Remembrance Day for Lost Species: Remembering and mourning extinction in the Anthropocene

Abstract

This article examines what is lost and remembered at a time of mass extinction; identifying the Anthropocene – the geological epoch in which the incremental and disruptive impact of the human species has become the main planetary force – as an epoch of mourning. The paper explores the memory and future memory of extinction through the example of Remembrance Day for Lost Species, an international initiative encouraging people all over the world to gather annually on 30^th November in funeral ceremonies to mourn extinct species. The article particularly draws on Ursula Heise’s concept of ‘eco-cosmopolitanism’ (2008, 2016) and Michael Rothberg’s ‘multidirectional memory’ (2009) as well as fieldwork notes and interviews conducted during Lost Species Day 2018 in Brighton, UK. The analysis considers the conditions of future memory at a time of ecological loss by examining the extinction memorial and funerary practices formulated and performed during the Remembrance Day’s events.

Introduction

Every 30th November, artists and activists all over the planet gather to celebrate Remembrance Day for Lost Species – or Lost Species Day – in private and public ceremonies, emulating funeral rites to mourn extinct species and remember ecological loss. Looking to what has been lost and what is being lost in the Anthropocene ¹ – the proposed geological epoch superseding the Holocene in which human activity has become the main geological force – this article attempts to survey Lost Species Day to conceptualise ecological mourning and memory in an age of mass extinction. ² As the new epoch infers, humans are a species with the collective potency to irreversibly transform the planet, its climate, atmosphere and ecosystems. As such, the Anthropocene requires us to think human histories within the long deep-time history of the earth (Chakrabarty, 2009), with extinction becoming the past, present and future memory of the planet. Lost Species Day encourages the mourning of extinct species and foresees future extinction grief at a time of planetary warming and mass species extinction. Following Greg Garrard’s ‘future perfect subjunctive’ (2016), which looks back at a future lost, the temporal nexus of the research is situated between memory of the past and future ‘proleptic’ memory of preliminary mourning (Colebrook, 2016). That is to survey remembrance practices which look at the disorder of the present and the failures of the past to anticipate a future collapse. In order to examine the intersections of ecological loss and future memory, the article applies ideas from the emerging field of extinction studies (see Chrulew et al., 2017) to a memory praxis to explore the mnemonic meaning of mass extinction. In conceptualising Anthropocenic presents and proleptic futures the article seeks to examine the conditions of ecological mourning (Cunsolo and Ellis, 2018) and extinction memory.

Lost Species Day was co-created in 2011 by Persephone Pearl, director of ONCA, ³ a small Brighton-based gallery and learning space committed to exploring social and environmental issues. ⁴ In November 2018, I interviewed Persephone Pearl and visited ONCA for their series of events marking Lost Species Day 2018. The interviews along with the notes taken during the day of fieldwork contribute to the analysis and support the arguments developed in this essay. The examination of Lost Species Day presented here suggests an approach to researching memory and extinction in the Anthropocene. The analysis does not allege to provide a complete definition of future memory at a time of ecological loss, but instead seeks to pursue the work of eco-mourning research (see Cunsolo and Landman, 2017) by uncovering the narratives formulated and performed in extinction memorial and funeral practices during the Remembrance Day’s events. The analysis focuses on the events organised at ONCA for Lost Species Day 2018; it especially engages with the mourning rites – a circular ceremony and a funeral procession – performed in remembrance of Steller’s sea cow, the 2018 Remembrance Day for Lost Species emblematic extinct species. The analysis first looks at ‘eco-cosmopolitanism’ (Heise, 2008, 2016) in relation to extinction narratives, considering whether a multispecies framework designed to assemble planetary human and nonhuman communities could be effective in thinking mass extinction. The inquiry then surveys the possibility of a ‘multidirectional memory’ (Rothberg, 2009) of extinction in relation to other related planetary memories.

