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Liminal species: extinction refusal and the social lives of the dead and disappeared

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Liminal species: extinction refusal and the social lives of the dead and disappeared

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Content i
Liminal Species:
Extinction Refusal and the Social Lives of the Dead and Disappeared
By
Pamela Perrimon
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)
May 2025

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Copyright 2024 Pamela Camille Perrimon
Dédié à Gus.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to my advising committee, Christina Dunbar-Hester, Jennifer Petersen, and Devin
Griffiths. Your continued support and advice throughout the dissertation process has been
invaluable. I deeply appreciate your time, dedication, and belief (but not in the religious
woodpecker way) in this project.
Thank you to the California Academy of Sciences, the Harvard Museum of Comparative
Zoology, and Prey Taxidermy Studio, who opened their archives, collections, and classes to me
without being too concerned about why a communications scholar would work with animal
remains.
Thank you to Troy Mikanovich for writing mentorship. I am certain this dissertation wouldn’t be
half of what it is without your help.
Thank you to my cohort and my peers, whose continued presence and comradery throughout this
PhD program has been both inspiring and grounding. Paulina Lanz, Jessica Hatrick, Cerianne
Robertson, Ana Howe-Bukowski, Junyi Lv, Ally Arrieta, Soyun Ahn, Max Brichta, Eddie
Gonzalez, Chris Persaud, Feixue Nan, Lichen Zhen, Becky Pham, Mehitabel Glenhaber, Steven
Proudfoot, Joshua Michael, Jack Tang, Hamsini Sridharan, Maggie Davis, Isabel Delano, Javier
Rivera, Rohan Grover, Pratik Nyaupane, Josh Widera, Zahraa Badr, Alfonso Hedge.
Thank you to my social support, friends, and collaborators outside of USC Annenberg, who
always reminded me that there is a world outside of a PhD program to enjoy. Also, thank you to
the world outside of the PhD program, which was mostly always there to be enjoyed.
Thank you to my family. This dissertation is a composite of interests, questions, and curiosities
which have deep roots in my life. In this way, it is a reflection of the ways I was encouraged and
challenged to grow and think about the world around me.
Thank you to my cat Gravy, and my snakes Molasses and Peanut Butter, who I am convinced
could write a thesis of their own from the number of times they listened to me read out loud
sections of this work.
No thanks is given to the passive voice, a constant grammatical struggle that I am still not sure I
could recognize.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................................. iii
List of Figures .......................................................................................................................................vi
Abstract ..............................................................................................................................................viii
Introduction ............................................................................................................................................1
What is Extinction? ...................................................................................................................2
Extinction as a Topic of Cultural Studies .....................................................................3
Affect and Emotional Orientations to Extinction ....................................................................10
Extinction Refusal ...................................................................................................................12
Cultural History of the Environment in the United States ......................................................16
Extinct Species as Lively Symbols .........................................................................................19
Methods ...................................................................................................................................22
Material Semiotic analysis and Milieu-specific analysis of the Extinct .....................22
Research Activities and Chapter Overview .............................................................................26
Making Knowledge about the Ivory-bill Woodpecker ...............................................26
(What) Remains of the California Grizzly .................................................................29
De-extincting the Woolly Mammoth ..........................................................................32
Conclusion ...............................................................................................................................33
Chapter 1: Making Knowledge About the Ivory-bill Woodpecker .....................................................35
Ivory-bill Woodpeckers and the breakdown amateur/expert trust in Ornithology ..................43
Destabilizing the Ivory-Bill: The Red List and the Endangered Species Act .........................47
Shifting goals of the Red List from Endangered Species Monitor to Biodiversity
Database ......................................................................................................................50
The taxonomic reorganization of the Ivory-bill and its revival in the Red List .........52
Ivory-bill liveliness on and off list in 2004.................................................................54
Details of the 2004 Ivory-bill Sighting and the Examination of its Red List
Status ..........................................................................................................................55
Local experts and how knowledge is sieved in the Red List ......................................58
Ivory-bill elusiveness as ambiguity in its extinction status ........................................60
USFWS and the Proposal to Delist the Ivory-bill ...................................................................62
Public Commentary and the Symbol of the Ivory-bill Woodpecker ..........................65
“The Ivory-bill Must Be Protected”: The Ivory-bill as a tool for
environmental protection ...............................................................................73
“The Ivory-bill is American”: Nation, Place, and Masculinity ......................77
Local identification with the ivory-bill ..............................................79
Private property and where lines are drawing in finding the ivorybill ..................................................................................................... 84
Skeptics and Naysayers .................................................................... 85
When Hope becomes Faith: The Lord-God Bird .......................................... 86
Proclamations of Hope and Faith in docket comments .................... 88
Forming an Ivory-bill Enthusiast Community Online ........................................................... 91
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................102
Chapter 2: (What) Remains of the California Grizzly .......................................................................104
Bearing Symbolic Life: Three famous California grizzlies ..................................................109
Extinction refusal of the definitely extinct ...............................................................113

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The Stuff of Taxidermy .........................................................................................................114
The California Grizzly’s Rise to State Animal ......................................................................122
The Natural History of the California Grizzly ......................................................................123
Taxidermy as Mediated Representations of Life ...................................................................127
Extinct Trophies: How hunting taxidermy becomes more than a trophy .................139
Endling Spectacles: Monarch’s life and death on display as the last California
grizzly .......................................................................................................................145
Post-extinction taxidermy: When is a grizzly a California grizzly? .........................153
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................161
Chapter 3: De-extincting the Woolly Mammoth ...............................................................................164
Why focus on the mammoth?................................................................................................168
The Sublime and Stuplime of De-extinction .......................................................................172
Mammoth de-extinction across companies ...........................................................................180
How de-extinction is defined within revival companies ..........................................180
Critiques and limits of de-extinction as a practice ...................................................182
Mammoth revival across three de-extinction companies .........................................184
Longtermism and its role in de-extinction company ideology .....................188
Vicarious Life and how “Life-on-demand” shows up across De-extinction
Sites ..............................................................................................................190
Mammoth remains and molecular life as mammoth life .............................192
Asian elephants as vicarious bodies .............................................................197
The Narrative Lives of the Mammoth at Work: De-extinction project
imaginaries ................................................................................................................203
Conclusion..............................................................................................................................213
Conclusion .........................................................................................................................................216
Lessons across cases of extinction refusal ............................................................................220
Localities of Extinction Refusals ..............................................................................220
Affect can affect Extinction Refusal .........................................................................221
Why does this matter to Communications? ..........................................................................222
Making knowledge about the Ivory-bill: how extinction is influenced by
narrative ....................................................................................................................223
The stuff of extinct bodies: how proof of death becomes further opportunities for
life .............................................................................................................................224
De-extinction and Revival: circumnavigating extinction through vicarious
life .............................................................................................................................225
Concluding thoughts: Limitations and implications .............................................................227
Bibliography ......................................................................................................................................228

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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1: “Ivory Billed Woodpecker” by D. Eckelberry (1944) .....................................................34
Figure 2: Screenshot of the 2000 International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s
ivory-bill assessment ..........................................................................................................................52
Figure 3: Screenshot from David Luneau's 2004 ivory-bill sighting ..............................................53
Figure 4: Obituary for Martha Washington, the Last Passenger Pigeon (1914) ............................58
Figure 5: Headline announcing the Endangered Species Protection Act (1967) ...........................62
Figure 6: A screenshot of discussion in an ivory-bill enthusiast Facebook group .........................79
Figures 7, 8: “About” pages for the Facebook groups Ivory-billed Woodpecker Sightings,
Discussion, Research, more and Ivory-billed Woodpeckers Fly ........................................92
Figures 9, 10: Foo Fighters poster including three species of Woodpecker native to
Arkansas and a screenshot discussing the poster on Facebook .......................................................94
Figures 11, 12, 13, 14: Examples of ivory-bill ephemera shared in enthusiast groups today ......95
Figures 15, 16: Ivory-bill taxidermy .................................................................................................96
Figures 17, 18: Ivory-bill study skins. ..............................................................................................98
Figure 19: Screenshot of a Mission Ivorybill Facebook post ..........................................................99
Figure 20: State Flag of California ..................................................................................................103
Figure 21: The Valley Center Bear ..................................................................................................108
Figure 22: Monarch the California grizzly in storage ....................................................................110
Figure 23: The Santa Barbara "California" grizzly bear ................................................................111
Figure 24: "Grizzly Bear" by C. Nahl (1852) .................................................................................124
Figure 25: “Grizzly Bear” by D. van Vleck (1855) .......................................................................125
Figure 26: "Lycanthrope” by U. Sepisvart (2024) .........................................................................129
Figure 27: The Valley Center Bear on display ...............................................................................138
Figure 28: Close up of Monarch in storage ....................................................................................145

