…Indeed, Gandy ( 2022 ) argued that a “white nationalist myth” of these landscapes as “‘unpeopled’ wilderness” (376) motivates contemporary ivorybill conservation discourses. In this view, the continued speculative presence of ivorybills is not necessarily positive, but this discourse does not define all postextinction ivorybill geographies.…”