As Matthew Chrulew et al. remind us ‘there is no singular phenomenon of extinction; rather extinction is experienced, resisted, measured, enunciated, performed, and narrated in a variety of ways to which we must attend’ (2017: 2–3). In asking how, who and what constitutes Lost Species Day’s extinction narratives, attention is paid to the ways that ecological loss is conceptualised as an entangled multispecies phenomenon in the ‘threshold’ era of the Anthropocene (Clark, 2015). In an age of planetary warming, extinction and mourning are geological gradients and memorial records. Lost Species Day in performing liturgical practices of ecological grief presents extinction as outlining memorial practices of, and for the Anthropocene.

Remembering extinction

Extinction studies is an interdisciplinary branch of ecocriticism and environmental humanities that considers the cultural and social implications of mass extinction, as well as the creative practices and strategies responding to such extinction (Chrulew et al., 2017). In telling and reporting stories of species extinction, extinction studies investigate modes of extinction mourning. The narratives of absence that are thereby created form the fabric of memory and future memory in the Anthropocene. There are scholarly precedents examining nonhuman and ecological loss from the perspective of extinction: amongst others, Deborah Bird Rose’s survey of Australian Aboriginal people’s intimate relationship with extinction (2011) and Claire Colebrook’s theoretical examination into ‘post-human futures’ (2014) are influential, as well as Thomas van Dooren’s elegiac bird extinction research (2014), Ursula Heise’s exploration of the cultural and imaginative narratives making extinction (2016), and Ashlee Cunsola and Karen Landman’s dive into the grief caused by the loss of ‘nature’ (2017). And although more attention has been paid to examining the grief of extinction in the past few decades, it often culminates in reflections of psychological, emotional and imaginative attitudes rather than explores the memorial implications of ecological death. I thus suggest an examination of remembrance practices of extinction as a way to position the discussion in terms of memorial significance through those practices’ temporalities, between past and anticipated future memory.

Collectively mourning extinction and mass nonhuman loss apprehends ecological grief on a societal scale. This suggests that multispecies extinction reveals something of human cultural and memorial stories, of what we tell ourselves about ourselves (Heise, 2016). Likewise, thinking death in the Anthropocene involves conceiving it both from a deep-time geological perspective and from the context of human histories, which then entails conceptualising a ‘planetary memory’ (Bond et al., 2018) connecting the temporal ‘macro-, meso- and microscopic perspectives’ (859) of the new epoch. Through the examination of ecological mourning practices, I thus propose to apprehend the cultural significance of extinction, addressing the taxonomic and archival practices – why we preserve, collect and categorise extinct species – codifying our relationships of kinship and othering with the nonhuman.

Collecting, displaying, representing and performing lost species, in natural history collections or funeral rites, attaches meaning, historicity and value to extinction, converting a material/immaterial reality of loss and absence into cultural and memorial discourses. Sharon Macdonald defines ‘[c]ollecting [as] a set of distinctive – though also variable and changing – practices that not only produces knowledge about objects but also configures particular ways of knowing and perceiving’ (2006: 94–95). Collecting as remembering is an epistemological, representational and ethical practice taking different forms (gathering, accumulating, juxtaposing), and finalities (cataloguing, comparing, preserving), in various historical and geographical contexts, while always signalling to the significance of extinction. Within a collection of extinct species for example, an extinct bee is a synecdoche for species extinction, carrying the significance for the species while in itself ontologically containing its own importance. Each extinct species in the Anthropocene carries the memory of the epoch as well as its own uniqueness and that of its particular geography and history: what is lost is not only the species itself but the future genetic heritage of its evolution. The individual vestiges of extinction tell a story of death and loss in the Anthropocene, the violence of the epoch imprinted in the air, the rocks, the seas, the rivers and the bodies and remains of humans and nonhumans and their absence as future memory.

