“1. Loving Swarms: Religious Ethics amid Mass Extinction” in “Extinction and Religion”
Religious Ethics amid Mass Extinction
MASS EXTINCTION BEARS A CULTURAL depth that might be described as religious. Involving eons of time and stories about ends of life, mass extinction is an epic knot of evolutionary and cultural histories. Indeed, in popular culture, extinctions and the responses they elicit are often described using religious vocabularies (e.g., apocalypse, lament, atonement, resurrection). In the field of religion and ecology, however, scholars seldom develop sustained interpretive engagement with extinctions. Our work often invokes anthropogenic mass extinction as an indicator of deep trouble with humanity, standing with climate change as a leading example of some rupture in relationships that calls for religious response. Yet whereas climate change has stimulated diverse forms of religious creativity and attracted detailed analyses from religious ethics, less attention is paid to extinctions. Why?
I initially pursue that question in this chapter by discussing a particular imperiled species, Saltmarsh Sparrow, and a particular religious tradition, the North Atlantic form of Christianity that currently inhabits Saltmarsh Sparrow territory. In part II, I counterpoint that way of framing the inquiry by turning to indistinct swarms—of insects and of religion. Global insect decline deepens the challenge to conceptualizing extinctions, while the range of cultural response to it points to alternative notions of religion within which scholars may find new convocations of practice and politics.
This essay proceeds in two parts in order to query the conceptions of extinction and of religion at work in making the connection between them. Working first with a tradition-based version of religion and a species-death case of extinction, I develop a line of inquiry with familiar conceptions: What does Christian ethics have to say about the imminent loss of Saltmarsh Sparrow? In the second part, I reconsider the lead concepts by developing a more complex meshwork of extinction and an affect-oriented account of religion as murmuration. Here I consider the swarm as a form of life whose diminishments may be felt in dread and as a metaphor for spontaneous associations of cosmological meaning-making.
Understanding the relation of religion and extinctions matters because, as Ursula Heise writes in Imagining Extinction, accounts of extinction “gain sociocultural traction to the extent that they become part of the stories that human communities tell about themselves: stories about their origins, their development, their identity, and their future horizons.”1 Although Heise has little to say about religion, many of the stories that human communities tell about their origins and identity involve religion in some form. How religious inheritances shape imaginations of extinction and what possibilities may be opened from traditions of moral thought should bear expansive significance. If the reason for neglecting religion is that there is little to find, perhaps because communities are not incorporating contemporary extinctions into their central stories of meaning and purpose, then that indifference or incompetence is its own significant biocultural production. Insofar as mass extinction is “entangled with human ways of being in the world,” it is also entangled with all the ways religion animates, influences, or haunts humans’ ways of being.2
PART I: “HIS EYE IS ON THE SPARROW”: CHRISTIAN ETHICS AND SALTMARSH SPARROW
Consider the sparrow—specifically, Saltmarsh Sparrow, which lives along the East Coast of North America. Named after its habitat, this creature’s unique and only home is the salt-marsh meadows of the Atlantic littoral zone. Once an extensive and resilient feature of the Atlantic coast, those meadows are now pinched between rapid sea-level rise and hardened shoreline developments. Diminished in size and altered in function by centuries of coastal engineering, remaining salt-marsh habitats are threatened by rising seas. As its home is inundated, Saltmarsh Sparrow faces likely extinction within a couple decades.
Declining by about 9 percent per year, their population has probably collapsed by more than 75 percent since 1990, meriting escalation from Vulnerable to Endangered on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Red List.3 While there might be fifty thousand individuals still singing their song, because they are tied to a disappearing habitat, ornithologists see little chance of Saltmarsh Sparrow surviving beyond the middle of this century.4 The vulnerability of this creature lies in its reproductive connection with spartina marsh grasses and the expected rhythm of flood tides. It nests midway up the grass column, just above mean tide lines and just below predator sight lines. And it nests between lunar flood tides, with the period from laying and incubating eggs to nursing fledglings capable of climbing out of flooded nests (twenty-three to twenty-seven days) timed to fit just inside the twenty-eight-day span between flood tides.5
With the growing frequency of unusually high tides, storm tides, and inland flooding events accelerated by hardened shorelines, their nests fail at increasing rates. Saltmarsh Sparrow has developed adaptive responses, including, remarkably, adding a canopy over its nests to keep eggs from floating out. But its adaptations cannot keep pace with the increasing frequency of floods and with rising seas: “As sea level rises, there will be a point where the neap and spring tides will flood most or all nests. When this happens, these species will have limited or no annual fecundity.”6 In other words, incremental sea-level rise does not incrementally reduce the number of Saltmarsh Sparrow; when daily high tides reach nest height, nests will fail along the entirety of the East Coast, and extinction will happen suddenly.7
Why does this extinction seem inexorable? While some of the causes are indirect, the main drivers are unquestionably anthropogenic. Settler people, broadly Christian and post-Christian in inheritance, have pushed Saltmarsh Sparrow to the brink of nonexistence by first halving the bird’s homeland and then causing it to flood. This extinction happens at the hands of humans who are living around the sparrow’s habitat and watching it happen in real time. Expert observers document Saltmarsh Sparrow’s decline, analyzing drivers of its demise and creating predictive models. Saltmarsh Sparrow’s death is foreseen, its causes known and still perhaps avoidable. In the short term, tidal flooding barriers could be constructed to protect nesting sites and sediment deposition projects undertaken to build marsh elevation. In the longer term, societies could allow marshes to migrate upland, away from the rising sea, and stop the greenhouse gas emissions driving the rapid sea-level rise.
How does the plight of Saltmarsh Sparrow matter for religious ethics? Is there something in the stories that North American coastal people tell themselves about their origin or identity that inhibits the formation of responsibility for Saltmarsh Sparrows or justifies their extinction? Beginning from a major religion in the bird’s habitat, we could ask how this creature’s imminent extinction matters to Christian ethics.
Christian theology has had little to say about the life and death of particular species. Concern for the general phenomenon of extinctions regularly appears within Christian environmental ethics, but even there, it is usually treated as a symptom of something more troubling to the ethicist—industrialism, modernity, colonialism. In other domains of Christian thought, the presence of nonhuman lives barely registers, much less their deaths. Of course, the phenomenon of anthropogenic extinctions is sometimes lamented, but seldom does responsibility for the survival of another species appear as a meaningful part of the relations described by political theologians. “Humanity,” or maybe modern industrial peoples, may be endangering “biodiversity,” but that general relation seems to remain external from imaginations of biopolitical membership. While there are many Christian churches along the salt-marsh corridor of the Atlantic coast, including some taking principled action on environmental matters, few could imagine Saltmarsh Sparrow as a member of their assembly or the dying of this species as a significant theological event for their community.
How can this be so? It cannot be that extinctions are so novel to North American attention that religious thought has yet to catch up. Anthropogenic extinctions have been widely known and worried over for more than a century.8 Climate change is a newer ecological idea yet has attracted much more robust theological engagement. If extinctions still form no serious part of North American theological ethics, there must be some other explanation. I briefly sketch two ways that the Christian imagination of the sparrow contributes to its endangerment; I then show how a minority strain of theological ethics could recenter the sparrow’s plight and raise critical questions in part II about this entire approach to the problem.
The Sparrow as Disposable Life
One of the few instances in which sparrows appear in the Bible exhibits precisely why the death of Saltmarsh Sparrow might not register in the Christian imagination. In the gospels of Luke and Matthew, Jesus is recorded as offering assurances to anxious listeners by comparing their value to that of sparrows. “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s care. . . . So do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows” (Matt. 10:29–31). Jesus seems to say that if God attends to even a sparrow, who is worth so little, how much more valuable must humans be in God’s sight?
Now, context would suggest that the moral point of that verse is not human supremacy over other species but God’s care for a people under imperial occupation. As Howard Thurman pointedly observed in 1949 for a Jim Crow–era readership, Jesus spoke to “a member of a minority group in the midst of a larger dominant and controlling group.”9 People who were demeaned, abjectified, and exposed to unaccountable violence would take comfort in the sparrow verse. Roman soldiers could take the life of a Jewish person as if her life were worth less than a sparrow’s, just as armed authorities might (still) kill Black people in white supremacist America as if their lives were disposable. In Thurman’s reading, Jesus’s exhortation Do not be afraid tells those up against the wall that they possess a dignity that cannot be taken or alienated. That assurance, writes Thurman, was part of “a technique of survival for the oppressed,” for it refused to accept the politics of dehumanization as any indication of one’s worth in God’s eyes, one’s actual human dignity.10
The sparrow thus plays a representative role in a major twentieth-century project of North American Christian theology: vindicating the equal humanity of all persons over against the manifold forms of white supremacy. The sparrow here is a symbolic foil to equality in God’s special regard for humans. Making good on human exceptionalism perhaps seemed to require staying silent as Passenger Pigeon, Ivory-billed Woodpecker, and California Condor fluttered at death’s door. While theologians and church people must have read the popular accounts of disappearing Bald Eagle and American Bison, there is little record that nonnative North American Christians made much meaning of them. Many coastal-dwelling clergy and theologians in the 1920s would have followed the press-covered updates on Heath Hen’s dwindling fate (see Barrow 2009), yet there is scant evidence that they incorporated its dying into their accounts of grace or salvation.
