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From dodos to 'lost' tribes: a history of extinction
00:35:06
Sadiah Qureshi explains why the history of extinction is a much murkier story that it initially seems
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Professor Saadia Qureshi
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Podcast Host James Osborne
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Soon after landing on Mauritius and causing the extinction of the dodo, humans came to terms with the fact that we have the power to destroy entire species. But that realization wasn't as straightforward as it might seem. Speaking to James Osborne, Sathia Qureshi discusses her new book, Vanished, which looks at how changing ideas about extinction has have reshaped the face of the planet.
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Today I'm joined by Professor Saadia Qureshi, who is a historian of race science and empire in the modern world. Sadia, your new book is titled An Unnatural History of Extinction. I want to hone in on a specific word in that title, unnatural. Can you describe for us what the first example that we know of of an unnatural extinction might have been?
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Professor Saadia Qureshi
The classic unnatural extinction that people are aware of, people tend to think about is the dodo. And that's because on Mauritius, for instance, it's an island that is not populated by human beings. And when human beings arrive they very, very quickly, especially when the Dutch and Portuguese arrive. The Arabs know about the island for centuries, but don't really do much. And when they, they introduce mammals, and that very, very quickly leads to a depletion in dodo numbers and extinctions. And this is something that's known about throughout the early modern world. And it's very much seen as the result of human interference within that island. But it tends to be thought of as a sort of one off or as a catastrophe rather than a process that is happening all the time in nature. The idea that extinction is happening all the time in nature is not prevalent at all, which is why something like the dodo would be, would be seen as a human induced event rather than a natural process.
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Podcast Host James Osborne
Okay, that's so interesting. So when people caused the extinction of the dodo, they weren't seeing the pattern, they just saw that it was one specific example that they thought maybe might never happen again and only happen as a one off.
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Professor Saadia Qureshi
Yes, there's several reasons why naturalists and people more broadly are not looking for patterns of extinction or why they don't expect it to take place. And much of it is theological in the sense that if you live in a world where you think of that as created by God in all its perfection, to think of something going extinct all the time is effectively to admit that God's creation has these flaws in it all the time. And so nobody would expect there to be a process that would rob the world of species because otherwise that would diminish the abundance of God's creation. So occasionally there are things that are known about, you know, these events, such as the dodo, and they are recognized as such, but they are very much seen as humanity intervening and causing a flaw or this rupture and absence within God's creation.
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Podcast Host James Osborne
So if people see the extinction of the dodo, the loss of the dodo, as going against God's plan or going against God's will. Could you talk us through what the reaction was to realizing that humans have the power to do this? Was there pushback against it? Did people try to kind of just sweep it under the rug?
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Professor Saadia Qureshi
It's quite curious because although obviously we know the dodo as the most famous sort of victim of extinction, many people don't realize it at the time. So although it is actually famous and recognized still in very, very limited circles, so much so that by the 19th century, people think of the dodo as some kind of fabrication or monstrous story rather than a bird that even existed. And it's only in the 19th century, when naturalists systematically combed through museum drawers and things like that to find relics, this bird, and managed to find enough bones to reconstruct one, that there is a recognition that this bird existed and went extinct. So even in the early modern world, when it happens, although some people are aware of it, it's a very, very limited awareness.
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Podcast Host James Osborne
And how does something like the discovery of mammoth bones, which you talk about in the book, how does that slot into this idea and does that strengthen the realisation that this is something that's happened before and could happen again?