Assembling and articulating these stories into an archive, presenting the deep historical significance of the era, and creating a record of loss and decay recognises the forces of extinction, its meaning and memorial, and future memory implications. Extinction memorial practices such as funerary ceremonies therefore transgress their narrative principle (telling stories of extinction). These practices devise a future memory by connecting decaying pasts and presents with prospective dystopian futures of ‘solastalgia’ (Albrecht, 2007), states of melancholic eco-anxiety at the prospect of environmental disruption. But beyond dystopian – or on the other end of the spectrum, solutionist utopian – futures, remembering extinct species in the present creates a space for collective mourning, making it possible to witness and contemplate the sixth extinction, and grieve collectively, imagining a future memory marked by the prospect of our own disappearance. This perspective historicises and ‘humanises’ extinction memorial practices, extinct species becoming historical objects with human value. In a similar sense, Susan Crane discusses the way fossils are collected, categorised and given human significance:

[i]t is no accident that fossils, those material traces of previous evolutionary stages are to be found in natural history museums: in the natural order of things, the existence of the living came to an end; while the remains – the traces, the randomly fossilized artefacts which transgress time by becoming mired in the primordial muck – transcended their previous form to acquire new significance as relics (2006: 100).

Although I would dispute the idea of a ‘natural order of things’ – as if there was a predetermined and essentialist evolutionary sequence regulating the world – Crane refers to the memorial process transforming individual nonhuman entities with their own agency and ontology to historical human ‘relics’ and artefacts. Collecting, representing and performing extinct species locate nonhuman memory within what is referred as ‘heritage’ (Hoelscher, 2006) – modes of accessing and exercising the past in the present – marking nonhuman loss through contextual human and ideological signifiers, and signalling a kindling and lineage between human and nonhuman. By discussing, representing and collecting extinct species and therefore containing nonhuman loss into heritage discourses, humans recognise themselves as embedded within a multispecies planetary memory of extinction. Remembering extinct species, whether through museum collection or funeral rituals is, I argue, a metonymical device of defining and devising planetary memory and future memory in the Anthropocene.

What is to be established then is the ‘species’ of extinct species that is manifesting nonhuman extinction in human and memorial terms, as well as beyond the human. The planetary-scale loss of nature, landscapes, ecosystems and nonhumans, and the grief accompanying it marks and possibly transforms our attitudes towards environmental decay (Cunsolo and Landman, 2017). However, I wish to problematise the idea of nature and the nonhuman, as solely defined by the inclusion and rejection of the human. Timothy Morton in his earlier ecocritical work rejects Nature, with a capital N, as a Eurocentric and universalist construction inherited from Enlightenment philosophy and Romanticism: Nature, its mysterious wildlife and unforgiving climate, is a mighty entity, nurturing while cruel, fragile while powerful, to be tamed and controlled (2007: 2–8). With the advent of industrialised European and North American empires, nature is no longer only an impending threat but becomes at risk, with modern environmental discourses constructing nature as eaten away by capitalist and imperialist desires and ambitions (Steiguer, 2006). Industrial and capitalist societies become responsible for the loss and decline of a ‘primitive’ nature, destabilising pre-modern fantasies of harmonious cohabitations. Rachel Carson’s environmental manifesto Silent Spring (1964), in which humans cause the ‘strange stillness’ that disrupts a formerly peaceful and self-sustaining nature and wildlife, trademarks that era and signals a shift signified by the awareness of human-caused species extinction. From Romanticism and modern environmentalism to Anthropocenic narratives, what is told are stories of human violence and extinction, of the loss of ‘natural’ ways of life and death, when humans and nonhumans lived and died in perfect harmony. Telling species extinction and stories of environmental degradation from such grand cultural narratives constructs the nonhuman as dependent on the human, both perpetrator and saviour, forgetting that humanity’s history itself is marked by Western histories of colonialism and capitalism.

From Romanticism to modern environmentalism and contemporary heritage narratives, nature and the nonhuman are to be regulated, protected and catalogued. In the words of Ursula Heise: ‘Environmentalist writers and thinkers have skilfully mobilised literary and aesthetic concepts and genres such as the sublime, the picturesque, pastoral, apocalyptic narrative, and what one critic has called ‘toxic discourse’ ⁵ about polluted landscapes and deformed bodies, so as to convey a sense of a previous, beautiful, and fragile natural world at risk’ (2016: 7). Extinction discourses in cultural and memorial terms maintain and reinforce the ideological positions of the society they refer to. Modern environmentalism then led the way to contemporary neoliberal sustainable discourses (Neilson and Tulloch, 2014), attempting to restore a semblance of balance between human activity and the ‘natural world’, while depoliticising environmentalism and extinction discourses, integrating them within capitalist and neocolonial cultures. What transpires are extinction stories which conceptualise extinct species as commodities, dispossessing the nonhuman from its autonomy and restricting it to its human suffix. Stories about extinction are political, they respond to ideological conditions and in turn govern environmental attitudes towards nature and the nonhuman. Collectively mourning extinct species as a performative and memorial exercise maintains these ideological and political positions but could also potentially form part of a political resistance redefining the human/nonhuman relationship. Stories and representations of extinction after ⁶ nature would then move beyond environmental anthropocentric paradigms to conceptualise extinct species remembrance practices as memorial and political actions sketching out new ways to be with, and more importantly without, the nonhuman.