Of course, the white theologians who thought settler colonialism providential would have perceived the extinctions as sadly inevitable signs of progress, just as they regarded the displacement and genocide of Indigenous peoples as sadly inevitable. Yet anti-racist theologians like Thurman who denounced white supremacy may have been silent for another reason: worry that theological concern for birds might weaken the ground of universal human dignity. If so, they would have seen their fear realized in the public alliance of eugenic white nationalism with early twentieth-century wildlife conservation, in which certain endangered animals, like American Bison, gained symbolic value for their association with European encounter and settlement.11 In fact, the convergence of species-preservation ideals with white colonialist nostalgia provoked the dean of Black liberation theology, James Cone, to disparage white ecotheologians with more concern for Spotted Owl than for Black lives. Cone’s main point was that if ecotheology continued to embrace conservationist ideas from colonial culture, it would never reach the entangled roots of white supremacy and of ecological destruction. “They are fighting the same enemy—human beings’ domination of each other and nature.”12 The sting of his conclusion—“if it is important to save the habitats of birds and other species, it is at least equally important to save black lives in the ghettos and prisons of America”—depends on the gospels’ passerine premise that if even birds matter, oppressed humans matter that much more.13
As an icon of God’s solidarity with people who find their lives devalued or rendered disposable, the sparrow guarantees human exceptionalism. That also seems to be the prevailing sense of the (less liberationist, more anodyne) hymn “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” written at the turn of the twentieth century and still widely popular across North America. “I sing because I’m happy, I sing because I’m free / His eye is on the sparrow, so I know he watches me.” If God’s eye is on the lowly sparrow, people can find assurance that however forgotten they may feel, God surely cares for them. The so tellingly shades the sparrow to reassure the human.
In both liberationist and anodyne receptions, the premise of comfort to humans rests on the assumed disposability of the sparrow. In precisely that indifference, the sparrow represents all nonhuman life in a theological cosmology: neither of disvalue nor of special value but indifferently standing outside the exceptional relationship of God with the human creature. God elected to incarnate Godself as a human, after all, not some other kind of creature—not Spotted Owl, Heath Hen, or Passenger Pigeon, and certainly not as a sparrow. It is rather a sign of the abundance of God’s love that it overflows the human, extending even to the lowly, disposable sparrow. As Psalm 84 puts it, “Even the sparrow finds a home near your altar.”
Fantastic Hegemonic Ignorance
A second way that Christian theology may endanger Saltmarsh Sparrow shows up in theological attempts to counter such narrow anthropocentrism. Ecotheologies often treat extinctions as symptomatic of some more fundamental relation. For example, Michael Northcott, one of the few Christian political theologians to seriously engage extinctions, characteristically treats them as signs of the corruption of the modern industrial social order.14 That tracks with a pattern in environmental thought more broadly. As Heise observes, “The endangerment of a particular species comes to function as a synecdoche for the broader environmentalist idea of nature’s decline as well as for the stories that communities and societies tell about their own modernization.”15
Now, it may be quite correct that Saltmarsh Sparrow’s peril cannot be understood apart from colonialism and capitalism or, as Northcott has it, the ontological and epistemological foundations of modern liberalism. The liability to being treated as synecdoche, however, is that the particular lifeway of Saltmarsh Sparrow begins to slip out of focus. For its life and death are not really the object of theological attention but rather the fate of a broader biocultural complex with which the theologian supposes the fate of humans also lies. The particular bird can easily be replaced by some other species, which the writer will be motivated to do if the sparrow’s conservation situation appears complex or ambiguous.
Indeed, it turns out that not every aspect of Saltmarsh Sparrow’s predicament aligns with an antimodernization narrative. While infrastructural tidal barriers (e.g., marsh-crossing roads) impede flows of sediment deposition important to long-term marsh mobility, they are sometimes also critical short-term protection from irregular flood events.16 Meanwhile, wetland restoration programs, which might seem to recover ecological territory from industrial modernity, have not, for a variety of discrete reasons, helped Saltmarsh Sparrow populations recover.17 If the bird does not reliably play its assigned role in a story about industrial violence and the ethicist therefore turns to a different species or (more likely) remains content with referring to extinctions in general, then moral concern does not really extend to Saltmarsh Sparrow. In either case, attentiveness to the Saltmarsh Sparrow as a particular lifeway is not required; no capacity to know its song is needed for its dying to fit the assigned role in a religious critique.
Some theological narratives that bring Saltmarsh Sparrow to attention may thus simultaneously encourage ignorance, as the bird is overwhelmed by the role it is made to play in a broader narrative. Adapting the concept of “fantastic hegemonic imagination” from Emilie Townes, we might call that fantastic hegemonic ignorance.18 Townes develops her concept to investigate the cultural production of white supremacy in everyday material life. For example, Townes shows how the Aunt Jemima commercial product materially reproduces a Mammy figure—a stout Black woman cheerfully provisioning white tables. It was first invented to offer a soft memory of plantation life, then reproduced in blackface minstrelsy of Jim Crow parodies of Black experience, then transferred to the label of a consumer product from a white-owned corporation. Aunt Jemima pancake syrup appeared on supermarket shelves for a century and was finally discontinued in summer 2020 in acknowledgment of the Black Lives Matter movement. One might develop an analogous line of inquiry into the way that some charismatic endangered species show up in material life—as cartoon Polar Bear in soda ads, as Snow Leopard plush toys, as Pink Dolphin in children’s books. Consumer products represent these animals in ways that make them seem happily present in everyday life, thus softening the reality that they have been pushed to the edge of survival by the very processes that at the same time capitalize the additional cultural value they carry by virtue of being endangered.
Yet those examples actually mislead, for few endangered species exercise such influence over the cultural imagination. Most are unknown. Saltmarsh Sparrow is scarcely known to cultural meaning-making until it is identified as threatened and appears on a Red List and in newspaper headlines—at which point its vulnerability is engulfed and overdetermined by imaginations of mass extinction. So the imaginative issue here is not one of grotesque surplus but rather of hegemonic ignorance reinforced, even and especially in discourses of concern.
The connection with Townes’s critique runs deeper than analogy because white supremacy plays a role in theological coproduction of this ignorance. In his pivotal book, The Christian Imagination, Willie Jennings traces the way that modern notions of race arose amid colonial displacements of identity from land. In the contexts of settler colonialism and associated missionary practices, Jennings illustrates European Christians learning to imagine humans as separate from nature and masters over it by simultaneously learning to imagine themselves as white. By investing whiteness with a divine mandate to realize their notion of “humanity,” settler Christians could moralize violent displacements of Indigenous and African peoples as tutelage in the ways of mastery. “With the emergence of whiteness, identity was calibrated through possession of, not possession by, specific land,” writes Jennings, thus rendering “unintelligible and unpersuasive any narratives of the collective self that bound identity to geography, to earth, to water, to trees and animals.”19 As colonial settlers became white, their political processes of land seizure and property ownership reinforced white supremacist understandings of divine providence, which in turn authorized further violence toward humans that whiteness racialized differently and moralized the exploitation of lands that whiteness imagined in terms of “resources.” White settler self-understanding was constructed from a theological commitment to ignorance of any moral claims from the peoples and lands they encountered. Ignorance of Saltmarsh Sparrow’s song, on this account, is not an accident of inattentiveness but a theological production of identities henceforth carried on bodies rather than articulated through kinship with particular lands.
Most theological accounts of “humanity,” argues Jennings, have not yet reckoned with that fundamental displacement of personhood from creaturely kinship. Even in emancipatory, liberationist, and postcolonial versions, much of North Atlantic political theology remains in thrall to a settler notion of humanity in which identity floats above the land, indifferent to other creatures. Jennings writes: “Thus our lives, even if one day freed from racial calculations, suffer right now from a less helpful freedom, freedom from the ground, the dirt, landscapes, and animals, from life collaborative with the rhythms of God’s other creatures.”20 Theological projects attempting to repair the inheritances of white supremacy have often advanced equality in a notion of humanity that was made in settler colonialism, where the process of making identities remains committed to ignorance of the ecological relations within which one lives.
Extinction discourse is never only about the loss of nonhumans, observes Audra Mitchell; it also produces certain kinds of human subjects.21 Jennings’s critique shows how theological discourse about nonhuman extinctions can unintentionally reproduce settler subjectivities and thereby continue to authorize violence against Indigenous peoples. When treated as symbol of trouble in “humanity’s” relationship with Earth, extinction discourse can assume the settler’s elective, abstract relationship with ecological concerns, thus perpetuating the ignorance that at once conceals and abets Indigenous genocide. “Extinction is not a metaphor,” protests Mitchell; “it is a very real expression of violence that systematically destroys particular beings, worlds, life forms and the relations that enable them to flourish.”22 Insofar as extinctions discourse maintains ignorance that excludes the particular relations of a place from having a claim on their identity or their politics, then it also maintains the erasure of Indigenous governance institutions that have historically convened the relations of a place.23
Theology from the Marshes
A different line of interpretation takes the sparrow’s marginality as its theological significance. If Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited interprets the religion of Jesus from the perspective of one “up against the wall,” then, in a time of mass extinctions, a theologian might imagine Saltmarsh Sparrow as up against the wall in a sense and therefore as occupying the place of creaturely peril assumed in the incarnation of God. Mark Wallace, meditating on the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon, argues that the saying of Jesus about sparrows should be heard as overturning the presumption of worthlessness. “Jesus knew that this is the attitude of many of us, in his time and ours, but counters that what we find to be useless rubbish in nature God embraces as worthy of care and compassion.”24 Thus, Wallace applies the idea in the sparrow pericope—that God loves those rendered lowly or made marginal—to the birds themselves.