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Professor Saadia Qureshi
So, in the late 18th century, amid the French Revolution, Georges Cuvier is really, really interested in looking at mammoth bones and so on, and he starts exploring the issue of whether mammoths are a different species to African and Asian elephants, because at that point, African and Asian elephants are seen as the same. So he's trying to figure out what their relationship is. And through those kinds of really, really thorough investigations, he's able to establish that both Asian and African elephants are different species, but also that this beast is not only a different species, but must be extinct. And that's not an unprecedented claim in the sense that everybody who knows of geologists who know about the mastodon and its discovery in the States think, know that there's this strange incognitum that nobody knows what it. But the idea that it might not exist within nature still is much, much more difficult for people to accept, because, for instance, Thomas Jefferson assumes, well, actually, it just must be roaming somewhere we haven't found in the continent where we haven't got to yet, and believes that, like, native legends about the beasts of the west and so on actually mean that it is very, very likely still existing. And it's only slowly over the decades, as Cuvier works on the mammoth bones or other kinds of extinct beasts. And from that he's able to both conclude and convincingly argue that there is a lost world that people have not really been aware of, of these animals. And he himself considers them to have been lost in some kind of catastrophe.
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Podcast Host James Osborne
Okay, so over centuries, really, there's a growing portrait of this thing called extinction that builds from evidence of this lost world. I think that that notion of a lost world is so evocative. And something that is equally evocative is, in your book, when you describe seeing a real dodo specimen, could you just take a moment to describe what seeing a real dodo specimen was like for you personally?
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Professor Saadia Qureshi
It was deeply emotional and upsetting. So when I write about extinction, I tend not to talk about species, but Ways of being, because I think species is this kind of artificial category that humans have created, and it's useful for taxonomic purposes and so on. But I think to speak of ways of being gives us a sense of how, when we look out and with the ways of being that we share the world with, that they are all quite distinctive and curious and have their own rights and existences. And to see such a curious way of being and such a famous way of being reduced to almost nothing. So we don't have a single complete skin of the dodo anywhere in the world. And the dodo that I saw, it's called the Oxford dodo, and all it is is effectively a mummified head that was once upon a time a full skin and slight remnants. So it really feels like this kind of. It brings home the fact that human beings, through their wanton slaughter, have robbed the world of these incredible and distinctive ways of being that survived for millennia, possibly millions of years, and now they're gone, you know, from human exploitation and so on. And that is a very. That's an incredibly powerful realization, but also incredibly upsetting. The idea that we not only have that power, but we wield it so indiscriminately and without respect for life, I find really troubling.
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Podcast Host James Osborne
And your definition of extinction as the loss of these ways of being really broadens it out, as you say, beyond individual species and makes it a much bigger concept. A major theme in your book is how this concept of loss, of ways of being ties in to imperialism and the history of colonialism. Can you explain for listeners why colonialism, imperialism and extinction are all so intrinsically linked together?
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Professor Saadia Qureshi
If you think about extinction as the loss of animal species, which is effectively what is the case for a very long time. We have the emergence of these new ideas of extinction in the late 18th and early 19th century, with Cuvier proposing that extinction is possible and it's inherent in the natural world. Once that gets established, people tend to think of extinction as a historical process. It's not until, say, the 1880s, 90s, like with the bison and the passenger pigeon, this idea that human beings can cause a loss of extraordinarily prolific species becomes common. But when Cuvier's original ideas of animal extinction are developed, they are very, very quickly taken up and applied far beyond the realm of animals, to people and in particular, colonized peoples. So a lot of people immediately start claiming that colonized peoples, indigenous peoples in places like North America, Canada, Australia, are on the verge of extinction throughout the world. So there's that Fundamental way in which ideas of animal extinction are used to narrate the history of settler colonies as process of extinction rather than a violent process of dispossession. So there's that very, very obvious way in which extinction gets used to talk about empire in the 19th century in a way that disavows the very nature of imperialism. And but there's also connections in terms of, you know, empire makes this science possible. So for instance, Georges Cuvier sitting in Paris, he is able to take advantage of the fact that he is in the middle of a metropolitan city within the border French Empire, and Napoleon is running around all of Europe, you know, taking things from his foes and stuff. So he's working some of the best scientific collections in the world, which only exist as they do because of empire. So imperialism is both a sort of structural factor in making the scientific research possible, but it is also an incredibly important to how people imagine and think of extinction once they start speaking of extinction beyond historical loss of animal species.