Eco-cosmopolitan extinction

To address these arguments in relation to Lost Species Day, I employ Ursula Heise’s concept of ‘eco-cosmopolitanism’ (2008, 2016) to a situated and empirical examination of Lost Species Day 2018 in Brighton. Eco-cosmopolitanism is an ethical framework designed to devise planetary citizenship principles which, rather than erase differences, assemble the human, nonhuman and nonbiological to compose planetary communities. Adopting an eco-cosmopolitan approach is as Heise alleges, ‘envision[ing] individuals and groups as part of planetary “imagined communities” of both human and nonhuman kinds’ (2008: 61). From there, ‘[s]peaking about species [and in this case species extinction] is also an assembly in the political sense, the process of convening a representative and democratic forum for deliberating and deciding on courses of action that affect all: all humans, but also many nonhuman species if the goal is some form of multispecies justice’ (2016: 226). Remembering and mourning extinction in the eco-cosmopolitan sense suggests becoming aware of some kind of entangled multispecies collectiveness. Remembrance Day for Lost Species produces eco-cosmopolitan memorial practices in that it performs and imagines planetary – human and nonhuman – communities and as such advocates for multispecies mourning, accounting for interspecies relationships (Kirksey et al., 2016) and attending to diverse yet intertwined ways of living and dying.

However, despite concern with providing a space for multispecies grief, Lost Species Day, launched in 2011, took its inspiration from conventional anthropocentric memorial formulas. Persephone Pearl at the beginning of our interview ⁷ explains: ‘We were intrigued by the idea of remembrance days and Armistice Day, which is the 11th of November, and curious about exploring connections between different kinds of war and dying. So we did it in November’. Thereby, inscribing Lost Species Day in the tradition of Armistice commemorations, and as such in the particular context of war remembrance and national identity (Winter, 1995). As much as Pearl would like to register the day, for it to appear on a UN list and become official, the large-scale memorial ambition of an international day of remembrance seems to conflict with the initial ethos of affective and multispecies activism. Pearl clarifies:

[I]t came out of feeling depressed about environmental activism and it’s kind of limitations in the context of capitalism [. . .] [W]hen I talked to conservation organisations earlier on, a lot of them just didn’t reply to me, because it felt not good to have days of mourning, because these are organisations whose existence is a struggle and there is genuine resistance to admitting defeat. I don’t admit defeat and I believe that allowing yourself to really experience loss and sorrow together is actually important and necessary in resistance.

Lost Species Day remains largely on the fringe from an international environmental perspective. It is that very informality that, I contend, permits for eco-cosmopolitan grief to be expressed and performed. Employing a memory activism framework (Chidgey, 2018; Rigney, 2018) the memory of extinction in the present, for the future, is activated. Situated at the intersections of memory work and activism, Remembrance Day is designed to carry the afterlife of extinction and to foster hope through its community. As a grassroots eco-cosmopolitan memorial practice, Lost Species Day is designed in opposition to ‘masculinist or patriarchal’ (Pearl) authoritative discourses; emulating feminist practices – Pearl mentions Carol Gilligan’s research on the Ethics of Care (1982) as one of the main inspirations – the Remembrance Day seeking to establish compassionate and collective memorial practices. During the interview, she describes her vision:

I feel like there could be a communal conversation. I feel like there’s a possibility for an interesting emerging practice to make spaces to ‘stay with the trouble’, ⁸ making spaces for process rather than campaigning or direct action. . . .