Theology undertaken from the margins, from the marshes where Saltmarsh Sparrow is up against a wall of hardened coastline on one side and rising seas on the other, may thus find God’s eye on the sparrow more intently than the majority reading understands. There are in fact some precedents with which to develop this direction. While scarcely a regular topos of theological reflection, anthropogenic extinctions have occasionally haunted the edges of North Atlantic Christian theology. Writing a few generations after Charles Darwin and responding to growing evidence that humans had the power to alter the course of life’s evolution, Liberty Hyde Bailey and Paul Tillich both began to contest the (settler) commonsense view that extinctions might be the work of providence by suggesting that God may be allied with life beyond humanity.25
Perhaps the first nonnative North American theologian to significantly attend to anthropogenic extinctions was Jim Nash, whose Loving Nature develops a theological argument for the rights of all species to exist and to fulfill their evolutionary potential.26 While biblical notions of justice did not include the rest of the living world, asserts Nash, the contemporary ethicist could extend the moral logic of the sparrow pericope to draw the whole living world into its sphere of protection. Nash is not claiming, as Wallace does, that Jesus’s sparrow saying aims to counter anthropocentrism; on the contrary, “the divine valuation of the rest of nature . . . sneaks in through a crack in the analogy.”27 Christian ethics works toward “a logical extension of love to its horizons, embracing all life forms in accord with Christian experiences of and testimonies to the unbounded love of God.”28 While there are destabilizing questions to ask about imagining extinctions as Nash did, which I explain in the next section, his work offers the rare example of a response to extinctions driving the interpretation of ideas basic to the Christian tradition.
Toward the end of the twentieth century, concerns about extinction animated a popular Christian movement to protect the US Endangered Species Act. Led by Evangelicals, an alliance of Christians appealed to the Genesis story of Noah rescuing other species from devastation, claiming that the Endangered Species Act was “the Noah’s ark of our day.”29 While Nash and a few others had previously referred to the promise of the Noah story for supporting biodiversity,30 their intervention was surprising to many because, despite its diverse menagerie known to every child, the ark story has long functioned as an allegory of human salvation. Centuries of Christian art and exegesis displaced other animals from the ark. When this popular movement recovered it as an image of God’s concern to save endangered species, the moment revealed how exceptionalist theological imagination had become.
Some theologians, such as Christopher Southgate and Denis Edwards, have begun regathering species into the ark of salvation by arguing that efforts to stop extinctions participate in God’s work of rescue and redemption.31 “The Spirit does not abandon the sparrow that falls to the ground,” writes Edwards, “but gathers it up, inscribing it eternally in the life of the Trinity.”32 Referring to a particular sparrow on a branch outside his window, Edwards writes: “This sparrow is known and loved by God . . . this sparrow participates in redemption in Christ, and . . . is eternally treasured and celebrated in . . . the Communion of Saints.”33 Although Saltmarsh Sparrow is threatened with extinction, God draws it into eternal life. The sparrow cannot then be ignored but rather must be cherished and protected as a unique participant in divine life. In fact, for Southgate and Edwards, God draws humans into God’s life by inviting them to love and protect other creatures.
Indeed, God may be incarnate in Saltmarsh Sparrow. Considering the exposure of all creatures to death and suffering and the ancient soteriological maxim that only that which is assumed may be saved, Niels Gregerson develops a deeper form of incarnation, “according to which God has not only assumed human nature in general, but also a scorned social being and a human-animal body.”34 The implication of deep incarnation, writes Elizabeth Johnson, is that “in Christ, the living God who creates and empowers the evolutionary world also enters the fray, personally drinking the cup of suffering and going down into the nothingness of death, to transform it from within.”35 On this account, Christ is present in the marshes, exposed to the flood tides. “Hope springs from this divine presence.”36 In fact, both Gregersen and Johnson invoke sparrows to make the point that in Christ, God shares the fate and suffering of all creatures.37 Incarnation may be, when interpreted from the marshes, about God becoming Saltmarsh Sparrow, assuming its vulnerability, perhaps to the point of undergoing death by drowning.
Yet deep incarnation discourse rarely touches on particular jeopardies and only glancingly on anthropogenic extinctions. It is typically preoccupied with “natural evils,” wondering why extinctions occur in evolution generally and how God relates to them. So when deep incarnation scholarship explicitly addresses extinctions, it decontextualizes them, shifting attention away from actual biopolitical relations in which writer and reader are enfleshed. Saltmarsh Sparrow and its marshes—and indeed this entire mass extinction, now just one in a series—slide out of focus in the question of what God is doing in evolution.
Moreover, by treating extinction within the decontextualized questions of inherited “religion and science” discourse, deep incarnation theologies miss the ways that human exceptionalism has historically functioned as white exceptionalism.38 Recalling Jennings, if the colonial production of whiteness created the notion of nonplaced human relations to other creatures, then understanding contemporary extinctions cannot be found by deepening theologies of incarnation. For it is not exclusive humanism that devalues the sparrow but rather production of racialized humans, including white settler subjects, Blackened subjects, criminalized subjects, and absent subjects.39 To the colonial imagination with its redemption-oriented perception of space, Charles Mills writes, “The nonwhite body is a moving bubble of wilderness in white political space.”40 Expanding the scope of redemption through deep incarnation while adding a partnership role for (white) humanity to transform evolutionary processes would therefore actually exceed the worst fears in anti-racist criticism of the Anthropocene idea.41
Redemption narratives, observes Native American theologian Tink Tinker, have long been overemphasized by settler forms of Christianity.42 Soteriology undergirded the doctrine of discovery that justified the taking and transformation of Indigenous lands. American Indian theologies prioritize instead the doctrine of creation, writes Tinker, which they understand through particularized relations of a place, with all the relatives of a land. The theological repair of the relations that push Saltmarsh Sparrow up against the wall of extinction may then need to begin where Jennings finds that the settler Christian doctrine of creation went awry: in the colonial origins of race. For it was there, Jennings holds, that identity formation was sundered from multispecies geography, from “the fine webs that held together memory, language, and place to moral action and ethical judgement.”43 Trying to value sparrows apart from those identity-making relations abstracts from the context in which they are specific relatives. Tinker’s doctrine of creation assumes Indigenous sovereignty as a condition of possibility for the creatures of a land to be known as relatives. Theology for Saltmarsh Sparrow would begin from the margins of settler culture, with those ancestral caretakers of coastal territories who continue to convene the relations of the marshlands: the Nanticoke, Shinnecock, Wampanoag, Lenape, Piscataway, Pequot, and Mohegan, among others. Restored sovereignty, for Tinker, is a condition of possibility for knowing the creatures of the land as relatives and thus for repairing relations with Saltmarsh Sparrow. Indigenous sovereignty would also be, says Tinker, a liberative gift “to share with our colonizer-settler relatives,” because it would disavow the settler imperative to redeem land that keeps in fact alienating them from it, replacing it with a creation-centered politics of kinship that would open the possibilities of belonging to land.44
In this third approach, the basic point is that attempts to extend sparrow logic to the birds themselves show extinctions shifting Christianity’s self-interpretation. While less radical, the shift can be seen in Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’, which mentions biodiversity and extinctions even more frequently than it does climate change, describes nonhuman creatures as kin, and states that humans have no right to drive other species to extinction.45 Each species gives glory to God in its own way and has intrinsic value of its own, says Francis, although he hesitates to prioritize the voices of the Indigenous in theology and of nonhumans in politics.46
Although most Christian political theologies still exclude the rest of the living Earth, the existence of these marginal strategies suggests that extinctions have the potential to unsettle premises of human exceptionalism and perhaps the connection of those premises to settler colonialism. If coastal Christian stories of self-understanding held that the life and death of Saltmarsh Sparrow are important to the life and death of God—may indeed be the life and death of God in some sense—then indifference or ignorance toward Saltmarsh Sparrows would be escalated from the regrettable norm to religious crisis. If Christian ethics hears meaningful questions from Saltmarsh Sparrow, it might come to see that theology from the margins has come to require theology from the marshes—which would suggest that extinctions are wending their way into religious stories told about identity.
PART II: SWARMS AND MURMURATIONS
I have so far covered religion and extinction in a conventional way in terms of a particular imperiled species, Saltmarsh Sparrow, and a recognized tradition of thought, Christian theology. Proceeding that way, however, may cloud our understandings of extinction while also obscuring important dimensions of religion. In this section, I will discuss worldwide insect decline to expand the moral imagination of extinction while also shifting the frame of religion from a historic tradition to unnamed affiliations of affect and spirituality. After addressing insect swarms, I turn to religious swarms.