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Figure 29: Full body of Monarch in storage ...................................................................................149
Figure 30: Monarch after restoration ..............................................................................................149
Figure 31: The Santa Barbara Bear display ....................................................................................152
Figure 32: Screenshot of Revive & Restore on The Long Now Foundation site .........................185
Figure 33: Screenshots from the projects page of Colossal Biosciences ......................................187
Figures 34, 35: Lyuba and Dima. Mummified baby mammoths ..................................................193
Figure 36: Screenshot of Revive & Restore discussing the role of DNA .....................................196
Figure 37: Screenshot of Colossal Biosciences discussing the role of DNA ...............................196
Figures 38, 39: Two screenshots from the Woolly mammoth revival page on Colossal .............198
Figure 40: Screenshot taken from Revive & Restore’s mammoth page of Stuart Brand,
Ryan Phelan, and George Church meeting an Asian elephant ......................................................199
Figure 41: Screenshot of Mammoth features superimposed on the silhouettes
of Asian Elephant bodies .................................................................................................................200
Figures 42, 43: Two screenshots of Colossal’s woolly mammoth revival project .......................201
Figure 44: Screenshot of Revive & Restore’s justifications for mammoth revival .....................203
Figure 45: Screenshot of Colossal’s justifications for mammoth revival .....................................204
Figures 46, 47: Screenshots from Colossal’s mammoth project page [1] ....................................205
Figure 48: Screenshot from Colossal's mammoth project page [2] ..............................................208
Figure 49: Screenshot from Colossal's timeline of tech commercialization ................................209
Figure 50: Screenshot from Colossal’s summary of the technologies developed during
the Apollo mission ...........................................................................................................................212

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ABSTRACT
Biodiversity loss is a mounting anxiety in the present day, with environmental advocates
warning that we are in a mass extinction event commensurable with past die-offs. But extinction
is not the end for some charismatic species. Liminal species are both extinct and lively, absent
and present, containing contradictory narratives in their form. I refer to these cases as instances
of extinction refusal, wherein the narrative of a group may reject the incongruent reality of the
world around them. The aims of this dissertation are to explore the myriad ways of how and why
extinction becomes and unacceptable outcome for many- why extinction is refused. To this end I
ask, what is extinction refusal? And what is the significance of the ways in which it crops up in
social life?
In this dissertation I approach the topic of extinction refusal informed by a materialsemiotic analysis (Law, 2019), and Melody Jue’s milieu-specific analysis (2020), of the extinct
species in question. These methodologies allowed me to perform research across three specific
case studies, that speaks to the local and particular orientations towards the extinct in a flexible
manner.
Extinction refusal manifests in communities when the species at risk holds particularly
important meanings and identifications for the people who love it. These narratives of extinction
refusal create a scaffold of cruel optimism (Berlant), which minimizes mourning and productive
attunements to thinking about biodiversity in crisis. Finally, narratives of extinction refusal are
informed by, and reciprocally benefit, dominant and colonial relationships to the nonhuman
world.
First, I examine the archival presence of the ivory-bill woodpecker across the
International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Endangered Species, the federal

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register, and among Facebook groups, attuned to the ways extinction deniers, that is, ivory-bill
enthusiasts, deny woodpecker death. Knowledge creation about the ivory-bill woodpecker is tied
to southern settlerhood and masculinity, so when the United States Fish and Wildlife Service
proposed delisting the bird “on the basis of extinction” it was construed as an attack on southern
lifeways and rural identity (Endangered and Threatened Species, 2021).
Second, I study the taxidermy of the California grizzly, bolstered by an analysis of its
natural and social history in settler California life. As a state symbol, the California grizzly is
refused extinction through its persistent civic presence. California grizzly taxidermies are curious
sites of extinct taxidermy that prolong grizzly bodily presence in the state, bolstering the bear as
a lively symbol through its decaying materials.
Finally, I approach the case of the wooly mammoth by looking at how it shows up across
de-extinction company promotional material and websites. I examine how its image is leveraged
and how mammoth revival is discussed. De-extinction companies leverage the narrative of the
mammoth as a happy future, which amplifies extinction anxiety all the while paradoxically
minimizing species death. Through tying mammoth life to other lively objects such as DNA or
elephant bodies, mammoth life is assured.
Across all these cases I find that the social lives of the extinct crop up in unique and
locally specific ways. Contributing to a growing body of literature on extinction studies, I argue
that extinction is refused for animals who are so loved, that refusal communities cannot be
without them.

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Liminal Species:
Extinction refusal and the social lives of the dead and disappeared
On June 24th, 2012, Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island tortoise died. George was an
endling, considered the last living of his species, when he was discovered on Pinta Island in the
Galapagos islands chain (Galapagos Conservancy | Lonesome George). Media outlets
internationally shared the news, with George’s death, the Pinta Island tortoise was officially
extinct.
However, George was not allowed to simply die. It was not long after the discovery of
George’s death that he was moved to a cooler for preservation. Later, he was flown to New York
for taxidermizing by the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). George was on display
at the AMNH for only four months in 2014-15 until his body was flown back to the Galapagos
where he remains on display today. During his short stay at the AMNH George’s endling story
and the extinction of his species rekindled the press which surged at his death. It was also after
his death that speculation surfaced about cryptic and undiscovered Pinta Island tortoises. Further
making headlines, related species of female tortoises who were placed in captivity with George
in life laid several clutches of eggs. With each unsuccessful clutch laid in the years that followed,
George’s status as an endling was rescinded and reconfirmed many times over.
Though Lonesome George died and his species was declared extinct, his social life
continues long after his death. Even today there is speculation about breeding Pinta Island
tortoises back to life using a genetically similar subspecies of Galapagos tortoise, something only

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possible through genetic samples taken from George pre- and post-death. While extinction and
extancy may seem clear cut at a glance, the distinction breaks down at close inspection. The
species introduced in the chapters that follow are similar to George in that their extinctions were
simply not allowed to be. These species remain liminal, oscillating between states of presence
and absence and between extant and extinct. In this dissertation I focus on species whose
liminality is displayed through their flickering and contested presence in social life. Through
their absence in nature, their social salience and presence becomes the primary way in which
communities encounter them. For particularly charismatic extinct species with a robust social
life, their social presence often occludes their absence from nature, thus some extinct and
disappeared species, like George, are not allowed to die. Instead, the communities that love them
reject extinction as a possible outcome for these species, prolonging the imagination of species
life for a myriad of purposes. George’s post-mortem story has been unfolding for over a decade
and though he is dead, as a social creature, he is not gone.
What is extinction?
Extinction, according to conservation biologists, marks the disappearance of a taxon, a
distinct group of related, interbreeding species entirely from the world (Ehrlich & Ehrlich, 1981).
A crucial characteristic for all species in a taxon is their ability to reproduce future generations of
that organism. When the rate of reproduction for whatever reason is unable to match the death
rate of a species, populations decline. Extinction, at its most clinical, is this process of taxon
decline over time.
Even among expert communities in the life sciences, the term “extinction” contains
multitudes. Taxonomists and species specialists’ complicate extinction further by redefining what
a makes distinct species, often reclassifying organisms such that species disappear on paper. To

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illustrate, if two species of birds are reclassified as one, then the second species in the merging
ceases to exist. Though a species that undergoes reclassification does not decline in population,
macro biodiversity assessments of a given environment may note the change of species in a
census as indicative of biodiversity loss and attribute this decline to extinction. Paleontologists
meanwhile, define extinction through the fossil record, with extinct species showing up as
taxonomically distinct from species living today. Thus, extinction is qualified not only through
phenotypical difference but also time. Evolutionary biologists define extinction as a crucial step
in species development and adaptation to their surrounding environments. Through continuous
adaptations to their environments, species evolve into new ones. The addition of certain
qualifiers such as “extinct in the wild” in biodiversity databases such as the Red List of
Endangered Species multiplies the ways a species may be extinct. Complicating these nuances of
extinct in specific locales further, though international qualifiers exist, local ones do as well.
Some species may be extinct in some geographic areas and not others. For instance, when
Oregon wolf OR-93 travelled south to the Californian central coast, his presence was noteworthy
as wolves had been “locally extinct” for 50 years (Weiss, 2021). Political geographies thus can
influence extinction events. These multiple definitions among experts thus demonstrate that
extinction is not a singular entity. To borrow from Annemarie Mol, “what we think of as a single
object may appear to be more than one” (Mol, 2003: vii).
Extinction as a topic of Cultural Studies
Beyond expert communities, extinction acquires new meanings (Barrow, 2009; Maxwell,
2017). Extinction studies is an interdisciplinary field, assembled from a growing interest in the
humanities and social sciences into the ways communities interact with the extinction process. It
distinguishes itself from environmental conservation fields by defining extinction as