I’m interested in that Timothy Morton idea of hyperobjects, things that are essentially impossible to get your head around. It’s about making space to think about an anthropocenic mass extinction, how it could be continuing after the extinction of the human species, make space for a sort of wonderment, a deeper appreciation of what is now.

Evoking Donna Haraway’s multispecies doxa (2016) and Morton’s hyperobject epistemology (2013), Pearl thereby defines Lost Species Day as a contemplative interspecies praxis which looks to memory and deep-time future memory from an eco-cosmopolitan perspective.

On Saturday 1st December 2018, ONCA celebrated Lost Species Day 2018 in their new space, The Barge, a boat turned learning and community centre in Brighton Marina. The day started with playful activities, kids running around and people gathered on the floor of the boat making kelp out of tissue paper and birch branches. At 3.30 pm, the small group of approximately twenty people gathered to sit on the floor in a circle, as the funeral ritual was about to start. Pearl began with a short speech focused on the meaning behind Lost Species Day, and the collective and human significance of extinction. Pearl insisted that these kinds of rituals and gathering were intended to destabilise and challenge neoliberal and neocolonial structures. She also urged the audience to (re)consider the use of ‘we’ and ‘humanity’ in environmental and extinction discourses, as ‘there are big corporations and governments that run the world and determine how things are going.’ She continued saying that ‘[she] didn’t think that feeling guilty and shamed were useful’. The ritual was designed to destabilise the megalithic ‘we’, making visible the hegemonic structures regulating life and death in contemporary societies and redirecting grief and empathy to small-scale communal practices. The ritual was community-focused but committed to an intersectional discourse recognising the many-fold narrative of extinction stories.

As each year a different emblematic extinct species is commemorated on Lost Species Day commemorates a different emblematic extinct species, Pearl’s speech gave way to stories about this year’s lost species, Steller’s sea cow (Hydrodamalis gigas), a large marine mammal that lived off the Pacific coast of Russia and went extinct 252 years ago in 1768. The stories highlighted the sociability of the sea cow, focussing on how the animal used to move in herds, spent its day eating to keep warm and bonded with each other strongly. One of the stories focused on how Georg Willhem Steller, the zoologist who discovered the species, remembers seeing a female sea cow getting harpooned by fishermen and other sea cows trying to rescue her by lying on the rope dragging her. Together, the stories contributed to the portrait of a unique animal. The language used was emotional and anthropomorphic, speakers talked about the animals having ‘partners’, insisted on their ‘tragic destiny’, and named the almost life-size papier-mâché sculpture of the sea cow made for the day hanging from the ceiling of the boat ‘Stella’. This was meant to trigger grief and empathy for the nonhuman species and in its metonymical ability, for a multispecies world, which I suggest forms the basis for eco-cosmopolitan mourning.

That day in Brighton was dim and wet, which felt apt for a funeral ceremony. The small party gathered on the gently rocking boat, the soft light of a winter’s afternoon shining through the windows, voices blending with the sound of the wind outside and the cracking of the boat. The sea cow stories lead into a circular ceremony in which participants were invited to remember what they had lost, to pray or hold in their thoughts what was being lost, and to honour and thank those who had helped them in their grief. This intimate ritual was designed as communal mourning. Participants were invited to witness each other’s grief and to share interspecies stories of loss and resilience, recalling human and nonhuman’s absence and presence. Thinking intersectionally about ecological violence, participants likened the sea cow’s disappearance to lost garden snails and dead parents, endangered starfish and indigenous communities losing their lands to extractive corporations and governments, hunted animals and sick loved ones, orangutans, bumblebees, hedgehogs and refugees drowning in the Mediterranean sea, mothers, human and nonhuman, trying to protect their children, birch trees disappearing around Britain and local campaigners, school children walking out of class in protest of climate inaction and future climate refugees. The intention of this experimental ritual was to perform an act of resistance through remembering absence and future absence and naming loss, creating a form of planetary empathy and mourning. The ceremony did not seek to create a hierarchy – although it could be argued, and this will be examined later on, that referring to refugees and indigenous populations during ‘Lost Species Day’ signals their inherent prospective extinction – but to establish a memorial space of eco-cosmopolitan mourning to collectively process the pain of absence at a time of planetary ecological decay. As such, the ritual proposed to remember lost species as much as it outlined the role of memory in community and identity building.