Reimagining Extinction
Until 1995, Saltmarsh Sparrow was known as Sharp-tailed Sparrow and was considered conspecific with what is now known as Nelson’s Sparrow. The birds look very similar, are both marsh specialists, and sometimes interbreed to produce fertile hybrids. The key difference is that Saltmarsh Sparrow is obligate to saltwater tidal marshes, whereas Nelson’s Sparrow is less exclusive in its nesting requirements, breeding also in inland freshwater marshes. Because of that difference, Saltmarsh Sparrow is endangered while Nelson’s Sparrow is not.
If the clan of Sharp-tailed Sparrow that insists on nesting exclusively in tidal marshes disappears while another clan continues to animate the marshes with wing and song indistinguishably different to all but ornithologists, has an extinction happened? Perhaps, but with those interbreeding kin in mind, one might wonder how much protection is owed the clan that has such particular nesting preferences. Is extinction a concept that necessarily goes with the classification of species?
How the question is answered can mean the difference between the allocation of public funds for significant interventions and watching a population dwindle out of existence. In the 1980s, the endangered Dusky Seaside Sparrow was reclassified as one of several subspecies of Seaside Sparrow, which is not endangered. Federal recovery efforts, which had included habitat purchase programs, were consequently suspended, and the last Dusky Seaside Sparrow died on June 16, 1987. Meanwhile, Seaside Sparrow, which specializes in coastal tidal marshes mostly to the south of Saltmarsh Sparrow’s range, sustains an overall healthy population.47 Officially, an extinction did not happen, yet birders of the southern US coasts continue to memorialize a distinct loss.
What is the subject of extinction, the form of life that can disappear or whose disappearing matters? Here, we begin to see the limitations of approaches that connect a particular religious tradition to a particular endangered species. When Nash extended Christian love to establish existence rights for other species, he took species as being a natural kind with a natural lifespan. But species may not be reliable objects of moral regard, and loving them may occlude moral perception from recognizing all that matters in extinction. Attention to extinctions would move differently with a keener appreciation of the dynamism and mutability of lines of life, of the species ideas as a classificatory construct with its own history, and of mutual constitution of human and nonhuman worlds.48 “By positing ‘species’ as bounded units,” writes Mitchell, “dominant discourses on extinction efface not only the profound entanglement of life forms, but also their synchronic and diachronic plasticity.”49 The ethics of extinction should thus seek out the beings and processes excluded from the species concept.
The recourse to love might actually impede that kind of attention, argues Mitchell, for love’s imagination seeks known beings with whom one can relate.50 One might, perhaps, learn to love sparrows, but the tiny insects on whom they feed seem less relatable and knowable and the spartina grass in which they nest are barely considered. Saltmarsh Sparrow exists as a web of relations involving innumerable beings, some of whom confound or recoil human minds and all of whom are constantly changing over time. Insofar as love seeks a knowable individual, it may obscure those relations.
Thom van Dooren’s avian-inspired concept of “flight ways” helps with dynamism and openness: “Extinction is the loss not of a single fixed ‘kind,’” he writes, “but of a potentially limitless set of emergent and branching flight ways from the present into the diversity of the future. Each species is ultimately a flight way beyond itself.”51 In this conception, extinction is not best imagined as losing a singular something or as a subtraction from an original endowment but rather as an extinguishment of the lines of possibility. What counts as a flight way? For van Dooren, it may well be a life-form recognized as a species but perhaps also a multispecies kinship or a subspecies population. Flight ways are not natural kinds simpliciter, given for humans to protect or not, but are interpretations arising from mutually involved, coevolutionary forms of life. The programmatic introduction to Extinction Studies that van Dooren writes with Deborah Bird Rose and Matthew Chrulew thus calls for “understanding and responding to processes of collective death, where not just individual organisms, but entire ways and forms of life, are at stake.”52
For different reasons, some environmental scientists agree that thinking of extinction as species loss may be a mistake. The concept of “ecological extinction” points to ecological interactions that are lost at much higher rates than species.53 The landmark 2019 Global Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, while certainly retaining the terminology of species extinctions, places them in an overall context of deteriorating life-support systems in a way that points to an understanding of the deathliness of extinction through relations and processes, communities and migrations, ecosystems and symbioses.54 Extinction here includes not only the vanishing of discrete species but also more collective, distributed, and therefore vague deteriorations. A study of decline of North American avifauna argues that “the overwhelming focus on species extinctions . . . has underestimated the extent and consequences of biotic change, by ignoring the loss of abundance within still-common species and in aggregate across large species assemblages.”55 The researchers estimate a net loss of 2.9 billion birds across biomes, a reduction of about 30 percent since 1970. There are untold implications for environmental health stemming from not only the loss of rare and threatened species, they observe, but also and perhaps especially from declines among the common habitat generalists.56
Whether a species persists somewhere as a few living individuals matters less for environmental health and biocultural futures than do declines in local populations, missing community links, and fragmented trophic relations. Feedback between defaunation and changing planetary systems thins migrations and empties forests.57 Phenological mismatch, where synchronized intersections of species come apart as they respond differently to climate change, sends a cascade of missed connections through a trophic web, and its implications are yet unknown.58 Mistimed migrations fray multispecies knots.59 “Relationships unravel, mutualities falter, dependence becomes a peril rather than a blessing, and whole words of knowledge and practice falter.”60 Meshwork comes undone, flight ways narrow. Separate from the mass extinction of individual species, even while related to and often driven by it, those diminishments are harder to describe—a threadiness to Earth’s pulses of life, a spreading weedy sameness that crowds out seedbeds of creativity, an unevenness in the atmosphere’s breathing, a narrowing of evolutionary futures.
Those broader understandings of death worlds and lifeworlds can be lost when the extinctions discourse focuses on endangered species and especially on the survival tales of a particular animal. Thus, we have the brinksmanship tales of saving Golden Lion Tamarin and Whooping Crane, of intrepid humans inventing ways for other animals to stave off death. Yet as Chrulew, van Dooren, and Heise have argued, those heroic tales are riven with ambivalence and trade-offs.61 They often depend on unprecedented methods of cross-species collaboration, like teaching cranes to migrate with aircraft or preserving endangered amphibians in engineered and sealed microhabitats. Moreover, by focusing on survivals and perhaps on de-extinction efforts at resurrection, life support for particular species turns attention to the spectacular rather than to fraying knots, thready pulses, or narrowing flight ways. The rescue stories often focus on preserving the species instead of the continuity and complexity of their distinctive worlds.62
Salt marshes themselves are threatened by sea-level rise, and with them all the relations, processes, knots, and migrations supported by this meeting zone of oceanic and terrestrial lifeworlds. As a being obligate to those tidal marshes, committed to them in a way that Nelson’s Sparrow is not, Saltmarsh Sparrow depicts the vulnerability of a world made possible by the thin, absorptive, and mobile corridor between firm land and open ocean, between fresh and salt. Along this dynamic edge, the marshes live by moving. They migrate with barrier islands, pushing ahead of their lee side in the island’s slow-motion wave toward shore. Or, fed by sediment deposition from rivers, they migrate upland when the seas rise and seaward when they recede. If the marshes are trapped by an inflexibly engineered shore, and if they are starved of sediment, they will die for lack of mobility. There will be a littoral zone, of course, but no longer a distinct lifeworld. Insofar as Saltmarsh Sparrow’s dying, which is easier to comprehend and quantify, compels attention to these forms of morbidity more difficult to perceive, then perhaps focusing on the endangered bird can expand how we understand extinction.
Swarms of Judgment
During its breeding period, Saltmarsh Sparrow forages almost exclusively on invertebrate animals, including amphipods, larval flies, marsh grasshoppers, lycosid spiders, moths, beetles, and other insects.63 The bird’s future lies with those insects. So how are they faring?
Tracking insect extinctions is a difficult task because taxonomies remain incomplete, archives of long-range tracking are scarce, and (unlike with birds) few citizen scientists have the requisite identification skills. Insects seem less relatable, less lovable, less knowable. However, a recent review of available research on insect decline finds that of those being tracked, “almost half of the species are declining and a third are being threatened with extinction.”64 With insects especially, diminishment is more important than disappearance from the biological register. The proportion of insect species in decline is twice as high as that of vertebrates, and annual biomass decline is estimated at 2.5 percent. That rate, scientists note, would be hardly noticed in year-to-year observation; it takes a long-term record to show up, at which point it looks devastating. One study from Germany found a 76 percent decline in flying insect biomass over twenty-seven years, a rate of about 2.8 percent.65 “The repercussions this will have for the planet’s ecosystems are catastrophic, as insects are the structural and functional base of many of the world’s ecosystems since their rise at the end of the Devonian period, almost 400 million years ago.”66 Many worlds, including Saltmarsh Sparrow’s, are sustained by insects; in their decline are ominous signs of worlds ending.
Again, extinction here encompasses a type of dying that differs from the dying-out of a species; diminishment of numbers becomes a vector of deathliness. Only in large numbers are insects functionally alive to a food web and a landscape. Their form of life is the swarm.
