What Is Extinction?

What Is Extinction? A Natural and Cultural History of Last Animals provides a much-needed, in-depth examination of the paradox of extinction - which both signifies the ultimate threat to any given species, as well as serves as its inevitable conclusion - through a wide range of case studies that roughly chart the development of Eurowestern settler colonialism. Schuster makes an important contribution to the recent development of extinction studies, particularly by engaging and extending discussions of the multiform ways in which the histories of mass killings of human and nonhuman animals intertwine.---Susan McHugh, author of Love in a Time of Slaughters: Human-Animal Stories Against Genocide and Extinction How are we to understand the unknowable, the extinction of humans? Joshua Schuster helps us grapple with the end by framing extinction broadly to encompass genocides (Native American Indian populations and European Jews), animal extinctions (as documented in photography), speculative extinctions (the last human as in HG Well's The Time Machine), and gestured solutions such as re-wilding as de-extinction. Schuster's detailed investigation into each shattering event provides lessons we have poorly learned that bear correction. With its novel framing What is Extinction? provides a breadth and depth for rethinking this pressing question. Schuster concludes with a hopeful possibility and pressing imperative: to live on a shared earth that demands an ecological lives of hospitality.---Ron Broglio, author of Animal Revolution