The event concluded with a funeral procession. Stella, the sea cow sculpture created especially for ONCA’s Lost Species Day, was brought out of the boat, carried through the hyper commercial area of Brighton Marina, through a carpark and onto the beach. Stella was accompanied by the sound of drums and chanting, participants following her and waving their tissue paper kelp in the wind. The procession ended on the beach where she was ‘fed’ the paper kelp and burned down. Pearl insisted on the importance of Stella’s incineration as an ‘active’ communal response to grief allowing the participants to internalise loss. The procession was small. Parts of the ceremony were contrived and melodramatic, but as participants huddled together around the small fire, watching the flames devour Stella’s body – the only source of light in a pitch black beach – waves rolling in, wind and rain whistling in their ears, they performed a unique eco-cosmopolitan mourning practice, which might begin to sketch out the conditions of grief in the Anthropocene. Lost Species Day, as devised by ONCA in 2018, performed the increasing interconnectedness and entanglement of human and nonhuman in the Anthropocene. By staying with the trouble, with the unstable and entropic conditions of life and death at a time of mass extinction, Lost Species Day performs eco-cosmopolitan memorial practices of multispecies love, solidarity, and ecological grief.

Multidirectional mourning

Before ONCA’s Lost Species Day’s funeral ceremony on 1st December 2018, the gallery organised a series of special events exploring biodiversity loss and racial justice. ⁹ Some Of Us Did Not Die included an art exhibition and a special lecture on 29th November 2018 by Dr Sadiah Qureshi. ¹⁰ Qureshi’s research and lecture, the theoretical framework for ONCA’s events programme, made visible the ways in which colonial history and the history of extinction ideas are intimately linked. In her lecture, Qureshi discussed how Eurocentric extinction narratives are used to justify calculated violence against indigenous populations, disguising colonial violence as a ‘natural’ process of extinction and selection, with extinction theories legitimising a topological and hierarchisation of races, and legislating colonial expansion. During our interview Pearl clarified her own position regarding the intersections of the history of environmentalism and racial justice:

What’s happened in the last few years for me personally, running an art venue, was realising who attends art, who is the art audience and who are the environmental activists I met, and realising it was basically people like me, i.e. white and middle class and suddenly a terrible feeling about that . . . So I started to look for decolonial thinkers and scholars of colours and . . . I started asking myself if my focus on biodiversity loss was racist? Am I doing something that’s racist? Not wanting that answer to be yes but having that terrible feeling that actually it involves a high level of privilege to be doing this . . . So something that I’m concerned not to do is to depoliticise extinction by extracting the animal or the nonhuman from the human and political context and telling that story in isolation.

Pearl’s discourse reveals how the histories, and representation, of environmentalism and species extinction overwhelmingly derive from western-centric doxa. Postcolonial and critical race studies are then essential to exhaustively understand the current ecological crisis (Chakrabarty, 2012; Demos, 2016; Qureshi, 2018; Nixon, 2011; Yusoff, 2018). At a time of anthropogenic planetary warming and mass extinction, environmentalism narratives must accommodate environmental, capitalist and colonial ‘slow violence’ (Nixon, 2011): insidious, incremental and protracted violence often occurring out of sight, bypassing generational timescale and affecting communities which are made vulnerable by imperialist extractive cultures. ¹¹ From indigenous communities exposed to toxic pollutants in Canada’s ‘chemical valley’ (Wiebe, 2016), and Black populations suffering from the environmental heritage of slave economies in former sugar plantations in the American south (Rapson, 2018) to the Kiribati people in the South Pacific losing their land, culture and heritage to rising seas, ¹² the history of environmentalism needs to include postcolonial and non-western perspectives so as not to reinforce and maintain exclusionary and marginalising historical and systemic structures of inequality.