In the beginning of the Hebrew Bible, swarms are called forth from the waters, blessed, and charged to multiply and fill the Earth (Gen. 1:20–1:22). The flood story also refers to “all the swarming creatures that swarm on Earth” (Gen. 7:21). Though they are a blessed form of life at the opening of Genesis, throughout the rest of the Hebrew Bible, swarms are associated with devastation. Appearing as a sudden cloud that could cast cities and whole populations into famine, they were apparently experienced as divine judgment for some wrong a people had committed or as a plague visited upon one’s enemies. Prophets struck fear in their listeners by threatening a cloud of insects. In other traditions, too, swarms of insects appear as a trope of calamity. The Qur’an names locusts as a plague sent by Allah to punish sin (7:133). An ancient Jain text lists swarms of locusts as one of twelve divine calamities for which the specialist should know the appropriate ritual propitiation.67 Some Zoroastrian texts regard insects as material agents of evil, their swarming becoming the literal undoing of creation.68 Across traditions, a swarm has often conveyed disaster; its religious affect was doom.
Now it is a lack of swarms that evokes that affect of looming disaster, of judgment for wrongdoing, of famine, and maybe even of the undoing of creation. “Insect Apocalypse” was the title of a widely read article in the New York Times, and news reports on the surprising absence of insects generally convey fear, alarm, or a sense of doom. Where prophets once struck fear with a forecast of swarms, they do so now by forecasting their absence.
One need not identify oneself with one of the recognized religions in order to share those feelings. Reports of insect decline may be received as omens of disaster or a foreboding of trouble. They may feel something like judgment on the ways of life causing this diminishment, a curse that demands propitiation, an incurment of existential debt, or a summons to conversion away from the ways of death.
Does it make sense to describe those feelings as religious, even when they appear in people who do not believe in divine judges or karmic debt and who would otherwise disavow the systems from which the names of those feelings and responses are derived? Donovan Schaefer argues that religion is not only about identities and beliefs but also “about the way things feel, the things we want, the way our bodies are guided through thickly textured, magnetized worlds.”69 On that view, religion has to do with affect—“the flow of forces through bodies outside of, prior to, or underneath language”—as much as it does beliefs, texts, or identities.70 With affect theory, Schaefer seeks to recover the animality of religious experience as something that happens before and beyond linguistic cognition in the responsiveness of embodied organisms to their world. His opening example is the ecstatic responses of chimpanzees to a waterfall, which might be seen as religious or at least as exemplifying the way environments can evoke affective response that may be considered protoreligious. The recognized religions are made possible by those feelings, argues Schaeffer, and usually develop bodily technologies to work with them.
In the case of insect decline, the environment evokes negative feelings, as the absence of vitality elicits dismal affects: a slumping anxiety, solastalgia, or sense of foreboding; it is the affective opposite of a waterfall. It is more likely to cause deflationary rather than ecstatic response, and the difficulty of noticing insect decline and the uncertainty about its consequences may deepen the troubling affect. Whereas an absence of insects might ordinarily be welcome, especially by those allergic to bee stings or in communities that still rightly fear destructive locust swarms, now, once people notice the absence, they are more likely to connect it to reports of the overall declines. The pleasing lack of flying nuisances may then produce a cloud of worry. Similar to the combination of concern and enjoyment one feels on an unseasonably warm December day in a northern latitude region, it may be experienced as what is sometimes called “blissonance” or perhaps as an uncanny sense that the insect apocalypse is the first sign of some broader cataclysm.
Now we are pointed toward a sense of religion not as discrete traditions but as affective experiences of dying lifeworlds. James Hatley suggests that extinction rightly evokes a sense of being interrogated and that failing to feel that way, or to at least pay attention, may be a problem that is religious in depth. The people responsible for this dying probably should feel judged or condemned. Then he turns to a traditional religious figure. Meditating on a depiction of the Buddha as a fierce combatant against desire, Hatley writes, “We of the global first world are in need of a warrior Buddha with the strength and ferocity to confront our spectacular inattentiveness.”71 Hatley is not arguing that one must be Buddhist in order to feel the world well but that a sense of being judged and of being compelled to pay attention to the diminishment of the living world is a fitting affective experience of living in worlds undergoing extinction.
Calling that experience “religious” may help connect it with practices for naming and responding to it. The diminishment of life’s swarming feels like the kind of event from which religious formations arose. Indeed, in the few political movements to directly address mass extinction, scholars observe religious behaviors from old traditions and new practices coming together in a shared space.72 Religion, it seems, helps them give expression to what is happening.
This claim does not imply that any of the recognized traditions are well suited to interpret extinction or that current practices of recognized communities offer fitting responses. It does, however, indicate that understandings of mass extinction that discount its religious significance may miss something important. In an essay for Conservation Biology entitled “Three Ways to Think About the Sixth Mass Extinction,” Philip Cafaro argues that considerations of character are another way of framing extinction, in addition to resource loss or criminal injustice.73 This is a familiar third option from virtue theorists, who often argue that moral understanding is impoverished by a perceived choice between framing in terms of consequentialism (e.g., resource loss) or of deontology (e.g., duties not to violate another’s dignity). But if religious narratives were also admitted, then many more ways to think and feel about mass extinction would appear; for example, it could be thought of in terms of eschatological anticipation, nonattachment to mutable worlds, compassionate identification with nonhuman life, the incitement of ghosts, the annihilation of nonhuman peoples, a lamentation for wrongdoing, an atonement for sin, alienation from the sacred, the flouting of original instructions, hope in resurrection, Mother Earth’s anger, the Creator’s punishment, desecration, the withdrawal of relatives, and more. Opened to religion, extinction evokes worlds of affect.
Why entertain such blooming emotional confusion? Religious experiences of extinction do not seem reducible to a common feeling, let alone a common ethic. Yet that profusion of religiosity can diversify understandings of extinction and perhaps help illuminate and prevent the extinction of biocultural worlds. Cafaro seems correct that, from the available logics of mainstream modernity, moral interpretation of extinction can seem limited to either financializing losses of nonhuman life or somehow overcoming the exclusion of nonhumans from reciprocal obligations of justice. Religious expressions may have the irruptive effect of invoking alternative moral worlds and subjecting the forms of life driving extinction to scrutiny by alternative cosmovisions; they may, as Eduardo Gudynas writes, surface conflicts that create “ontological openings.”74
When Indigenous cosmovisions generate decolonial or nonmodern interpretations of extinction, they may also create conflicts that reveal how settler notions of extinctions reproduce settler worlds. The cosmovisions provincialize settler notions of extinction, thus making it possible to imagine the extinction of settler notions of humanity and sustain the flourishing of many alternatives.75 Whereas mainstream ideas of extinction sometimes justify conservation measures that displace Indigenous people or further erode their territorial sovereignty, Indigenous interpretations of extinction may be critical to the survivance of Indigenous worlds. Insofar that those worlds are ontologically diverse and perhaps include animacies, cosmopolitics, and many forms of nonhuman or suprahuman kin, then “religion” may aptly name some of the imperiled or excluded relations.76 As Rosyln R. Lapier documents, the settler assault on bison was an attack not only on kin of the Blackfeet but also on the religious world in which kinship with bison is possible.77 Zoe Todd makes analogous observations about fish as kin in a Métis world faced with petro-based water violations.78 Such worlds are the basis for Kyle Powys Whyte’s observation that Indigenous environmental governance is often organized as reciprocal responsibilities among relatives.79
Insofar as religious interpretations generate alternative or nonmodern interpretations of extinction, their proliferation may produce affect; in relations so odd that they might be called religious, settler modernity is confronted and called to account by other possibilities. From the absence of swarms, there may arise an uncanny sense of being interrogated, judged, or condemned.
Murmurations: Rethinking Religion in a Time of Extinction
When birds swarm together in a collective patterning flock, it is called a murmuration. Swarms develop through emergent behavior that results from many individuals following simple rules of interaction. In flocks of birds, those may be: move with neighbors, remain close to them, avoid collisions. Although there is no central authority, as each individual follows spacing patterns, the result can sometimes take the appearance of a shape-shifting body, a superorganism dancing with light and sky.
Murmuration is an instance of allelomimesis, which is when one organism performing a behavior induces other nearby organisms to perform the same behavior. As birds begin to aggregate and move together, others seem attracted to join. Swarming is a form of contagious biological intelligence, an adaptive interaction with changing environments. Starling and swift swarms may respond to the presence of raptors or to light conditions that favor their attacks. Locust swarms seem to arise from a response to drought by desert grasshoppers. The small, usually solitary grasshoppers respond to the environmental stress by growing larger, becoming gregarious, sprouting wings, and moving collectively in search of food. The dramatic phenotypic change seems stimulated by the behavior and grouping of other desert grasshoppers. Formerly dispersed individuals become a world-altering cloud.
Murmuration can also refer to the low sound of troubled human voices. In a social form of allelomimesis, dissenting murmurs may also become contagious, feeding rapid shifts in social pattern or political collectivity. A regime fears no threat more than murmurs.