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Podcast Host James Osborne
And this is a really complex topic, both in terms of what actually happened in history and in terms of the language we use. I just want to make this really clear from your perspective. What are the problems with conflating the loss of these native human groups with extinction? Like, do you think that these two things are separate? Should they be combined into one? How should we navigate this?
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Professor Saadia Qureshi
I think it's important to recognize the ways in which ideas about animal extinction have been applied to peoples. And that to me is part of getting back to the unnatural history of extinction. Because that allows us to unsettle idea that extinction is just the loss of animal species. So if we take the example of the Beothuk for instance, which is one of the earliest examples of people who are said to have been lost or become extinct, this is a claim that's made very, very quickly in the 1820s and 30s when the last of the Beothukushona Dittith is supposed to have has passed away. And immediately she's claimed to be the last of her people. So there's several things going on there. Firstly, there's the imposition of ideas of animal extinction on people, which itself is a really, really big expansion of what can be made extinct into human subjects. But when people make that claim, what they're often doing is ignoring continued forms of existence. So by claiming Shana Dutth is the last of her people, people are assuming that there is no movement or migration between of Newfoundland and Canada more broadly, which is not true. And this is especially important because you know, there are people now alive with Beothuk heritage. In that sense, they don't exist as a nation in that times of identity, and that's well known. But these claims about the last of their people, the last of their race, are often rooted in European notions of kinship that are imposed onto indigenous peoples. And so there are multiple layers of denial and disavowal involved in these kinds of claims about extinction, both within the 19th century and by us, if we continue to perpetuate them without thinking critically about them.
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Podcast Host James Osborne
So because the loss of ways of being, as you put it, can't be pinned on just one person or that term of like the last of their race or anything like that, you think that applying the idea of extinction to groups of people is an unhelpful idea.
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Professor Saadia Qureshi
So as a historian, my concern would be that if you have settler colonial nations that are able to say or do say, these particular Native notions don't no longer exist exist. What they're effectively doing is undermining any campaign for Native sovereignty or any kind of claim about continued Native existence, which is really important for land rights. So I think these it's by repeating claims of Native Extinction uncritically, people do not realize that they are both ignoring continued Native existence, which itself is a form of injustice. But it also perpetuates other forms of injustice, such as the denial of land rights. And I mean, for instance, in Canada, there's a. The Chinite nation had to spend decades to prove that they existed and to be formally recognized by the Canadian government. And imagine living a life where you're constantly told you don't exist because you were wiped out. And as a result of that, you have no rights or that you have no connections to your homeland. That's, I think, profoundly troubling. And it's made possible by the repetition of these myths of extinction that are first circulated in the 19th century by, often colonists who have no regard for Indigenous ways of knowing or their own forms of kinship.
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Podcast Host James Osborne
I think this is so complex. And obviously, yeah, you know, it's complex enough for you to have written a whole book about it. But I think one of the reasons why it's hard to understand is that on the one hand, it seems obviously right to admit and come to terms with the fact that humans can cause extinction. Because if we just deny that, then we're removing our responsibility. But on the other hand, we. What you're saying is that when that concept of extinction is applied to human groups, whether that's the native groups of North America or Australia, actually, the concept of extinction turns into a way of backing the power and authority of imperialist or colonialist forces. Is that about right in terms of how we should understand this tension?
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Professor Saadia Qureshi
Yes. And I think it's partly because, I mean, even children are familiar with the idea of extinction. It's something that is absolutely embedded within the ways that we're brought up. If we're used to going to museums or seeing Jurassic park on TV or, you know, those kinds of things. And it's precisely because we encounter extinction as species loss all the time that I think it's very, very easy to think of it as something that's inevitable, that is just embedded in the natural world without stepping back and being able to think of it as an idea that has a history and that. That history has consequences in the present day. And I think that's why it's so important to be able to think of extinction in these multiple ways. Because I don't want to deny that dinosaurs have gone extinct by any means. We know that they no longer exist. So things do go extinct. But how we make sense of their extinction has a very, very important political effect both within, in terms of Understanding our past, but also understanding our present.