ONCA’s Lost Species Day 2018 was conceived to display this gap, as Pearl herself reflected: ‘it’s been very gratifying for me because I was feeling a lot of shame and ambivalence about the project, as this sort of product of privilege, a white environmentalist with its white genealogy’. However, Remembrance Day for Lost Species, like many Western activist projects, is rooted in Eurocentric environmentalism, ¹³ in which the connections between racism and biodiversity loss are often obliterated in favour of universalist narratives. Extinction discourses during Lost Species Day have, however, the potential to produce and perform ‘multidirectional’ memorial practices (Rothberg, 2009), opening up the possibility of dialogical and generative interactions between different histories and memories. Multidirectional memory is about conceiving distinct representations of the past together, which has the potential to form transhistorical solidarity, and the creation of synergic memories uncovering associations and alliances across time and space. As Kathryn Yusoff confronts the ‘White Geology of the Anthropocene’ to ‘a Billion Black Anthropocenes’ (2018) to address prevailing modes of subjection, exploitation and othering which are intimately tied with capitalist and colonial histories, mass biodiversity loss and environmental injustice are the result of entangled histories of Western hegemony, precipitated by the same destructive human infrastructures. Looking at the historical colonial exploitation and erasure of indigenous communities could thus bring about new ways of remembering and commemorating extinct nonhuman species. Colonial and indigenous memories, although responding to different dynamics, make visible what is valued and subsequently obliterated. As extractive capitalism triggers the destruction of entire ecosystems and as colonial economies privatise natural resources, these capitalist and colonial systems erase and negate the lives and agency of ‘disposable’ bodies (Butler, 2004). Even though Rothberg’s multidirectional memory creates idealised and over-optimistic models as it fails to recognise the limits of cosmopolitanism, amalgamates differently situated memories and prevents reflexive differentiation (Bond and Rapson, 2014), it can also open up the possibility for such spaces to be conceptualised, even if somewhat idealised. Bringing together two seemingly distinct memories thus generates connections between specific historical struggles. If looking at memory is considering past trauma as integral to present conditions, examining those struggles together through the prism of multidirectional memory brings past violence and its remnants into the present. Doing so aids an understanding and allows for examination of the contemporary perpetuations of such violence.

However, multidirectionality and eco-cosmopolitanism as models are limited in the context of Lost Species Day. They favour homogeneity and universalism over multiplicity, forming artificial planetary communities, with little attention paid to mechanisms of exploitation and subjection. To illustrate this, I want to return to an aspect of Lost Species Day 2018 funeral ritual, the circular ceremony in which participants were invited to remember what they had lost and to pray or hold in their thoughts what was being lost to a reality of mass extinction. As participants listed extinct and endangered species – sea cows, bees, orangutans and birch trees – and evoked the memory of present and future climate refugees and the fate of indigenous populations facing land theft from extractive industries, they performed, as outlined in the previous section, a form of eco-cosmopolitan and multidirectional memory and mourning. But if the devastating prospects of lost futures can take its toll on mental health, especially amongst younger people, and might even produce a form of environmental ‘pre-traumatic stress disorder’ (Kaplan, 2015) or ‘anticipatory anxiety’ (Saint-Amour, 2015), this pre-emptive grief, even if constructed from a relational – or multidirectional/eco-cosmopolitan – standpoint, is different from the kind of grief caused by mass extinction. Mentioning or referring to present and future climate refugees or indigenous communities fighting for the rights to their land in a funeral ceremony during Remembrance Day for Lost Species in some way implies the inherent and ineluctable extinction of these populations. Although pre-mourning these communities can make visible the colonial and capitalist mechanisms of extractive cultures and economies which create a system in which not everyone holds the same level of valuability and ‘grievability’ (Butler, 2004), these narratives of dramatic disparities historicise populations that have been made disposable. This is realised by restricting them and their culture to a future past that is already lost and by removing the possibility of agency over their struggles.

