Spectral ecologies: De/extinction in the Pyrenees

Abstract

How is extinction problematised through biotechnological and ecological interventions, and how might such mediations elucidate different understandings of biotic loss and recovery? The bucardo – an endemic ibex from the Pyrenees – is the only extinct animal to have ever been cloned, and for seven short minutes in 2003, “extinction was not forever.” Using the bucardo’s extinction as a starting point, rather than an ending, this paper addresses the “spectral ecologies” of the Pyrenees. Drawing on interviews and extensive ethnographic work conducted in Spain and France, I discuss the implications of this cloning project, and examine the various ways in which it is contested. Speculative futures of bucardo clones “returning” to the Pyrenees seem unlikely, however, following the successful introductions of another subspecies of ibex to the French Pyrenees in 2014. Such events – following the mobilities and geographies of the ibex themselves – invalidate justifications for cloning in conservation. Spectral ecologies are characterised through the unsettling of – and departures from – linear temporalities. I broaden the ontological scope of species resurrection to attend to phenotypic shifts associated with ecological restoration projects, which I call “de/extinction.” De/extinction unsettles a range of epistemological assumptions concerning two of conservation’s key concepts: species and extinction. Introduced ibex in the Pyrenees are beginning to resemble the defining features of bucardo with every new generation, a fascinating reworking of the bucardo’s absence. The figure of the ghost brings to the fore multiple pasts and futures, human and nonhuman, materialising and affecting bodies in spectral ecologies. This case offers a theoretical advance to the field of extinction studies and cultural geographies in considering different meanings of “the end,” and the imagined futures of “lost” biota.

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

“…Relatedly, Garlick and Symons ( 2020 , 299) recently outlined an agenda for geographies of extinction, advocating for “an explicit political ecology of extinctions-in-place.” Like Despret, they argued that foregrounding place helps to account for the site-specificities of extinction events, and how these relate to wider political and economic forces such as colonialism and capitalism. Most relevant to our study, they consider “geographies after extinction” which—aligned with geographic work about more-than-human spectrality and haunting (e.g., McCorristine and Adams 2020 ; Searle 2022 )—accounts for “how particular places, sites or landscapes bear traces of absence in the wake of ecological destruction” (Garlick and Symons 2020 , 313). Bersaglio and Margulies’s ( 2022 ) notion of “extinctionscapes” similarly considers how the absence-presence of extinction shapes landscapes long after the expiration of a species—in their case study of rhinos in Kenya, this takes the form of postextinction encounter value.…”

“…Subsequent cloning efforts failed, and the bucardo remains extinct. Yet it remains in the Pyrenees, woven into the cultural landscape (Searle 2022 ).…”

“…For Roberts ( 2013 ), “images haunt between the visible and invisible, real and virtual, as material objects and abstract cognitive, embodied, subjective processes” (387). A photographed bucardo is neither wholly absent nor present; through the medium of photography, absences are made present, conjuring haunted landscapes and ecologies while rendering extinction affectively palpable (Searle 2022 ; Adams, McCorristine, and Searle 2023 ). These representations of the animal continue to forge new meanings and understandings of extinction and are entities that affect those who encounter them across spatial and temporal scales; to borrow Despret’s term again, they are “distance reduction technologies.” Although it emerges from a distinct spatiotemporal point, whenever a photograph is encountered it has the capacity to affect in particular ways each time different from the last.…”

“…How authentic are reproductions produced by imperfect technologies such as those used in interspecific somatic cell nuclear transfer? The ecological and ethical merits of a revisited bucardo cloning program are disputed given that the biological material of a single individual remains cryopreserved, thus rendering repopulation efforts impossible without hybridization with extant species (García-González and Margalida 2014 ; Searle 2022 ). Such questions resemble similar debates concerning the authenticity of ivorybill sound recordings to represent accurately and authentically the extinct (Hunter 2023a ), and exemplify the affective, situated, and intersubjective nature of this existential question.…”

For a new weird geography

“…There is an enduring interest with haunting, revenants, loss, absence and spectrality within cultural geography (Wylie, 2021). Yet, while these absences are evidently important in certain modes of human-nature relation (like conservation; see Searle, 2022), it is those agencies which become palpable and unsettling in their presence that capture our interest in this paper.…”