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fundamentally a social process (Alagona, 2013; Minteer, 2018). Broadly, extinction studies
scholars consider that how social groups think about and react to extinction is as generative a site
for study as creating knowledge about endangered/extinct species themselves. While literacy in,
and interaction with STEM is a core element of examining the processes of extinction scholars
contributing to the field also theorize extinction through critical histories and interpretive work
amongst lay communities (e.g. Parreñas’ work in wildlife rehabilitation centers, van Dooren’s
work with sandhill crane preserves). Anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose, for instance, highlights
conflicts between Aboriginal Australian communities, conservationists, and government groups
in her work on the dingo (2013). Extinction studies thus does not find an easy home in a singular
discipline. Instead, its foundational works range across the social sciences and humanities (Rose,
van Dooren, & Wolfe, 2017; de Vos, 2019).
Extinction is also a temporal and evolutionary process, normalized in long histories and
understandings of life on earth. Species evolve, diversify, and go extinct. Biodiversity will
explode as it did in the Cambrian, only to face severe culling as it did in the Permian die-off.
These processes of life and death are natural and part of the long history of life on Earth
(Darwin, 1902). What is unnatural and producing anxiety in how we think about extinction today
however, is the modernity of it all. Popular science writer and journalist, Elizabeth Kolbert
popularized the 20th and 21st century as “the sixth extinction” connecting contemporary
extinction to past extinction events that have occurred over Earth’s history (Kolbert, 2014). The
notion of the sixth extinction is often critiqued, with scientists claiming that the rate of
contemporary extinction is nothing akin to the mass die-offs recorded in past extinction events
which wiped out majorities of life on earth. The scales of mass extinction events are so broad and
destructive that in comparison, the sixth extinction is incommensurable, and thus uncategorizable

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as an extinction event. Responding to these critiques, advocates for calling the present the sixth
extinction respond that extinction events should not be categorized principally through their
results, but rather through their processes. The acceleration of extinction rates and species
disappearance in the 20th and 21st centuries are indicative of the role of environmental disruption,
encroachment, and development in causing biodiversity loss. This popular understanding of the
causes of contemporary extinction is not an easy argument to reckon with, as it insinuates that
contemporary lifeways, replete with the vagueness the term entails, is culpable for species
decline. Extinction studies is a relatively new field that explores the phenomenon of biodiversity
loss and contemporary extinction as it intersects with social, political, and daily life.
Cultural anthropologist and foundational thinker in extinction studies, Deborah Bird Rose
draws a clear line between extinction and mass extinction (2013). Where extinction is a natural
and common process, mass extinction events are much rarer and more tied to a profound
disruption of ecological order. What makes extinction today particularly fraught, Rose argues, is
that people are often the root cause (2013). In the Anthropocene there is no studying extinction
without studying the role of who is impacting the environment, in what ways, and to what ends.
Rose approaches this disruption through examining conservation and extinction as a product of
love and the absence of love, the latter underpinning what she calls “death work” (2012).
Quoting from environmental biologist Michel Soulé that, where endangered species are
concerned, “we save those we love,” Rose maintains that the inverse must also be true: species
who are not loved are slotted for extinction (Rose, 2013: 3). In the cases of dingoes today (2013),
and flying foxes in the 1960s (2022), a lack of love meant being subjected to endangerment
practices such as being free to hunt or subject to regional culling programs. By folding in the
notion of love and lack-of-love to extinction studies Rose provokes her audience to thinking

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about endangered and extinct species within a scaffold of affect without drawing directly from
affect scholars. Extinction becomes anthropocentric, dependent on the appraisal of non-human
species within a social evaluation of charisma, environmental use, and calculus of triage. Rose’s
explorations into love and species extancy present an uncomfortable argument: living in today’s
mass extinction is dependent on how a species shows up in culture.
For Rose, loving animals can be a violent affair, especially for species in which love is
not readily given. From “death work” comes “double death,” which refers not only to the death
of a species but also to the death of that species’ future, its ecological relationships, and its
evolutionary lineage (Rose, 2012). The disappearance of a species from an ecological niche and
from an evolutionary chain “unmakes” the relationships between extinct species and living ones.
This long process of unmaking relationships is what environmental humanities scholar
Thom van Dooren focuses on when discussing how extinction is a uniquely drawn-out process of
mourning. Grieving for extinct and disappearing species is inextricable from the slow disconnect
of eroding multispecies bonds when species begin declining (2014: 143). His book Flight Ways
(2014) examines the role of endangered birds and how mourning shows up in the social life of
communities that are intimately tied with them. His explorations from albatross, to sandhill
cranes, to Hawaiian crows examine the relationship communities have to the inevitability of
species loss precipitated through environmental disruption. He argues that extinction is this
pattern of losses as a disappearing species disentangles from its interconnections with others (van
Dooren & Rose, 2016: 12). Thus, extinction is never simply a process limited to one species but
always multispecies.
Van Doorens’s study examines living animals whose populations are either headed for
extinction or functionally extinct, whereas in this dissertation my work highlights cases where

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species death has occurred but is accompanied by extinction refusal. For the communities who
have lost loved species, the unravelling of relational processes is still occurring at the social
level. Though a species may be physically gone, it’s memory and social life remain, as witnessed
in Lonesome George’s post-mortem life. Where van Dooren’s work hones in on these
unravelling connections in the disentangling process of species death, I argue that even postdeath, this process of unravelling continues and is most clearly seen in disappeared species with
robust social lives.
Van Dooren appeals to the catharsis of mourning the soon to be extinct as a way of
relearning how to live in a shared world. Ultimately grieving is incremental, multi-species, and
long-lasting, spanning generations. Mourning, he writes, allows groups to reflect in a
conscientious and sustainable way about shared futures with the non-human (2016: 143).
Mourning requires effort as the undertaking is painful, but a necessary part of extinction as it
requires witnessing and accepting the decline of populations and the erosion and loss of
relations.
English literature scholar Ursula Heise (2016) argues that extinction, at its core, is
dependent on fabricated systems of knowing the non-human world. Her work on the ARKive and
the IUCN’s Red List of Endangered Species show that species inclusion into biodiversity
databases is inconsistent, reflecting changing research trends and predicated on the unstable
definitions of species and endangerment. Key to her critique of biodiversity databases, is the
overrepresentation of “charismatic species”. Charismatic species are species who are given
excessive human interest, often by nature of their physical traits, but sometimes through
narrative importance. We can see species charisma at play in the ways some species are given
more attention and care than others, such as when certain species are deemed worth saving at the

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expense of another in environmental triage cases (e.g. killing invasive species to bolster native
plants), or when certain species come to be symbolic of place through cultural campaigns (e.g.
palm trees in Los Angeles). Knowledge about endangered and extinct species is thus always
imperfect, inculcated into a calculus of social value precisely because they reflect how
communities prioritize and systematize species life through interrelations.
Little work exists that studies the species that people simply will not allow to die, and the
lengths people go to ensure continued life. One example of scholarship that does this
investigative work is Decolonizing Extinction (2018) by anthropologist Juno Salazar Parreñas.
Parreñas considers extinction as a culturally and historically informed process. She focuses in on
how the critically endangered orangutan is undergoing extinction and how the conservation
efforts to save the species are shaped by colonial ideologies about the natural world. Extinction,
she argues, is situated and localized, informed by land use practices and histories of land
stewardship (2018, 7). For Malaysian Borneo, Parreñas shows how colonial rule influenced a
continued orientation to orangutan conservation through continuing practices of extraction and
control. Orangutans, as Parreñas demonstrates, are simply not allowed to die because of their
charismatic and historically important role in how colonizers perceive Bornean nature (2018).
Conservation efforts respond to the imperative of keeping orangutans extant through often
violent and invasive conservation efforts mimicking colonial approaches to land use and
biodiversity imaginaries. Parreñas identifies practices of forced copulation and sensitization of
orangutans to humans as ways in which continued orangutan life is achieved, often to the
detriment of female orangutans.
In her chapter on forced copulation, Parreñas explores how female orangutans often bear
responsibility for species liveliness by forcibly bearing young. A consequence of this practice is

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that they are forced into contact, often violent, with male orangutans more often than if they were
free ranging. Through stories of violence in day-to-day human-orangutan interactions, Parreñas
also shows how the conservation programs are dangerous to workers. The ever-present capacity
of semi-wild orangutans to attack groundskeepers often means that indigenous lives are also at
risk in conservation. These colonial mechanisms of spatial control which force contact between
male and female orangutans, and between indigenous workers and orangutans, prioritize
colonizer and orangutan lives. In contrast, decolonizing extinction means giving up these
colonial structures of control and Parreñas calls for a turn to palliative care for orangutan
conservation. Decolonial methods calls for the willingness to let a species die, undercutting the
domination and control of life demanded by colonial conservation methods. Decolonial practices
challenge conservation practices by asking what a good death would entail and by rethinking
extinction as a process rather than an outcome. Parreñas’ intervention into extinction and
conservation studies shows that dominant ways of seeing the nonhuman world are localized and
inflected by power, place, and history (2018). I extend this concept into looking at the already
extinct.
One of the key areas where my exploration of disappeared species differentiates itself
from other scholarly works in extinction studies is through focusing on the social lives of the
already extinct. Scholars built the field of extinction studies to examine the myriad ways humans
and non-humans attune themselves to the biodiversity crisis, population loss, and threat of
extinction for non-human species. Scholars such as Rose, van Dooren, Heise, and Parreñas write
about the social lives of endangered species who are on the brink of extinction and transitioning
from life to death. Ultimately, Van Dooren writes that extinction is akin to storytelling, in that the
ways communities come to be attuned to its process is through the mediated experiences of