Instead of commemorating these communities in funeral ceremonies, it might be useful to reframe their imposed vulnerability and precariousness, to focus on their rights to anger, to agency, to their own land and to embassy. In that sense, thinking extinction and its commemoration in terms of multidirectionality and eco-cosmopolitanism is useful to a certain extent, as long as it does not reassert the same logics of power and inequality it is seeking to disrupt. I want to be careful here not to defend a kind of apolitical neoliberal discourse of empowerment which erases the insidious mechanisms of deeply unjust and violent imperial and extractive economies. Instead I wish to think about what it means for a group of Western, predominantly white people to sit in a circle and mourn people from across the planet who are subjected to incremental economic, climatic and colonial violence. What does it mean for people in the West to declare a day to remember extinction and while doing so, grieve for the lives of entire – living and fighting – communities.

Conclusion

At the end of our discussion, Pearl reflected on Lost Species Day 2018, explaining:

Remembering and sitting with the loss and what’s being lost, being a participant in this, is a profound thing, it is a sort of challenge to that consumerist extractivist paradigm, in a tiny way. . . . It’s about making space to think about an anthropocenic mass extinction, how it could be continuing after the extinction of the human species, make space for a sort of wonderment, a deeper appreciation of what is now.

One of the most important things I took away from this year’s lost species day, was how the idea of lost forever is a kind of colonial concept as well, it has a kind of aggrandisement, or erasing quality. If something is lost forever, how can you be committed to it?

Pearl outlines the conditions of collaborative survival and extinction: remembering extinction is anticipating, imagining and formulating a planetary future memory of absence. Mourning extinct species can maybe then start to acknowledge a form of interspecies solidarity and multispecies kinship in the face of mass extinction, a mourning that transgresses solely anthropocentric demands. This echoes Vinciane Despret, translated by Matthew Chrulew, in the afterword of Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death and Generations:

But what the world has lost is not what people mourn. What the world has lost, and what truly matters, is a part of what invents and maintains it as world. The world dies from each absence; the world bursts from absence . . . When a being is no more, the world narrows all of a sudden, and a part of reality collapses (2017: 219).

As ‘part of reality collapses’ under the weight of absence and extinction, the memory of such absence is the presence and manifestation of the ‘bursting’ of the world, the pain, fear and grief of living and dying on a planet on the brink of mass extinction. Mourning ecological loss in the Anthropocene is collectively recognising the advent of a new era of biodiversity loss and multispecies entanglement. Lost Species Day funeral and commemorative ceremonies, like the one I witnessed in Brighton, are blanketed by a solemn and prophetic aura. They sketch out the possibility for memorials of the apocalypse, creating sacred spaces of ecological mourning to reflect on the shared mortality of humans and nonhumans. These liturgical practices of ecological grief encourage solidarity between living things, celebrate life on the planet and offer eco-cosmopolitan and multidirectional spaces to mourn ecological destruction.

But ultimately, Lost Species Day is a memorial day created and performed for modern occidental humans. It introduces memorial practices with taxonomic and conservation purposes that present a vision of the Anthropocene as the disruption of a cyclic, harmonious and stable nature. This reasserts a humanist, universalist and anthropocentric discourse in which Western humans are the exceptional species, the measure and structure from which life is understood. Lost Species Day navigates this paradox: it formulates memorial practices inviting ecological mourning, reaffirming the entanglement of humans, nonhumans and the planet while maintaining a narrative inherited from Eurocentric Enlightenment doxa in which humans are the measure of all things. As an eco-cosmopolitan and multidirectional memorial practice, Lost Species Day attempts to devise an entangled and collaborative planetary memory of extinction. And yet, as a ritualistic palimpsest memorial practice linking different pasts, presents and futures in an effort to preserve the memories of lost species and protect what is under threat, the Remembrance Day remains fundamentally anthropocentric and western-centric. Lost Species Day overall is focused on universal human histories, granting humans the role of persecutors and saviours, and reasserting the humanism of white environmentalism. Yet, there could be space for Remembrance Day for Lost Species, for extinction mourning and future planetary memory, to move beyond eco-cosmopolitan and multidirectional models, to conceptualise a form of ambivalent entanglement and differential memory which recognises multispecies conditions of life and death while also uncovering the mechanisms of colonial and capitalist cultures that create the very conditions of mass extinction. This new model, which problematises the ‘we’ of Anthropocene extinction stories, could formulate and perform a planetary future memory that composes life and death in a ‘bursting’ world on a brink of collapse.