A central predicament of mass extinction, as with other Anthropocene plagues, is the apparent asymmetry between moral agency and planetary stress.80 Without competent forms of planetary governance, is there any meaningful way to bear responsibility for mass extinction? Without a coordinating authority, how can the distributed feelings evoked by extinction connect with political possibility? In Facing the Planetary, political theorist William Connolly appeals to what he calls a “politics of swarming.” Perhaps the actions available to individuals and collectives need not carry scalable solutions to an entire adaptive challenge. Rather, let them experiment with fitting patterns of interaction knowing that “each role experiment—and all in aggregate—is radically insufficient to the scope of the problems.”81 The wager of the swarm is that the accumulation of individual role experiments, buoyed by a “spirituality of freedom,” may be gathered into “militant pluralist assemblage,” the results of which relay across scales and registers to give rise to a new political event.82
Like the murmuration of birds, this political swarm emerges as individual agents follow a few basic patterns of interaction, “both intensifying diverse attachments to life on this rare planet and pursuing militant cross-regional citizen actions.”83 The simple rules are: care and connect. This shared “spirituality,” some kind of faith in the possibility of attending to life and connecting with others, may give rise to emergent patterns of action.
There is the beginning of a suggestion here that—in the experiments and attachments, the connecting and assembling—an alternative form of religion may emerge. Connolly appeals to Bruno Latour’s Gaian collectivities. Supposing that the Anthropocene casts doubt on the inherited religious traditions as much as on the modern notion that one may elect to be irreligious, Latour redefines religion as “what one protects carefully, what one thus is careful not to neglect.”84 Latour asks people to identify their cosmological collective by acknowledging the organizing respect by which it is convoked. In that view, the deepest and most important conflicts are not between “world religions” but rather run through them and all cultural formations, moving across the identifying boundaries to convoke collectivities characterized by patterns of care and negligence.
For readers who understand themselves as secular, Connolly’s spiritual freedom may be pleasingly vague, just as Latour’s cosmological collectives are attractively obscurant. By neglecting to specify how one might meaningfully participate in a membership, Latour effaces the actual and ongoing work of collectives who survive colonization and enslavement by generating exactly this sort of cosmopolitical conflict. In his more recent book on climate politics, when Latour recognizes resistance and survival from the colonized, he makes it seem as if they just now have the opportunity to enter cosmological politics—as if they have not been “protecting carefully” a cosmological collective all along.85 For example, it is as if the “climate politics” of the Standing Rock Sioux protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline were not a continuation of two centuries of Indigenous resistance to settler colonialism along the Mni Sose.86 Similarly, Connolly’s “spiritual freedom” can resonate all too well with the ephemeral commitments of liberal American political theologies, where spiritual but not religious functions as an individualist talisman against the claims of any sodality. In contrast, consider the pipeline contests at Standing Rock or Union Hill, which convene “militant pluralist assemblages” from various religious and political backgrounds through prayer or ceremony.87 The emergence of the swarm in these instances, and the sustenance of its militant and pluralist commitments, seems to require a sacralizing assembly. Participation in the specific assembly draws people into its alternative social imagination and may dramatically increase their sense of agency. As a certain sense of the sacred becomes “highly contagious,” formerly dispersed individuals become a world-altering cloud.88
With that emendation in place, Connolly’s metaphor of the swarm helps illuminate a cosmopolitical spirituality that emerges from the caring and connecting that happens amid responses to extinction. Scholarship on North American nature-based spiritualities suggests that they take form in ways that differ from conventional religions.89 They often move across cultural space through rhizomatic networks, occasionally appearing within conventional religious groups and more frequently in alternative affinities of spirituality, sometimes without any explicit reference to religion or spirituality. What nature-based spiritualities share, argues Bron Taylor, is a sense that nature is sacred and should be revered and that humans intimately belong to it.90 Taylor elevates those manifestations of “dark green religion” that offer adherents a way to break with religious imaginations of the transcendent—especially Christianity. However, the spiritual currents that Taylor identifies seem to move through, beyond, and beneath many cultural streams, including religions with relations of transcendence (even Christianity). The identifying marker of a current that one might find flowing through a range of religious and secular contexts, suggests Douglas E. Christie, is a contemplative ecological consciousness shaped by “a deepening of awareness of oneself as existing within and responsible for the larger whole of the living world.”91 These scholars describe a posthumanist sense of spirituality that is attuned to an ecological sense of the sacred to which humans belong among others in a multispecies collective and by which their personhood is shaped.
Those shifts in the basic relations by which people understand themselves as persons do not seem aptly described by notions of religion that correspond to identity formations, formal beliefs, or systematized worldviews. They seem rather protoreligious, marking shifts in what Charles Taylor calls the underlying “imaginary” of the kinds of relations involved in personhood.92 As imaginaries shift, perhaps in response to environmental conditions that portend deadly threats, so do the possibilities for how people interact and flock together. That is one reason why religious and secular function ever less reliably as antonymous terms of description; while they retain the institutional and intellectual referents of a relatively settled modern North Atlantic imaginary, pressure from rapidly shifting biosocial conditions and cosmological alternatives may trigger fissures or shifts in the underlying imaginary that are best described in the lexicon of religious studies.
Scholars in environmental humanities exhibit troubled ambivalence toward the apparent fittingness of religious language to interpret the situation. Thinking beyond modern premises, with more-than-human lifeworlds and suprahuman agencies, scholars invoke religion-adjacent terms like new animism to gesture toward the depth of rupture in received imaginaries, yet they rarely engage religious thought as they do.93 “Everybody wants to rethink animacy, but almost no one wants to be an animist,” observes anthropologist Kath Weston.94 The anxiety is vividly displayed in Timothy Morton’s call for “not a return to animism as such, but rather animism.”95 Thus by performed disavowal a term that was made for nineteenth-century inquiries into “primitive” religions becomes at once acceptable and indispensable. Observing the prevalence of religious language under erasure in the environmental humanities, Oriol Poveda suggests that pressure to understand liveliness on a rapidly transforming planet presses scholars to articulate postsecular forms of enchantment.96 Because enchanted and animate vocabularies are indebted to worlds that they regard skeptically as “religious,” scholars enact their secularity by employing religious terms in self-conscious irony or troubled unease.97
Such ambivalence makes sense in unsettled cultural conditions, where rapid environmental changes may seem to outstrip authorized tools of interpretation, compelling scholars to reach for ideas and practices hitherto marginalized by the set of knowledge-authorizing rules known as secularism. However, insofar as their anxiety keeps religion-invoking scholars aloof from constructive religious thought and critical religious studies, the ambivalence can leave their descriptions impoverished. Despite its attraction to religion-like interpretive ideas, Anthropocene discourse, notes Bronislaw Szerszynski, tends to retain Holocene notions of the secular that prevent it from recognizing and thinking with the new orderings of the sacred emerging from rapid planetary changes.98 Szerszynski’s “geo-spiritual formations” and his speculative geo-fictions for a second Axial Age seek to enhance the descriptive capacity of Anthropocene discourse so that it can better articulate the multinatural senses of spirit circulating in response to extinction.
Imagine religions as “lines of flight,” suggests Whitney A. Bauman, as a way to refocus on the dynamic trajectories of meaning-making that emerge from shifting planetary relations and attempt to “move life into ever new and creative ways of becoming.”99 Those many lines of flight interact with the flight ways of van Dooren’s interpretation of extinction. Now imagine lines of flight attracting, influencing, and imitating one another. Imagine religion as murmuration.
Experiences of and responses to the diminishment of multispecies swarms, I am claiming, can be helpfully understood in terms of religion. Simultaneously, the religiosity of distributed responses to mass extinction might be understood on the model of swarming. As people experiment with ways to intensify attachments to life amid deathliness and gather in pluralist cross-regional polities—Connolly’s care and connect rules—especially when doing so within multispecies assemblies convened by caretakers of specific territories and through sacralizing practice, the forms of life may become contagious, expressed as a shape-shifting superorganismal intelligence.
Loving Swarms
Consider the experimental forms of attachment and devotion that humans of many different identities undertake in response to dwindling migrations. On the southern tip of the Eastern Shore of Virginia, where a peninsular narrowing of the coast forces southward migratory birds to converge, hawk counters gather every fall to track the migration. One person, who has agreed to serve as the official counter, commits to being present every day, from dawn to dusk, for the extent of the migration—about six weeks. Attended and supported by a changing group of people who devote a day or a week to the vigil, the counter holds her attention over an arc of sky between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. Without asking about her beliefs or identity or even worldview, I came to understand that she is attached to the birds that she can identify at staggering distances, that she takes herself to belong to this thinning pulse of migration, and that she find special meaning in her vigil, knowing that it is joined by others up and down migratory flyways and across generations.
The birds themselves obviously help make this biannual vigil, and the participants not only focus on them as objects to count but also seem enchanted and animated by them; certainly the vigil honors their presence as special. Yet a sense of thinning and dwindling haunts that enchantment. As the time between sightings grows, birders may murmur to one another about diminishments, about what they hear from other places; the elder may tell the younger what migrations were like forty years ago. The comparisons are relayed as quantitative information but expressed in tight-lipped grimaces implying senses of loss and fear. The murmured recognition of the overall context of absence alters and intensifies the experience of sighting a bird.100 When three American Kestrels, whose population has declined by 50 percent during the lifetime of some people there, shoot low over the conversation in rapid-winged, stiff-tailed determination, it can feel as if they are harried south by some deathly pursuer. The vigil cultivates a spirituality (although no one uses that word) in which members learn to understand themselves as existing within this migration and in some way responsible for it. With their skills of perception trained on and honed for these birds, their year organized to this calendar, and their sense of themselves caught up in a broader flock, their attachment should be recognized as love.