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others (2014: 9). Stories, however, persist past death, and histories have long-reaching
consequences to present and future lifeways. Thus, there is merit to looking at stories of past
extinctions and the ways that they endure as lively social stories in contemporary space. By
looking at the social lives of the already extinct I extend Rose’s argument: how can we save
those we love when they are already gone?
Affect and Emotional Orientations to Extinction
Cultural studies scholar, Lauren Berlant’s theorization of cruel optimism argues that
things people desire may in fact be obstacles towards flourishing (2011). That is, attachments and
ways of living that we see as desirable are in fact “a cluster of promises we want someone or
something to make to us and make possible for us” (1), beautiful but ultimately unobtainable.
Thus, Berlant writes that we remain attuned, optimistically, towards the achievement of
happiness, success, and good-feeling often at the neglect of present needs. This optimistic
orientation towards the future often leads ambivalence for present states of being, ironically
stagnating change and assuring the good life remains aspirational (Berlant, 2008). For feminist
and affect studies scholar, Sara Ahmed (2010), happiness is similarly a stagnating force.
Happiness is a construct of control in society, a promise that encourages people to perform in
predictable ways and interact with predictable materials to achieve happiness. She argues that
“the struggle against happiness as a necessity is also a struggle for happiness as a possibility”
(2010, 222). In this quote, Ahmed pushes us to consider “unhappy” alternatives to present
conditions for an ultimately more just future.
Extinction, and especially contemporary extinction is traumatic. It involves the
disappearance of a species from an ecosystem. Though this process is a natural one in the manner
that Charles Darwin and other early naturalists made clear when writing about the flows of life

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and evolution in the world, often in contemporary extinction, species death is unnatural. A
growing anxiety in current climate and environmental work concerns the consequences of fossil
fuel extractions, deforesting, and other harmful capitalist practices on the environment and in
species loss. With good reason, popular biologist and naturalist, E.O. Wilson once condemned
homo sapiens as “the planetary killer” (2002: 94). In The Diversity of Life, one of his earlier
publications leading up to this denouncement, he estimated that 82 species go extinct every day
(1999). Biologists Paul and Anne Ehrlich write in Extinction, that the daily rate of species
disappearance is anywhere from “five to fifty times higher than it has been in our evolutionary
past” (1981: 8) further speaking to the role of disruption in causing extinction. Practitioners of
environmental and conservation science regard the numbers posited by popular biologists like
Wilson and the Ehrlich’s with skepticism. Their numbers, many argue, are too low. The United
Nations Center for Biological Diversity refers to estimates by the Millennium Ecosystem
Assessment which estimates that up to 150 species are lost every day (Millennium Ecosystem
Assessment, 2005). This evaluation made in 2005 has remained static despite a growing
awareness of the environmental destruction and species disruption in the world.
Affect theories such as Berlant’s cruel optimism, and Ahmed’s theorization of happiness,
find purchase in extinction stories through people’s attachment to species life. Earlier, I
introduced Deborah Bird Rose’s work, focusing on her attunements to charismatic, loved,
species. Rose’s work examines the affordances that love gives to animals who face of extinction,
instilling a biopolitics of which non-human lives are deemed worthy of saving, which are
sentenced to death, and which are ambivalently ignored. Charisma and love play a strong part in
determining species futures, succinctly summarized in the quote “we save those we love” (Rose,
2013: 3). Of course, the love communities have for endangered and extinct species is a curious

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phenomenon in and of itself. Non-human species find purchase in human social life for many
reasons: they are charismatic, important keystone players, or historically intertwined with people
and places.
Extinction Refusal
This dissertation is about extinction refusal, a concept I define broadly as the myriad
ways extinction, as a contemporary issue, is rendered an unacceptable outcome for the
communities that are witnessing it. Extinction refusal is a social phenomenon of contemporary
life as it is directly responding to how groups intimately face unnatural extinction. Refusal is also
a deeply cultural process, tied up in localized histories and identities. Each of the species I
describe in the chapters that follow have particular entanglements with the communities that love
them. As such, extinction refusal is as much a product of localized reactions to similarly
localized human impacts as contemporary extinction is, entangled within a politics of culpability
and narratives of guilt about species death. In the chapters that follow I outline the varied forms
extinction refusal manifests as, in relation to settler-colonial, American ways of knowing and
thinking about nature and non-human life. I demonstrate how extinction refusal is a product of
histories of thinking about the natural world, which in turn shapes how non-humans appear in
social life. Communities refuse extinction premised on their relationship with the disappeared
species and the natural world, from extinction denial regarding the ivory-bill; to extinction
circumnavigation through transformation made evident in the case of the California grizzly; to
extinction reversal, or de-extinction, as seen in the chapter on the woolly mammoth.
I leverage refusal in these cases as a broad organizing concept with varied and
heterogeneous profiles. In the chapter of the ivory-bill woodpecker, refusal manifests through
denial, with communities staunchly holding on to ivory-bill life against dominant narratives of

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species extinction. Extinction refusal for the California grizzly manifests less antagonistically to
dominant narratives, instead refusing extinction through the re-animation of grizzly bodies in
civic space. It is through these reanimations that the extinction of the bear is occluded and
secondary to its social life. Finally, in my chapter on the wooly mammoth extinction is refused
through distraction and through a rhetoric of reversibility. De-extinction projects minimize
extinction as an outcome of biodiversity loss to the extent that it can easily be cast aside in favor
of other (de-extinction) rhetorics.
Often refusal is glorified as an alternative to structures of power. Refusal of Berlant’s
optimism or Ahmed’s happiness are ways of achieving catharsis, and from that ultimately
sovereignty. For communications scholar Laura Portwood-Stacer, refusal is an act of resistance
to capitalist structures. The Anarchists she works with theorize refusal as activism, rejecting
participation in capitalist consumption cycles (Portwood-Stacer, 2012). Alternatives to dominant
and capitalist views of the world are constantly conceived in literature as catalysts of change to
hegemonic standards. Refusal is also more than simply resistance to power as anthropologist
Carole McGranahan writes in “Theorizing Refusal: An Introduction” (McGranahan, 2016). In
her call for anthropologists and ethnographers to “think with refusal”, she argues that refusal is
more than resistance, and ultimately a mundane practice of “staking claims to the sociality that
underlies all relationships, including political” (320). In this sense, refusal can be political, but it
can also be separated from histories and associations of governance. Notably, refusal can be
applied to a myriad of interactions with others and with the environment. To this end she writes
that refusal is “social and affiliative” in a way that inculcates insistence alongside resistance
(322) meaning that refusal can become a point of identification for individuals who “insist” on
certain truths. By including insistence as a generative variable, McGranahan theorizes “refusal”

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away from dominant narratives of refusal as overtly political, and happening in smaller points of
action and insistence performed by communities.
McGranahan also opens the possibility for thinking of refusal as not necessarily a
positive analytic, citing how a refusal of analysis in resistance studies led to academic thinness
(320-321). Ultimately, it was the refusal of scholars to study dominated groups from the position
of the subjugated that lead to an unbalanced field of scholarship (321). While her analysis of
unsettling refusal as a negative notion stops here, her previous work of including insistence into
the definition allows the possibility of thinking critically about negative applications refusal can
have.
To further upset refusal as a generative and ultimately just force, I turn to Feminist STS
scholar, Michelle Murphy’s critique of care. Thinking with care, much like refusal, is an
approach to research that pushes back against dominant and hegemonic ways of analyzing
culture. Michelle Murphy tasks those who read her work on unsettling care with “the continued
necessity of critique and historical accountability and hence the negative effects that come with
[thinking with care]” (Murphy, 2015: 731). For Murphy the popularity of care as an analytic and
in feminist practice can come with its detractors. She warns her audience that approaching an
object with an uncritical politics of care can also blind us from seeing the ugliness and violences
of the objects in question. Thus, even alternative scaffolds to dominant structures must be
troubled or else fall into traps of optimistic thinking. Murphy’s bid to unsettle adds to Donna
Haraway’s well-known appeal to “stay with the trouble” by extending critiques even to terms of
resistance (Haraway, 2016). Importantly, in unsettling care, Murphy opens the possibility that
celebrated forms of resistance may also be troublesome.

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Elisabeth Anker, a political theorist, brings the practice of unsettling vocabularies home
in her book Ugly Freedoms (2021). Here, she explores the consequences of glorifying terms
through her analysis of US “freedom”. Her disavowal of the term, made through the modifier
“ugly” highlights the ways in which positively valanced words such as freedom may be
problematized by situated histories and socialities. “The ascription ‘ugly’,” she writes, “gnaw[s]
away at the ceaseless affirmation of freedom’s virtue, challenging the veneration of actions
practiced under its mantle” (Anker, 2021: 6-7). Though freedom is perceived inherently positive,
a consequence of this is that the lengths people go to maintain the term continues injustices and
violences, replicating harms while willfully ignoring them in the pursuit of “freedom”.
Returning to extinction, the refusal at play in the chapters that follow is a predominantly
ugly thing. The disappeared species I examine all remain alive discursively and materially in
transformed ways through practices of extinction refusal. This refusal has consequences. It is the
refusal of the possibility of mourning, insisting on the continued optimism and happiness
ascribed with maintaining species extancy no matter the cost. In this manner, extinction refusal
embraces stagnation, rejecting possibilities of catharsis through mourning. Extinction refusal is
also a social term, with those that refuse extinction finding community amongst others that
replicate these rhetorics. Refusal communities limit the possibility for thinking about nature in
new and generative ways, rather returning to reproducing past and idealistic narratives about the
environment and the species who live there. Ultimately, it is a form of cruel optimism as
extinction refusal clings to a nature irrevocably changed through species decline. It manifests an
unobtainable ideal of nature that problematically reinforces a settler colonial ideology of
biodiversity in the land. The ideal “balanced” ecosystem in the chapters that follow is the one
described by biodiversity censuses during the 19th and 20th centuries. Refusal communities

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replicate these ways of thinking moving forward, basing new orientations and technologies not
on cathartic processes, mourning, and doing better for future life, but by fixating on life-that-was.
Extinction refusal is a refusal of insistence, a problematic and ugly thing that negates the
possibility of moving past species disappearance and instead clinging to happy ideals of nature.
Cultural History of the Environment in the United States
The cases discussed in the chapters that follow are moments of localized extinction
refusal informed by settler-colonial ways of relating to the natural world. The environments
evoked by those who refuse extinction in this dissertation are national ones that draw on
imaginaries of nature and wilderness in America. This is to say, those who refuse extinction often
have a notion of an ideal biodiversity in a given ecosystem. This ideal biodiversity, one that
retains the presence of disappeared species is always nostalgic. Particularly important to note
about the attachments communities have to past natures is that the history of nature and
biodiversity in the United States is entangled with nationalistic and settler ideologies.
As a deeply social and cultural orientation to facing biodiversity loss, extinction refusal is
a flexible term applicable to a myriad of places. In this dissertation, I focus on extinction refusal
as it crops up in a United States context. In the US, notions of nature and wilderness, and by
proxy the life it supports, is a sociocultural project. Nature is already a material product, as
environmental historian William Cronon (2003) argues that US “nature” is anything but natural;
rather, it is a curated project undertaken by communities in a given space. The ways in which
communities make use of ecologies to support lifeways significantly alters the biodiversity and
ecological profile of any given area. For instance, in colonial New England, the timber industry,
beaver trapping, and growing agricultural communities transformed the pre-colonial ecology that
was already shaped by indigenous communities. Old growth forests were replaced by fast

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growing beech and birch trees, beaver genetic variation was decimated as the population fell to
near extinction, and animal movement patterns were hampered by the proliferation of stone walls
in new settlements (2003). Cronon’s work showing how the role of colonialism in irreversibly
changing New England ecology broadly reveals how a community’s relationship to the land
materially influences biodiversity.
Nature and ecosystems are also an ideological project as well. The notion of wilderness,
Cronon (1996) argues elsewhere, follows from colonial mythmaking processes that yoke white
identity to the control of natural spaces. The notion that wilderness is nature that is sublime,
untouched, and empty is frontier thinking that erased indigenous communities from American
geographies. This erasure, moreover, was deeply gendered. During the era of American westward
expansion (early to middle 1800s), frontier ideology figured the masculine ideal as a rugged
dream of “returning to nature.” Wilderness was juxtaposed against notions of white civilization
as having “sapped masculinity” through collective living (9). Frontier ideology, in contrast,
exalted the individual man who could triumph over nature, extoling radical individualism in
which the return to nature was at once a return to masculinity. As Cronon also argues, frontier
myths grew into national myths, such that masculine identity became national identity, which,
moreover, accrued elements of the Sacred (7). Early nature writers such as John Muir, Henry
David Thoreau and William Wordsworth all wrote about being in nature as an individual act
performed in solitude. And, it was Muir’s writings connecting empty landscapes with nostalgia
and spiritual catharsis that led to the founding of Yosemite National Park (7). Thus, Wilderness
became a romanticized American ideal of uninhabited land, often through the removal of
indigenous communities, and where travelers could go to affirm identity and emotion of place.

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Nature is also figured as a US resource, extractable and consumable by communities.
Land, for anthropologist Tania Murray Li (2014), is not a stable concept, but rather reflects a
capitalist orientation to physical space. With the same parcel of land, a property developer would
have a different orientation to the space than a hunter would, and so in this way a particular place
can have a multitude of meanings depending who occupies, traverses, or uses it (589). Li calls
such practices of meaning-making as acts or devices of inscription. Farming, construction, and
infrastructure-building implicate tools to transform land into resource. But resources are finite
and land is immovable, prompting the making of exclusionary practices to restrict competition
for resources, material or symbolic (who has access, who is excluded and how). For example,
this is the ideological work even behind national parks and wildlands, whose entrance fees, lack
of accessible infrastructure, and great distances from metropolitan centers exclude many from
visiting. Within this scarcity model of land, the frontier is seen as “idle” land, land that is empty
land waiting for inscription. The frontier connotes environments yet unused but bearing the
capacity to give forth resources. Untouched forests can be transformed into lumber mills, cleared
for agriculture, raised for development etc. Under capitalism, wilderness is merely a resource in
abundance, land that works for the dominant social group.
Social groups also extract specific symbolic values from nature. Much like Li’s capitalist
conception of land, species can also become resources for meaning making and inscription.
Consider the bald eagle and the American bison, whose presence as the national bird and national
mammal inscribe the species with American value and meaning. When the American bald eagle
was on the register for endangered species during the late 20th century, a massive species
restoration project was launched restoring the bird to a stable population because of its symbolic
value. Thus, extinction refusal in the United States taps into these nationalistic myths of

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American exceptionalism through its untouched wilderness and manifest destiny, as well as its
conception of land as material and symbolic resources for gain.
Extinct Species as Lively Symbols
Throughout the chapters that follow, I grapple with the myriad ways absent species
remain present in social life. I call extinct species who remain salient retain and the capacity to
contain meaning, symbolic value, and affective value “lively”. Disappeared species remain
dynamic when communities continue to extract meaning from them, attach new meanings, and
change the symbolic values of loved species. Meanings and symbolic value may also change
over time, so extinct species still alter and develop as social vehicles long after their
disappearance from the living world. Thus, though not alive, I consider these capacities for
change to be “lively”. A particular tension for extinct species is that they are inherently dead, so I
use the term “lively,” not as a contrast to deathliness but rather at the opposite of inert, inactive
and stagnant.
In Virtual Menageries (2019), media studies scholar Jody Berland examines the image of
the animal across communication platforms, digital and analog. Berland shows that animals in
media have always taken on the onus of symbolic packhorse by examining the historical
genealogies of the ways in which animals become symbols. The menagerie, a precursor to
today’s zoos were historically places for animal witnessing and sites where communities could
imagine by gazing at animal bodies. Animals within menageries thus became receptacles for
social meaning, mediating something more than themselves (2019: 2). For instance, a giraffe in a
zoo may be a giraffe, but it may also be a receptacle to imagine the landscapes it came from, the
conditions of capture, and an anchoring body to think about an unwitnessed place (49). Digital
images and modern animal gazing works similarly to the menagerie. Our exemplary giraffe on

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the internet may provoke the same imaginaries as the giraffe in the menagerie, or it may
commercially mediate Toys’R’Us, be memed, reference a sports team, etc.
Berland also grapples with the duality of the animals she writes about when she asks: “is
this figure an image or a life?” (12). In her exploration of material menageries, Berland pushes
against the propensity to “dematerialize” animals when creating symbols with and social lives of
them, challenging those who think with animals, to consider animal bodies as well (2019: 96).
She offers the example of the beaver, which has robust social and symbolic meanings, but also a
material presence. The stuff of the beaver, the fur, bones, and flesh, alongside beavers living in
captivity and the wild remain entangled with the animal’s symbolic life while simultaneously
agentive and lively animals. Her provocation here, to acknowledge the materialization of
symbolic animals, is important as it addresses the lively body outside of the symbol. She
concludes that the images in the virtual menagerie are always engaged in a type of double talk.
A digital image of a cat references a living animal but also the sociality of the image itself,
creating double meaning. Through this process, animals in the virtual menagerie become “lively
images”.
So, what about extinct and disappeared species, where lively bodies are absent? For
extinct species, images and manifestations of the animal still carry social meaning and
imaginaries. Crucially though, extinct species cannot reference living bodies that communities
can view and engage with, impeding Berland’s argument that images and animal bodies engage
in double talk. Though material traces of the extinct exist, they reference instead the mediated
imaginaries of the species still in human social space. Fossils, preserved bodies, and collection
specimens pepper material life as evidence that once these animals existed outside of social life
but do not do so now. Symbolic uses of the body imbue extinct and endangered species with

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liveliness of a different sort. The body of the California grizzly, for example, retains its “bearness” as a representation of state identity. Alive or dead, the bodies of species do a lot of sociocultural work, and their disappearance from environments means that their symbolic and social
lives must take on the work of carrying meaning. Thus, extinct species and their material traces
live only in discursive and symbolic spaces, becoming what I term a “lively symbol” to reference
a primarily social life.
I use the term “lively symbols” as distinct from “lively images” precisely because the
extinct cannot engage in Berland’s double talk. Lively filmed footage of the Tasmanian tiger,
birdsong recordings of the Kaua’i Ō’ō, or shell collections of the Upland combshell are all lively
recordings of the species during life but now only add to imaginaries of what the species used to
be, symbolizing a life that was. Without a lively counterpart, the propensity for image double talk
is negated and traces of a species only remain as narratives. Further, “lively symbols” goes
beyond the scope of the image and the lively body to encompass other forms of how the extinct
come to be mediated. This dissertation addresses the remains of birds, bears, and mammoths
distinct from imagery or as complete living bodies. “Lively symbols” encompass partial and
social materials past the image.
To this end, the three chapters that follow offer a contribution into thinking about how
disappeared species fully become vehicles for social meaning in extractive ways, premised on
the disappearance and death of a species. Berland’s lively image is only as lively as the species it
depicts. Double-talk of an image dissipates through the animal’s transition to the completely
mediated, as when lively voices die in double-talk, only social voices remain. I hone in on
particular unhappy narratives and stakes, picking species whose social meanings are undergirded
with narratives of species loss. I further examine the limits of the lively image and the notion of

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double talk in animal likeness in social life. If double-talk cannot occur when a species is extinct,
what talking still remains?
Methods
Material-semiotic analysis and Milieu-specific analysis of the Extinct
Material-semiotics is a methodological approach that considers object of analysis as both
discursive and material actors in situ. The capacity of objects to carry messages through their
material and contextual positions in society means that through attending to these objects we are
able to glean insights into how communities make sense of reality with and through things.
Objects of study are rendered inherently multiple and complicated in ways that acknowledge the
material alongside the discursive.
Sociologist John Law writes that material semiotics is not a cohesive set of theories but a
methodological “movement in social science which cultivates a set of sensibilities to practice, to
process, to the weaves of materiality and narrative, to the irredeemably situated character of
those weaves” (Law, 2019:15). Thus, as a methodological orientation, it is the onus of the
researcher to piece together the connections and multiplicities of an object in culture. It is the
combination of its material and discursive facets that culminate in a discursive analysis of the
object. However, material-semiotic analysis also acknowledges contradictory and multiple truths
of an object through its sheer materiality. While objects of analysis materially contribute to social
discourse, they also stand on their own and contribute to the narrative in particular ways. For
extinct species, a major tension between the material and the discursive is the absence of material
bodies in nature. Thus, absence also can also come into play in a material-semiotic analysis.
Others tensions also exist, the slow decay of preserved specimens is for instance another

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example of materials acting antithetically to dominant discursive themes of species who are
refused extinction.
Feminist science and technology studies scholar Donna Haraway writes that objects and
animals in culture are often reflections and refractions of dominant cultural narratives (1989).
Studying how things show up in public life as well as how they are discussed is often useful to
glean reflexive insight about what values undergird the production of knowledge. Thus, the ways
disappeared species show up in public life is telling of how they are remembered and how they
perform a specific narrative for the groups that love them. Their materiality is also important,
because it is as produced as the rhetorics that surround them. Because extinct species are absent
from nature, their presence is always produced and always situated within a social discourse.
What I mean to say by this, is that it is worth looking at the material traces of these species’
forms in social life, as it is through these traces, that we can glean insight into why communities
latch on to particular species and what is important about these species to the populations that
love them.
In this dissertation I piece together the ways in which extinct species still materially and
discursively show up in the world. For the Ivory-bill woodpecker, I look at how the bird is
evoked in public commentary and in policy, as well as the ways fan communities circulate
images and stories of the bird. For the California grizzly I look at how its skins have bolstered its
civic presence in California. Finally, for the wooly mammoth, I look at how de-extinction
companies evoke the image of the mammoth for drama and clout to sell their ideological
narrative of environmental stability. With a material-semiotics approach, I am able to meet each
of these cases in the unique ways they intersect with material and social life with a “unifying
explanatory theme” (Law, 2019: 8).

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“Media” has an older definition, defined as the plural of a medium, the fascia between
two objects connecting them. In The Marvelous Clouds: Towards a Philosophy of Elemental
Media, John Durham Peters challenges that while there has been work about media in the
environment, and media of the environment, the environment also can be media itself (2015: 3). I
introduce Peters here specifically to build on a growing addendum of media studies to
encompass more than broadcast, new, and constructed forms of “media”. In Wild Blue Media
(2020), by focusing on seawater Melody Jue explores how analysis might look when thinking
about the environment as media. Positioning oceans as media, Jue posits that environment-asmedia can be more than a cultural artifact and an agentive and generative force of meaning
making on its own. In many ways the ocean is consumable as a media artifact since it is
narratively built up by how communities consider and make use of it. In this way seawater is a
resource for meaning making and diverse lifeways, while simultaneously existing outside of its
social presence (Jue, 2020: 22). Jue approaches thinking about environments-as-media through
focusing in on what she calls a “milieu-specific analysis” that considers the many complexities
and facets of a subject.
Thinking through seawater, Jue’s “milieu-specific analysis” traces the role of one
particular form of media (the ocean) as not simply a culturally salient product, but also an
agentive force separate from human communities (3). While the ocean may become a cultural
artifact, it is in no way wholly represented in this manner with its presence extending outside of
the realm of artifact. Attuning to the ocean through a milieu-specific analysis, Jue acknowledges
the moments of dissonance and incommensurability that happens when we consider a complex
thing only as a constructed media artifact, and develops her approach as a workaround to the
alternative of simplifying complex objects (11). Critically, Jue’s milieu-specific analysis of an

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object of study offers a vital acknowledgement of the complexity of objects essential to thinking
with extinct species.
A milieu-specific analysis allows recognition of the different types of life at play when
considering extinct bodies. An extinct species may be physically dead, but still discursively
discussed as alive, or as discussed in my chapter about the California grizzly, the body of a
species may be symbolically reanimated through taxidermy. Which is all to say, the types of life
associated and indeed displayed with extinct species are complex and multiple. Approaching
these objects with a method that acknowledges that these are objects which contain multitudes, is
not only important, but in fact necessary. In this sense, approaching these subjects as sites of
cultural production is a disservice as it constricts research materials simply to constructed
artifacts. In the chapters that follow I attend to the extinct, and their presence in culture, with the
underlying methodology of Melody Jue’s call for a milieu-specific analysis.
In the chapters that follow I approach the key species at stake, the ivory-bill woodpecker,
the California grizzly, and the woolly mammoth with a milieu-specific analysis, acknowledging
their complexities and multiplicities of being. I contribute to media work at the intersections of
media studies and science studies that interrogates natural processes and things as sites of media
by premising the extinct body as a mediating tool to further understand how communities tell
stories of species precarity and unnatural impact on the environment. Affect theories such as
Berlant’s and Ahmed’s find purchase in extinction stories through people’s attachment to species
life. In an earlier section I introduced Deborah Bird Rose’s work, focusing on her attunements to
charismatic species. Her work examines the qualities that love gives to animals who face
extinction, instilling a biopolitics of which non-human lives are deemed worthy of saving, which
are sentenced to death, and which are ambivalently ignored. Charisma and love play a strong part

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in determining species futures, succinctly summarized in the quote “we save those we love”
(Rose, 2011: 3).
Extinct species remain lively and dynamic when the communities that love them retain
their presence. The forms of the extinct become a medium between their discursive and material
presence in culture and their material absence from the environment. Considering extinct species
as media artifacts considers both of the manifestations of the species above as separate parts of a
whole story. Thus, Facebook comments of an ivory-bill and taxidermized forms of the bird both
become essential parts to the story at stake.
As these chapters concern the topic of extinction refusal, I look at the way these species
are evoked amongst refusal communities in discussions of life and liveliness and how they
obfuscate or circumnavigate narratives of extinction altogether. Similar to how the disparate
irruptions of a species inform its social life, the cases that follow similarly work together to
create a larger narrative of how extinction refusal has become an overarching orientation to
thinking about biodiversity loss in the United States. Seemingly disparate, the cases of the ivorybill, California grizzly, and woolly mammoth are themselves artifacts of this orientation towards
extinction.
Research Activities and Chapter Overview
Chapter 1: Making Knowledge about the Ivory-bill Woodpecker
For the ivory-bill woodpecker I examine how communication and knowledge about the
bird’s presence was made over the course of the 20th century. Since the bird was last reliably seen
in 1944, the ivory-bill’s presence has been primarily discursive among interest groups and
consequently transformed into an imaginary media artifact that shows how the communities that
love it engage with extinct and disappeared species (Kluitenberg, 2011).