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Podcast Host James Osborne
Okay. We are talking about how all of these different ideas and notions of extinction have evolved really across the past four, five centuries. And clearly this is something that has gone through different iterations. Can you take us step by step, kind of trying to map out a timeline here of how the thinking about extinction has changed over the centuries from the start to now. And some of the names and some of the faces involved with that progress.
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Professor Saadia Qureshi
I wouldn't necessarily see it as progress. I see as shifts and transformations. And the reason I don't see it as progress is because we often tend to think of science as somehow progressively getting things right that I think we don't want to admit just how political science actually is. And I think that's important to bear in mind. So, you know, but let's begin with the dodo. We have in the early modern world this understanding of the natural world as God's creation. Broadly speaking, within Euro American kind of contexts, there is a recognition that things can go extinct, such as the dodo, but they're often called extirpation or extermination. So that the idea that this is some. There's a human intervention during the French Revolution. Cuvier conducts his research looking at comparing fossilized remains of like elephantine creatures like the mammoths to present day elephants, and builds up an enormous amount of incredibly detailed evidence that suggests that there are many, many species that are no longer with us and establishes the notion that they're extinct very quickly. Extinction goes from being this sort of theologically suspect idea into something that's thought of as a natural process. And once it's thought of as a natural process, it's often considered as a natural law. And once people start considering it as a natural law, they consider using extinction to think about change in the world much, much more broadly. And crucially, that it is then God's will. So when people start talking about native peoples across the 19th century as going extinct, whether that's the Beothic in Newfoundland or aboriginal Tasmanians in the 19th century, they're often talking about it as a form of extinction, but also as a form of providential progr progress. And that's a very, very specific claim about how imperial expansion of Britain of European nations is a form of civilizational progress, which is why I think we need to be aware of what the kind of work that that word progress is used to do in the 19th century. Then in the late 19th century, people start becoming aware of the loss of species, prolific species, and people start thinking Gosh, maybe extinction is something that's happening in the here and now, and it's something that is potentially caused by humans. So this form, thinking of it as vanishing wildlife or threatened species. So extinction then comes to be something, as something that can be both rapidly accelerated by humans, but that also means it can be stopped or halted. And that's when you start to get forms of wildlife protection. So that by the time of, after the Second World War, once people have started establishing national parks and so on in the later 19th century, the idea that we can have conservation practices steps in. And by the 1980s, for instance, we have widespread kind of new forms of conservation biology emerging, which is the way that we tend to think of extinction now. And the most familiar idea to us, the idea that the world is in the midst of a biodiversity crisis, possibly on the verge of a sixth mass extinction, and that we need to do something about it because of our exploitation of the natural world, that creates a.
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Podcast Host James Osborne
Really vivid, useful timeline, and it really emphasizes how many different forces are at play here. You have of scientific, quote, unquote, progress. And you've, you've explained the challenges with using that word. You have colonialism, theology, naturalism. And I think one of, one of the things that proves that complexity is that there are so many moments in your book where you add an idea into extinction that I hadn't considered and that many listeners won't have considered being connected to extinction at all. So you just mentioned national parks, and in your book you talk about how the history of national parks intertwines with extinction and attitudes toward extinction. Could you add some more detail to that?
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Professor Saadia Qureshi
So national parks are founded from the 1870s onwards with Yellowstone and then Yosemite. And when people think of national parks, they tend to think of them as an inherent good that are linked to environmental conservation. But that's not why they're first founded. They are first founded is effectively as a form, as a kind of internal tourist industry within the United States. And they only become associated with environmental protection much later in the late 19th century, when people realize places like Yellowstone are the last refuges of wolves or bison, for instance. And national parks, people often don't remember that they are carved out from the lands of native peoples. And those native peoples themselves are. Are often forced off those lands, are dispossessed of them. So, for instance, in the 1830s, Andrew Jackson pushes through legislation in America called the Indian Removal Bill, and he justifies Indian Removal, what he calls Indian Removal, on the basis that if peoples, Native nations who are in Contact with European settlers are not moved out of their traditional homelands, they will almost certainly go extinct. And so his solution to that is to force, coercively move people off their lands onto Indian territory. And then this creates an expectation that native peoples on the verge of extinction. And in the 1830s, there's a man, a painter, called George Catlin, who hears about this, and he's absolutely convinced that this is going to happen. And he starts trekking through the Rocky Mountains and so on. And he comes up with this idea of the national park in the 1830s. And his vision is of a refuge where native peoples can actually continue to live as they do, because he has romantic ideas of how they live and, you know, the idea of picturesque scenes of wilderness and so on. But by the time national parks are actually established in the 1870s, they are a very, very different story. They are not the kind of the national park that Catalyn envisaged with native nations, but actually visions of wilderness completely depopulated through dispossession. So that's a very, very kind of important way in which we encounter dispossession, but don't even see it any longer, because we see it as a good thing, an inherent good, often for thinking about wildlife protection and so on. But it has very, very dark and troubling roots within imperial dispossession.
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Podcast Host James Osborne
I think we also forget a lot of the faces and names who were. Who were involved in the story of extinction. Who do you think is the most important or most significant name or face who has contributed to how we understand extinction? Who we don't give credit to, or who we don't talk about now as much as we should, or perhaps who listeners won't even have heard of.
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Professor Saadia Qureshi
I think many people likely have not heard of Georges Cuvier, to be honest. I mean, when I first started talking about this with my editor, for instance, she was like, why isn't he as famous as Darwin? I was like, well, it's partly because Cuvier didn't actually believe that species evolve. And so when people wrote about him in, you know, they tend to think of him as the on the losing side of history. But I think there are also many other names that are, to me, are actually more important. And those are the people whose stories have been forgotten, like Shanna Dittith, who are claimed to be the last of their race, and whose stories are used to tell a very, very particular and fragmented and partial story of British imperialism that perpetuates these forms of historic injustice. So I would be far happier if people knew who Shona Dittith was and what her life story really means. Far more so than I would if people suddenly were super keen on learning more about Cuvier, for instance, although they're both really important in their own ways.
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Podcast Host James Osborne
This is such a emotionally challenging, difficult topic to speak about and probably to hear about. As a historian of this, are there any trends that you see at the moment that give you cause to feel hopeful about where this is going in the future?
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Professor Saadia Qureshi
In many ways, my book is a love letter to the natural world as well as a historian pleading for people to think about how understanding these histories of extinction can help us do better in the present. Precisely because I would like to think that knowing about extinction and it's and thinking about extinction as a political choice offers hope rooted in love and joy. Because I think one of the problems in the present moment is that people feel profound, just profoundly paralyzed in terms of their own kind of inability to have an effect or to do something within the context of climate change and so on. But I think if we can change the way we relate to other ways of being around us, and if we can respect life itself, then I think where that itself is a huge, huge shift from thinking of nature as an exploitable resource. And I think that is happening. I think there's also increasing interest in thinking about having different relationships with the natural world as a form of conservation itself, rather than just thinking of us as having dominion and stewardship over the natural world, of actually changing how we live within the world. And I think that is definitely a moment for hope. And where the histories of these difficult ideas and things come in is that I think they can help us make genuinely better decisions and policy choices. So that instead of choosing policies that are rooted in dispossession and that we don't know about, because we don't know about that history, we can actually think, well, how can we best create a world that does provide justice not just for tigers, but indigenous peoples, for instance?
- [34:04]
Podcast Host James Osborne
That was Professor Sathia Qureshi, Chair in Modern British History at the University of Manchester, and she was speaking to James Osborne. Sathia was discussing her new book, An Unnatural History of Extinction. And for more on this topic, be sure to check out our Everything youg Wanted to Know episode on extinct animals with Dr. Ross Barnett. That's available now. Wherever you get your podcasts.
- [34:35]
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