Still, this handful of reserved twitchers waiting on silent migrators seem to be unlikely candidates for a “militant pluralist assemblage,” unless, by allelomimesis, some surprising shift happens. Not long ago, settlers would have gathered at that same place in the same season to shoot migrating raptors—part of an assault on avian predators that one early twentieth-century clergyman moralized as a “holy war.”101 Hawk Mountain, along a migratory flyway to the west, was a regular scene of seasonal slaughter before a people’s movement transformed it into the sanctuary it is now. The bird hunt that used to happen across North America as part of celebrations for the feast day of the birth of Jesus has become the Christmas Bird Count.
It may be incorrect to say, then, as I did earlier, that settler religion has not noticed extinctions. Perhaps religious response to North American extinctions has been happening in unusual formations, hitherto unthematized as religious. Consider religion theorist Thomas A. Tweed’s summary definition: “Religions are confluences of organic-cultural flows that intensify joy and confront suffering by drawing on human and suprahuman forces to make homes and cross boundaries.”102 The hawk watcher’s vigil convokes with the attention of the amateur entomologists who first noticed the diminishing insect swarms, with those who curate cultural memories of extinct creatures, with all those restoring relations and resisting extinctions, because, in some way, it is how they confront suffering and find joy, how they intensify attachments to lifeworlds and connect with multispecies collectives.
Religiosity in this model helps imagine transformations of love for a time of extinction. Whereas Mitchell worries that facing extinction with an ethics of care or love may prevent attention from moving beyond the relatable and knowable, extinction may possibly tutor people into new capacities of love. Lisa H. Sideris argues that, when open to bearing extinction’s grief, love may become more capable of entering difficulty.103 “Love in a time of extinctions,” writes Rose, “calls forth another set of questions. Who are we, as a species? How do we fit into the Earth system?”104 For Rose particularly, how might love for wild dogs reshape one’s understanding of humanity in multispecies relations? If one follows love into extinction—love for the insect swarms that we also experience as nettlesome and destructive; love for the not-fully-knowable meshwork of spartina grasses, mudflats, ocean storms, human infrastructure, amphipods, and untold others we could collectively invoke as Saltmarsh Sparrow’s world; love for parasites of the human microbiome, at once maligned, feared, and necessary to human beings105—the questions that are raised may transform what love does. Following the extinction may make it possible to imagine extensions of care to entire kingdoms of life hitherto poorly understood.106
Naming the quality of this love and especially of its convocations as religious can help illuminate the depth of cultural stress created by extinction. If the various forms of care, attentiveness, grief, and fear convene in what van Dooren and his multispecies studies colleagues call “arts of attentiveness” and “techniques of cosmopolitical care,” the experiments of attachment to life may have the potential for cascading change within an imaginary.107 They may be thought of as anticipated murmuration.
The question, unanswerable in advance, is whether, by allelomimesis, other humans will imitate the love and some assembly will sacralize it, perhaps setting in motion the cascade of events that give rise to swarming. If those practices spark a “militant pluralist assemblage,” possibly new collectivities emerge, a murmurating cosmological rebellion, a contagious biological intelligence making sudden swerves in the dusk sky.
Loving the dwindling, swarming lives with whom we are entangled implies faith in murmuration. Yet whether swarms of love actually emerge or a rebellion succeeds, the practices of faith seem fitting anyway. According to Rose, “In this time of extinctions, we are going to be asked again and again to take a stand for life, and this means taking a stand for faith in life’s meaningfulness. We are called to live within faith that there are patterns beyond our known patterns. . . . And we are called into recognition: of the shimmer of life’s pulses and the great patterns within which the power of life expresses itself.”108 Practices of faith in this world here take the form of vigils, of attentiveness to particular flight ways, in the hope that lines of flight take wing.
WILLIS JENKINS lives in the Rivanna River watershed, which is unceded Monacan territory, where he works at the University of Virginia as the Hollingsworth Professor of Ethics and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies.
NOTES
1. Ursula K. Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 5.
2. Willis Jenkins, “Whose Religion? Which Ecology? Religious Studies in the Environmental Humanities,” in Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology, ed. Willis Jenkins, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and John Grim (New York: Routledge, 2016), 22, citing Deborah Bird Rose, Thom van Dooren, Matthew Chrulew, Stuart Cooke, Matthew Kearnes, and Emily O’Gorman, “Thinking Through the Environment, Unsettling the Humanities,” Environmental Humanities 1, no. 1 (May 2012): 1.
3. Maureen D. Correll et al., “Predictors of Specialist Avifaunal Decline in Coastal Marshes,” Conservation Biology 31, no. 1 (February 2017): 172–182.
4. Christopher R. Field et al., “High‐Resolution Tide Projections Reveal Extinction Threshold in Response to Sea‐Level Rise,” Global Change Biology 23, no. 5 (May 2017): 2058–2070; Jon S. Greenlaw et al., “Saltmarsh Sparrow (Ammospiza caudacuta), Version 2.1,” in Birds of North America, ed. Paul G. Rodewald (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 2018).
5. Trina S. Bayard and Chris S. Elphick, “Planning for Sea-Level Rise: Quantifying Patterns of Saltmarsh Sparrow (Ammodramus Caudacutus) Nest Flooding Under Current Sea-Level Conditions,” The Auk 128, no. 2 (April 2011): 393–403; Greenlaw et al., “Saltmarsh Sparrow.”
6. W. Gregory Shriver et al., “Population Abundance and Trends of Saltmarsh (Ammodramus caudacutus) and Nelson’s (A. nelsoni) Sparrows: Influence of Sea Levels and Precipitation,” Journal of Ornithology 157, no. 1 (January 2016): 198.
7. Field et al., “High‐Resolution Tide Projections.”
8. Mark V. Barrow, Nature’s Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
9. Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (1949; repr., Boston: Beacon, 1976), 18.
10. Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited, 29.
11. Miles A. Powell, Vanishing America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); John Levi Barnard, “The Bison and the Cow: Food, Empire, Extinction,” American Quarterly 72, no. 2 (June 2020): 377–401.
12. James H. Cone, “Whose Earth Is It Anyway?,” CrossCurrents 50, no. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2000): 37.
13. Cone, “Whose Earth Is It Anyway?,” 44.
14. Michael S. Northcott, Place, Ecology and the Sacred: the Moral Geography of Sustainable Communities (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015).
15. Heise, Imagining Extinction, 32.
16. Correll et al., “Predictors of Specialist Avifaunal Decline.”
17. Chris S. Elphick, Susan Meiman, and Margaret A. Rubega, “Tidal‐Flow Restoration Provides Little Nesting Habitat for a Globally Vulnerable Saltmarsh Bird,” Restoration Ecology 23, no. 4 (July 2015): 439–446.
18. Emilie M. Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (New York: Springer, 2006).
19. Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 59.
20. Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 290.
21. Audra Mitchell, “Beyond Biodiversity and Species: Problematizing Extinction,” Theory, Culture & Society 33, no. 5 (September 2016): 23–42.
22. Audra Mitchell, “Decolonizing Against Extinction Part II: Extinction Is Not a Metaphor—It Is Literally Genocide,” Worldly, September 27, 2017, https://worldlyir.wordpress.com/category/extinction/.
23. Zoe Todd, “Fish Pluralities: Human-Animal Relations and Sites of Engagement in Paulatuuq, Arctic Canada,” Études/Inuit/Studies 38, no. 1–2 (2014): 217–238; Kyle Powys Whyte, “Indigenous Environmental Movements and the Function of Governance Institutions,” in Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory, ed. Teena Gabrielson et al., 563–580 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
24. Mark I. Wallace, When God Was a Bird: Christianity, Animism, and the Re-enchantment of the World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 93.
25. Panu Pihkala, Early Ecotheology and Joseph Sittler (Berlin: LIT Verlag Münster, 2017).
26. James A. Nash, Loving Nature: Ecological Integrity and Christian Responsibility (Nashville: Abingdon, 1991).
27. Nash, “The Bible vs. Biodiversity: The Case Against Moral Argument from Scripture,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature & Culture 3, no. 2 (2009): 224.
28. Nash, “The Bible vs. Biodiversity,” 235.
29. Laurel Kearns, “Noah’s Ark Goes to Washington: A Profile of Evangelical Environmentalism,” Social Compass 44, no. 3 (September 1997): 349–366.
30. See Kevin J. O’Brien, An Ethics of Biodiversity: Christianity, Ecology, and the Variety of Life (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2010), 137–140.
31. Christopher Southgate, The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2008).
32. Denis Edwards, “Every Sparrow that Falls to the Ground: The Cost of Evolution and the Christ-Event,” Ecotheology: Journal of Religion, Nature & the Environment 11, no. 1 (March 2006): 118.
33. Edwards, “Every Sparrow that Falls to the Ground,” 120.
34. Niels Henrik Gregersen, “The Cross of Christ in an Evolutionary World,” Dialog 40, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 193.
35. Elizabeth A. Johnson, Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 192.
36. Johnson, Ask the Beasts, 192.
37. Johnson, Ask the Beasts, 196; Gregersen, “The Extended Body of Christ: Three Dimensions of Deep Incarnation,” in Incarnation: On the Scope and Depth of Christology, ed. Gregersen (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 225.
38. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
39. Mitchell, “Beyond Biodiversity and Species”; Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York: New York University Press, 2020).
40. Mills, The Racial Contract, 53.
41. Nicholas Mirzoeff, “It’s Not the Anthropocene, It’s the White Supremacy Scene; or, the Geological Color Line,” in After Extinction, ed. Richard Grusin, 123–149 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
42. George E. “Tink” Tinker, American Indian Liberation: A Theology of Sovereignty (New York: Orbis, 2008).
43. Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 58.
44. Tinker, American Indian Liberation, 49
45. Francis I, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (Vatican City: Vatican Publications, 2015).
46. Jenkins, The Christian Imagination; Gaston Kibiten, “Laudato Si’s Call for Dialogue with Indigenous Peoples: A Cultural Insider’s Response from the Christianized Indigenous Communities of the Philippines,” Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics 8, no. 1 (2019), https://researchonline.nd.edu.au/solidarity/vol8/iss1/4.
47. Greenlaw et al., “Saltmarsh Sparrow.”
48. John S. Wilkins, Species: A History of the Idea, The Species and Systematics series, vol. 1 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2009).
49. Mitchell, “Beyond Biodiversity and Species,” 34.
50. Mitchell, “Beyond Biodiversity and Species,” 37.
51. Van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 38.
52. Rose, van Dooren, and Chrulew, Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 5.
53. Alfonso Valiente-Banuet et al., “Beyond Species Loss: the Extinction of Ecological Interactions in a Changing World,” Functional Ecology 29, no. 3 (March 2015): 299–307.
54. Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (Bonn: IPBES Secretariat, 2019).
55. Rosenberg et al., “Decline of the North American Avifauna,” Science 366, no. 6461 (October 2019): 120.
56. Rosenberg et al., “Decline of the North American Avifauna,” 121.
57. Dirzo et al., “Defaunation in the Anthropocene,” Science 345, no. 6195 (July 2014): 401–406.
58. Susanne S. Renner and Constantin M. Zohner, “Climate Change and Phenological Mismatch in Trophic Interactions Among Plants, Insects, and Vertebrates,” Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 49 (November 2018): 165–182.
59. Michelle Bastian, “Encountering Leatherbacks in Multispecies Knots of Time,” in Extinction Studies, ed. Rose, van Dooren, and Chrulew, 149–185 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).
60. Rose, “Shimmer: When All You Love Is Being Trashed,” in Arts of Living on Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, ed. Anna Tsing, 51–63 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 52.
61. Chrulew, “Saving the Golden Lion Tamarin,” in Extinction Studies, ed. Rose, van Dooren, and Chrulew, 49–88 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017); van Dooren, Flight Ways; and Heise, Imagining Extinction.
62. Mitchell, “Beyond Biodiversity and Species,” 35.
63. Greenlaw et al., “Saltmarsh Sparrow.”
64. Francisco Sánchez-Bayo and Kris A. G. Wyckhuys, “Worldwide Decline of the Entomofauna: A Review of Its Drivers,” Biological Conservation 232 (April 2019): 232.
65. Caspar A. Hallman et al., “More Than 75 Percent Decline Over 27 Years in Total Flying Insect Biomass in Protected Areas,” PLOS One 12, no. 10 (October 2017), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0185809.
66. Sánchez-Bayor and Wyckhuys, “Worldwide Decline of the Entomofauna,” 232.
67. See Pandurang Vaman Kane, History of Dharmasastra: Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India, vol. I (1930; repr., Pune: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 2016), 160.
68. I am indebted to Sonam Kachru for this observation and to Michael Allen for the Kane citation.
69. Donovan Schaefer, Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 4.
70. Schaefer, Religious Affects, 4.
71. James Hatley, “Walking with Ōkami, the Large-Mouthed Pure God,” in Extinction Studies, ed. Rose, van Dooren, and Chrulew, 19–48 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017) 2017, 41.
72. Stefan Skrimshire, “Extinction Rebellion and the New Visibility of Religious Protest,” Open Democracy, May 12, 2019.
73. Philip Cafaro, “Three Ways to Think About the Sixth Mass Extinction,” Biological Conservation 192 (December 2015): 387–393.
74. Eduardo Gudynas, “Religion and Cosmovisions Within Environmental Conflicts and the Challenge of Ontological Openings,” in Church, Cosmovision and the Environment, ed. Evan Berry and Robert Albro, 225–247 (New York: Routledge, 2018).
75. Mitchell, “Beyond Biodiversity and Species.”
76. Whether the category of religion, a colonial invention, can accommodate Indigenous lifeways is a fraught disciplinary question. For an affirmative answer from a Blackfeet perspective, see Rosalyn R. LaPier, Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers, and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017).
77. Lapier, Invisible Reality.
78. Todd, “Fish, Kin and Hope: Tending to Water Violations in Amiskwaciwâskahikan and Treaty Six Territory,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 43, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2017): 102–107.
79. Whyte, “Indigenous Environmental Movements.”
80. Bruno Latour, “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” New Literary History 45, no.1 (Winter 2014): 1–18.
81. William E. Connolly, Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 127.
82. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 128.
83. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 130.
84. Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2017), 152.
85. Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, 2018). I owe the observation and this specific phrase to an unpublished essay by Matthew Elia.
86. Nick Estes, “Fighting for Our Lives:# NoDAPL in Historical Context.” Wicazo Sa Review 32, no. 2 (2017): 115–122.
87. Whyte, “The Dakota Access Pipeline, Environmental Injustice, and US Colonialism,” Red Ink: An International Journal of Indigenous Literature, Arts, & Humanities 19, no. 1 (Spring 2017); Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (New York: Verso, 2019); Jenkins, “‘Enemies of Humanity’: Political Theology from the Pipelines,” Political Theology Network, June 11, 2020, https://politicaltheology.com/enemies-of-humanity-political-theology-from-the-pipelines/.
88. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Karen Fields (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 224.
89. Catherine L. Albanese, Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Sarah M. Pike, For the Wild: Ritual and Commitment in Radical Eco-Activism (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017).
90. Bron Raymond Taylor, Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (Oakland: University of California Press, 2010).
91. Douglas E. Christie, The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 20.
92. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
93. Important exceptions include Graham Harvey (2006), who has done more than anyone to redefine and redeploy the term; Deborah Bird Rose (2013), who compares Indigenous and materialist forms of animism to explain her own use; and Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013), whose “grammars of animacy” are carefully derived.
94. Kath Weston, Animate Planet: Making Visceral Sense of Living in a High-Tech Ecologically Damaged World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 26.
95. Timothy Morton, “Guest Column: Queer Ecology,” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 125, no. 2 (2010), 172.
96. Oriol Poveda, “Religion in the Anthropocene: Nonhuman Agencies, (Re)enchantment and the Emergence of a New Sensibility,” in Routledge International Handbook of Religion in Global Society, ed. Jayeel Cornelio, François Guathier, Tuomas Martikainen, and Linda Woodhead, 469–477 (New York: Routledge, 2020); See also Jeremy H. Kidwell, “Re-enchanting Political Theology,” Religions 10, no. 10 (September 2019): 550–564.
97. Weston, Animate Planet; Poveda, “Religion in the Anthropocene.
98. Bronislaw Szerszynski, “Gods of the Anthropocene: Geo-Spiritual Formations in the Earth’s New Epoch,” Theory, Culture & Society 34, no. 2–3 (Spring 2017): 253–275.
99. Whitney A. Bauman, Religion and Ecology: Developing a Planetary Ethic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 10.
100. Helen Whale and Franklin Ginn, “In the Absence of Sparrows,” in Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief, ed. Ashlee Consulo Willox and Karen Landman, 92–116 (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2017).
101. Barrow, Nature’s Ghosts, 240.
102. Thomas A. Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 54.
103. Lisa Sideris, “Grave Reminders: Grief and Vulnerability in the Anthropocene,” Religions 11, no.6 (June 2020): 293–309.
104. Rose, Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 2.
105. Jamie Lorimer, “Hookworms Make Us Human: The Microbiome, Eco‐immunology, and a Probiotic Turn in Western Health Care,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 33, no. 1 (March 2019): 60–79.
106. Claire Régnier et al., “Mass Extinction in Poorly Known Taxa,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 25 (June 2015): 7761–7766; Colin J. Carlson et al., “Parasite Biodiversity Faces Extinction and Redistribution in a Changing Climate,” Science Advances 3, no. 9 (September 2017), https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1602422.
107. Thom van Dooren, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster, “Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness,” Environmental Humanities 8, no.1 (May 2016): 1–23.
108. Rose, “Shimmer,” 61.
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