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In this chapter I examine the field and expert reports uploaded to the International Union
for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Endangered Species and from BirdLife International
which are the governmental standards for policy surrounding this bird. Particularly, I approach
these documents attuned to the ways that these standard reports affected the status of the ivorybill in conservation databases over the course of 20th century endangered species censuses.
I also examine the public comments and ensuing Facebook discourse erupting from the
US Fish and Wildlife Services proposed delisting of 23 species from the Endangered Species
Act’s list of protected species. Their proposed ruling, published on September 29, 2021 in the
Federal Register precipitated an influx of public commenters pushing back on their bid to delist
the bird. Public comments in the ivory-bill chapter are a particularly important site for data
gathering because they are the catalyst for the formation of the ivory-bill Woodpecker enthusiast
community.
Public law scholars, Dorit Reiss and Barbara Romzek write that public participation
opportunities in legal and governmental settings can become sites for identity performance and
public theatre which in certain situations has deleterious and dangerous effects (2020, 2). That is,
public commentaries may offer spaces to perform beliefs and validate identity amongst the
public more than influence decisions. So, Reiss and Romzek’s article discusses how public
commenters participating in bad faith within public comment sections on vaccination policy,
instead de-legitimize public health decision, spread misinformation, and act in bad faith to the
legal standards of free speech in democracy (6-8). Further, the in-between space of the public
commentary section works to obfuscate expectations of expertise and responsibilities of
knowledge creation.

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Reiss and Romzek’s arguments are amplified in sociologist Justin Farrell’s book on the
moral imaginaries of Yellowstone National Park. In a parallel to the ivory-bill Farrell highlights
the importance of public commentary when discussing the reintroduction of wolves to the
Yellowstone Park system. He writes, in the public commentary on the USFWS proposal, “the
ultimate motive behind writing a letter is to persuade the USFWS to change its course of action”
through scientific proof and rational debate. However, many of the comments choose to persuade
through emotional and ideological arguments (Farrell, 2015). Commenters on this public forum
rarely addressed the specific requests the USFWS identified as constituting proper
argumentation, but instead used the space to perform ideological validation. Farrell’s conclusion
about public commentary in support of wolf-life in Yellowstone was that the driving force behind
most comments were only about the wolf from afar. A close reading of these comments, he
argues, unearths narrative and cultural mores exemplified and troubled by the USFWS’s proposal
to stop wolf reintroduction. Rather, public commenters on the docket were motivated to write in
because of underlying values and beliefs about Yellowstone and its spiritual value to the “Mythic
American West” (2015: 215). Thus, public comments were integral to performing a set of beliefs
in conjunction with others forming a community and finding their beliefs echoed among others.
In my chapter on the ivory-bill woodpecker, the public commentary holds immense importance
as a site of analysis because it highlights the underlying ideologies at play in enthusiast
communities. Facebook groups that stemmed from the organization of commenters outside of the
Federal Register replicate the ideological and narrative first amassed in the public comment
section of the USFWS proposal to delist the bird.
I examine these comments looking for the narrative threads of why the decision to delist
the ivory-bill should be rejected and what cultural qualities are attributed to the bird. I argue that

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through its rhetorical presence in social life, the ivory-bill has become a media artifact as
conceptualized by Huhtamo and Parikka (2011). Thus, we can understand what it has been
mediating through a thematic analysis of the public comments. Following the docket posters of
the public comments to Facebook, I analyze popular narratives about ivory-bill sightings and
ivory-bill extancy among the community. I argue that the presence of the ivory-bill in these
digital communities as alive creates a social life for the ivory-bill within these spaces. These
communities keep the bird alive through their comments and interactions, refusing the extinction
of the bird.
I finish the chapter by looking at how material presence of the ivory-bill is discussed
among the community. Facebook forums are the foci of interaction for ivory-bill enthusiasts and
extinction deniers but they are also spaces where members share their love of the ivory-bill.
Alongside sighting narratives and comments proclaiming ivory-bill life, they further manifest the
bird’s social presence though sharing photos of “ivory-bills” in the wild: taxidermy, artistic
representations, and commercial production of the bird’s image.
Chapter 2: (What) Remains of the California Grizzly
In my California grizzly chapter, I begin by looking at the narrative of the bear as it
became a symbol of identification in California. I trace the history of the bear as it relates to
Californian settlerhood. The California grizzly has been a charismatic animal whose decline
coincided with its symbolic adoption by an industrializing California. I trace this transformation
of the bear by looking at the changes its popular taxidermy went through across the 19th and 20th
centuries. This chapter focuses in on three particular California grizzly skins and how they
invoke grizzly life through their bodies as media artifacts. As artifacts, grizzly taxidermy takes

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on symbolic life that embodies the historical entanglements of the bear with Californian
lifeways.
Feminist STS scholar Susan Leigh Star’s history of taxidermy as a failed scientific
discipline offers insights into the state of the practice during late 19th to early 20th century,
coincidently paralleling the decline and disappearance of the California grizzly. Taxidermy, she
writes, is important for two particular reasons: its presentation of the natural world, and its representation of the natural world (1992, 258-259). Though initially taxidermy was present in
Western culture as a trophy and proof-of-conquest the hunter had over an animal, turn of the
century science realized that the reproduction of animals in life-like maquettes could offer insight
into physiology and the study of wild animals in a domesticated (inert) form (258). The
stagnation of taxidermy as a science followed not long after its attempt at scientific boundary
making as it became clear that the practice was more artistic in its representations of nature and
the non-human than previously thought (259). In short taxidermy failed as a science in early 20th
century museum studies due to its overwhelming subjectivity which clashed with the ideologies
of scientific positivism.
Taxidermy tells a story, and its details of preservation is part of this story. In this chapter I
examine three particular bears as sites of analysis: the Valley Center Bear, Monarch, and the
Santa Barbara Bear. These three taxidermies each highlight distinct times in taxidermy as a field
and in relation to species extinction. Each of these bears are unique in their preservation and
presentation. I look at how these forms were taxidermized and the social values accompanying
the particularity of the taxidermy process following Rachel Poliquin’s taxonomy of taxidermic
style (Poliquin, 2012), as well as how these taxidermies have changed in public display over the
course of the Grizzlies decline and extirpation. I examine how the stuff of the bear was posed,

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presented, and maintained from the animal’s death through to the present day, paying attention to
the grander museum narratives they feed into. Accessing the bears in museums also let me
examine accession records through museum archives which further details preservation and
mounting information not publicly available, and which provides insight into the transformation
of individual bears into a spectacle. Monarch’s accession information for instance, records that
the bear was infamously overstuffed making him appear much larger than he was in life and that
while he was on display pre-accession, he had lost most of the hair from his muzzle because of
visitors petting him, details that offer insight into the history of the bear’s social life post death
where there are little written records.
Taxidermy tells a story that with study of the preserved animal offers glimpses into their
discursive presence in culture. Donna Haraway’s work into the preservation of game animals in
the mammal halls of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) explores how bodies
can constitute an archive (1984). Of taxidermy she writes, “taxidermy fulfills the fatal desire to
represent, to be whole; it is a politics of reproduction” (25). Thus, how species in the AMNH
were posed and displayed constituted mediated sights of nature as told by the hunter, the
taxidermist, and the curator. The Valley Center Bear is a historical exemplar of trophy taxidermy,
its preservation accompanied with a hunting narrative. Monarch was a charismatic grizzly
captured alive when the species was known to be in decline and preserved after death as “the last
of his kind”. The preparation and mounting of his taxidermized form is inseparable from early
1900’s growing consciousness surrounding extinction. The Santa Barbara bear, taxidermized
specifically for a museum diorama, embodies primarily the narrative of Californian state animal.
These sites offer insight into how the bodies of extinct species themselves are repurposed after

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animal death to take on new life. Through taxidermy, grizzly extinction is circumnavigated
discursively and materially because of its presence in Californian social life.
Chapter 3: De-extincting the Woolly Mammoth
In the chapter on the de-extinction of the woolly mammoth I analyze the corporate and
promotional messaging around the fantasy of species de-extinction. These materials are useful
for an analysis of extinction refusal as they show how the phenomenon of extinction refusal
works within commercial and technological business spaces, ostensibly selling extinction refusal
as an optimistic orientation to unhappy biodiversity futures. Thus, I analyze messaging around
de-extinction through an affective lens, looking for moments of “cruel optimism” (Berlant,
2011), and how these companies deploy emotional narratives about life and extinction.
I follow the project of the woolly mammoth, a foundational species for de-extinction
revival narratives as it travels across de-extinction companies, from the Long Now Foundation
and Revive & Restore to Colossal Biosciences, looking at how the promotional materials sell deextinction as a solution to alleviate anxiety around the futures of waning species. In the case of
the Long Now Foundation and Revive & Restore, this includes sifting through old archived
versions of their web materials and promotional copy on the project.
Returning for a moment to Jody Berland’s Virtual Menageries (2019), she argues that
“animals displayed online co-constitute new spatial and sociotechnical imaginaries with various
trajectories of power, desire, and belief” (25). Attending then to the mammoth, and when it’s
image and narrative appears across these websites, should offer insight into Berland’s stated
trajectories co-produced with its image. I hone in on mammoth project pages and moments
where mammoth imagery is used alongside promotional material to draw out the actors, desires,
and beliefs that attend the mammoth body.

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Chasing the woolly mammoth across de-extinction companies allows for an analysis of
de-extinction rhetoric and its evolution since the term’s “rebranding” in 2012 by the Long Now
Foundation. With the materials above I explore the themes at work in their rhetoric. I analyze
how these narratives of de-extinction create affective orientations that promote extinction refusal
and I look at how the process of de-extinction promises happy futures. Following Berland’s
(2019) conceptualization of animal life in digital media, I analyze particular moments where
mammoth life becomes intertwined with something else, thus becoming more than its embodied
self. Specifically, de-extinction narratives discursively create woolly mammoth life and refuse its
extinction by shifting mammoth life onto the continuation of biotech development, current extant
species, and the abstract molecular. Material semiotic analysis grants an analysis of “mammoth
life” as a rhetorical artifact that becomes repository in which to attach narratives. As such,
prehistoric mammoth life is reinvigorated through vicarious association and de-extinction
companies refuse extinction rhetorically through their promotional narratives of extinct species
revival.
Conclusion
The chapters that follow demonstrate moments where the line between extant and extinct
are not as clear cut as we want to believe. Instead, if extinction is a process, and a social one at
that, species that face it are bound up in similarly sociocultural scaffolds of the communities that
remember them. How people come to know a species and what is at stake with that species’
death are determining factors of extinction as a state of being. Animals, as mediators of localized
and situated meanings, suddenly take on social lives outside of their material ones so much so,
that communities who love these animals may not allow the species to die, refusing extinction as

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an acceptable outcome. In this dissertation, I posit that the bodies, present or absent, of extinct
species offer a generative, milieu-specific, archive in which to think about the biodiversity crisis,
the endangered, and the extinct.

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Chapter 1: Making Knowledge about the Ivory-bill Woodpecker
Figure 1 “Ivory Billed Woodpecker” (Eckelberry, 1944)
In 1944 Don Eckelberry saw an ivory-bill woodpecker. The sighting was an exciting
event in birding circles across the United States because of the woodpecker’s rarity. Ivory-bill
woodpeckers, inherently difficult birds to find, were disappearing more and more from the public
eye, and were on the cusp of vanishing entirely. Eckelberry was a celebrated bird and wildlife
artist, he was known amongst birding circles as a credible and honest birder and though he didn’t
produce photographs of his sighting, he reproduced a sketch of the bird he saw that day (pictured
above). He had travelled to Louisiana’s famous Singer Tract, a plot of land today located in the
Tensas River Wildlife Refuge in northeast Louisiana, in search of the species. The Singer Tract
was known amongst woodpecker enthusiast circles as a habitat for ivory-bills. It was here that

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James Tanner and J.J. Kuhn has famously photographed ivory-bills in 1938, and provided, for
the first time in recorded history, a description and photograph of an immature hatchling.
Eckelberry was there on behalf of the National Audubon Society, who had commissioned him to
search for, and document, ivory-bills. His famous 1944 sighting was the last time an ivory-bill
would be seen without controversy.
****
Yet after Eckelberry’s interaction with the woodpecker, unverified reports and
speculations continued. Complicating the veracity of these encounters, the official population
status of the bird in biodiversity databases such as the IUCNs Red List of Endangered Species
oscillated between extant and extinct several times since the bird’s inclusion in 1988. Between
the unstable state of the woodpecker’s status in extinction monitors, and the conflicting nature of
continued sightings amidst a narrative of disappearance, the ivory-bill woodpecker is built up as
a persevering but unstable figure. The condition of its existence fluctuates in a way that amateur
and experts are constantly redefining. A consequence of this instability, is that a community of
ivory-bill enthusiasts who argue that the bird is alive and extant has organized in opposition to
dominant reports of the bird’s extinct status. The ivory-bill’s existence thus lingers lively and
dynamic in public memory and popular imagination, distinguishing the bird from other
disappeared species. The story of the ivory-bill refuses to disappear.
The ivory-bill woodpecker is a salient species for teasing out a manifestation of
extinction refusal, as many stakeholders today argue against the dominant belief that the ivorybill is extinct. In fact, arguments of ivory-bill life are so prevalent and sustained since 1944 that
the bird has become popularly known as the “Ghost Bird” because of its lingering presence. The
ivory-bill woodpecker is a generative animal to look at because of how its social life has come to

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eclipse its embodied life. Writing on the mediated images of animals, media studies scholar Jody
Berland argues that when animals are a spectacle, they become receptacles of cultural and social
meaning (Berland, 2019). Thus, when animals are presented as objects, they reflect social values
and relationships because it is people who are doing the looking. Animal bodies in culture are
always more than the sum of their parts and human-animal interaction interpolates animals into a
scaffold of meaning-making. In this chapter I tell the story of the ivory-bill throughout the 20th
century to demonstrate how the bird has been built up from the meanings made about it to
become a species upon which extinction refusal can flourish.
The story of the ivory-bill is premised on a unique history of how knowledge comes to be
constructed in Ornithology. I begin this chapter outlining how extinction refusal manifested from
an eroding relationship of trust between amateur and expert spaces. Accompanying these fraying
bonds, I dive into the woodpecker’s ambivalent history in biodiversity monitors to argue that the
ivory-bill’s oscillating status undermined any bid for trustworthy expert knowledge to be made
about the woodpecker while simultaneously strengthening the bird’s social presence and value in
amateur space. When the USFWS proposed to remove the bird from the Endangered Species Act
in 2021, amateurs and enthusiasts saw the decision as one which cut them out of the knowledge
production process entirely and opposed the proposition, rallying under images of living ivorybills. This chapter concludes with an examination of the backlash against the proposed delisting,
arguing that over the course of the 20th century, and coalescing in the commentary of the
delisting proposal, the ivory-bill woodpecker transformed from a bird into a social identity and
set of ideologies.
Extinction refusal is never simply about the species alone but also the multispecies
connections made. As extinction studies scholars Thom van Dooren, Deborah Bird Rose, and

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Matthew Chrulew argue, it about the loss of the relationships the species had with others (2017).
For ivory-bill woodpecker extinction, one of the relationships at risk is its social identity fostered
by local communities over the course of the 20th century. Key to the ivory-bill’s social life is its
ambiguity. Geographer Hannah Hunter argues that any recordings of ivory-bill kents (calls) are
too interpretive to constitute proof on its own without visual evidence (Hunter, 2023). However,
recent photographs and video of ivory-bill sightings are infamously blurry and disputed and no
ivory-bill bodies have been produced. Narratives and attestations of ivory-bill life are unable to
anchor onto material proof. Any material presence of an ivory-bill today is either a historical
specimen, collected during the 19th and early 20th century, or manufactured ephemera.
Where the ivory-bill’s narrative does find purchase is through its symbolic life and the
narratives communities weave around the bird.1 Since ivory-bill narratives are based on the
symbolic life of the bird rather than the bird incarnate, the symbolic bird eclipses embodied life
almost entirely. When the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) proposed to delist
(remove) the bird from the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in 2021 their proposal overturned a
century of stasis concerning ivory-bills. While the ivory-bill remained ambivalently alive on
paper but absent in nature, it grew as a symbol in southern lay communities and became
analogous with narratives of place, land, and local rural identity. Thus, the proposal to delist the
bird, a bureaucratic decision on the USFWS side, was construed as a personal attack on the
communities who had come to identify with the bird. Ivory-bill enthusiasts exploited uncertainty
1 Human-animal interaction being mediated through narrative is hardly a new concept. Taxidermic displays at the
American Museum of Natural History told stories of masculine and western domination over the natural world
through the visual medium of the diorama (Haraway, 1984). