Kate Rigby

Extinction is nothing if not a multivariate and "polysemous" concept; despite the finality it appears to confer on those affected by it, it has different temporalities attached to it, and has meant broadly different things to different people at different times (O'Key 2023: 168; see also Jørgensen, 2022, Van Dooren, 2014). As recently as a couple of centuries ago, the idea that species could disappear was widely considered to be improbable (Wignall, 2019: today, the reality that they do disappear, and that those disappearances have potentially devastating consequences, has percolated into public life (O'Key, 2023: 172-173). Although paleobiologists do not necessarily agree on this, the Earth today is experiencing what is popularly known as the Sixth Mass Extinction (Barnowsky et al., 2011; for a different view, see also Bambach et al., 2004). Over a million of the world's animal and plant species are currently considered to be under serious threat, while our long-term future on the planet is increasingly uncertain. Meanwhile, the recent COVID-19 pandemic has reminded us that humans, animals and even pathogens are co-dependent on each other's survival; that our deaths are shared with others' deaths, just as our lives are entangled with others' lives (Van Dooren, 2014: 137). Unsurprisingly given this context, a new field, Extinction Studies, has emerged over the past decade or somainly in Australia and the US, but now increasingly in the UKthat directly engages with the questions raised by these circumstances. Extinction Studies, as it is currently conceived, tends to be either biologically or culturally oriented; in this special issue, and the CUP Extinction series that hosts it, we make a strong case that it needs to be both. Extinction needs to be understood, that is, in cultural as well as biological terms, not least through the various stories that are told about it; and also through the various languages that are associated with it, which are as much tied up with emotions as with ideas, with cultural values as with scientific facts (Heise, 2015). Extinction, as the cultural theorist Ashley Dawson suggests, may well be an "underacknowledged formand causeof the contemporary environmental crisis", but it is equally a crisis of the imagination: a product of our seemingly impoverished capacity to conceive of a more socially equitable, biologically diverse world (2016: 9; 101). The main question the contributors to this issue have been instructed to ask is what extinction meansbiologically, culturally, sociallyin contemporary contexts of global crisis: the decline of species, the death of languages, the deterioration of already vulnerable human societies and natural ecosystems. Further questions arise from this. What is the future of life in a time of mass extinctions? What is our place in, and what are our obligations to, a more-than-human world: one that we humans share with a multitude of other species whose lives are bound up with our own? What are the different meanings of extinction in different social and ecological contexts, and what stories and narratives, as well as everyday material practices, are needed to cope with the unprecedented scale of loss? Can extinction be forestalled, or even reversed, and what are the consequences of such measures? What legacies does extinction leave us with, and what does it tell us about the all too easily taken-for-granted temporal processesgenerational change, the deathlife continuumthat it "catastrophically interrupts"? (Van Dooren et al., 2017: np). Addressing extinction requires collaborative work: across species, across nations, across societies and cultures, but also across disciplines. Extinction Studies is a field that by definition crosses conventional disciplinary boundaries, creatively combining the work of arts-and sciences-based researchers. It is also one that by definition attracts the young, on whose own futures the future health and biodiversity of the planet depend. This special issue is dedicated, accordingly, to the work of early-stage researchers based at universities in the UK and Europe. Although their submissions were made anonymously and blind-reviewed, around half of the contributors to the issue are affiliated with the UK's pioneering doctoral scholarships program at the University of Leeds in Extinction Studies, researchers attached to which are required to work in and across at least two different disciplines 1 ; while the other contributors, who are currently based at various European universities, are pursuing similar kinds of interdisciplinary work. In some cases, especially those of the Leeds-based contributors, essays have been co-authored with more experienced university colleagues, including their own supervisors, but the collaborative work that has been produced is very much led by younger scholars who are laying the

In this short article, I explore the ways in which literary studies, and in particular, the study of ecopoetry and ecopoetics, can contribute to current engagements with the temporal horizon of ‘deep’, geological, time. Drawing on the concept of ‘temporal discernment’ advanced by environmental philosopher, James Hatley, I argue for the cultivation of an appreciation for plural temporalities (including the historical, ethical, immemorial, creaturely, contemplative and prophetic, alongside the geological and evolutionary), the lineaments of which I trace here in Diane Pacitti’s poetry collection, Dark Angelic Mills centred around the multi-layered history of the post-industrial, multi-cultural Cathedral town of Bradford in England.

(2019). Ancient Christian Ecopoetics: cosmologies, saints, things. Green Letters. Ahead of Print.

Contact Improvisation is a form of dance. As the name sug-gests, this is not the kind of dance where everybody knows the steps in advance. While its moves are unscripted, Contact Improvisation also differs from the semi-solo style of arm-flailing and hip-swiveling in which many of us learnt to en-gage as teenagers, for its practitioners are required to remain at all times in close proximity to a partner. “Characteristically performed in a duet,” explains Hellene Gronda:Contact Improvisation combines the freedom to move spontaneously with an injunction to maintain a physical relationship with your partner(s), usually through touch, but also through commitment to a mutual trajectory based on a shared centre of gravity. Body awareness is fundamental to safe practice of the form because it is like-ly to include falling and spatial disorientation. It can be awkward, spectacularly dangerous, or breathtaking and tender. ... Contact Improvisation is primarily practiced in a community activity called a Jam. ( Gronda 2005, 28–29).

Sometime around 1800, toward the end of his period of programmatic neoclassicism, Goethe took time out from his official duties at the Weimar court, and from his own scientific research, to compose a perfect Petrarchan sonnet addressed to the relationship between “art” and “nature.” While seemingly in flight from one another, we are told in the opening stanza, the apparent divergence of the entities thus named actually effects their unforeseen reunion: “Natur und Kunst, sie scheinen sich zu fliehen, / Und haben sich, eh man es denkt, gefunden” (Though art and nature seem sore disunited / Yet each, before you think, to each is turning).¹ Reassured by this apparent reconciliation of nature and art, the speaker declares that his antipathy (Widerwille) (whether to the one or the other or, perhaps, to their apparently antipathetic trajectories) has also disappeared, and he now finds himself drawn equally to both. This bold beginning raises a series of questions, arising in no small part from the multivalence of the very terms “nature” and “art,” which are only partially and indirectly answered in the following stanzas. “Nature,” as Raymond Williams remarks in Keywords, is “perhaps the most complex word in the [English] language,” and judging by the lengthy entry in the Grimms’ Deutsches Wörterbuch, the same can certainly be said for Natur in German.² One wonders, then, what conception and dimension of “nature” is in play here? “Art” is somewhat less prodigiously polysemous, but it was significantly more so in Goethe’s day. While we tend to associate this word primarily with the sphere of aesthetic production, as in the creation of works of art, around 1800, Kunst, like “art” in English, could also refer to activities that would today be classified in terms of “craft.” Such crafty “arts” could also include the experimental techniques deployed by those who had adopted Sir Francis Bacon’s novum organon in order to induce “nature” to surrender “her” closely guarded secrets.³ What kind of “art” is this, then, that is seemingly so at odds with “nature”? Why are they in flight from one another? And on what basis, and in what manner, might their apparent reunification be effected?

This article examines the relevance of romanticism to ecocriticism. It analyzes some cases of contradictory trends and tendencies that can be traced in the thought and literature of the romantic period and considers some of the ways in which romanticism was taken up in the “new world.” It explores romantic conception of Nature and Freedom and the contrapuntal movement of secularization and resacralization. While the article emphasises the diversity of Romantic thought and writing, it suggests that some strands anticipate contemporary postequilibrum ecology.

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment - December 2013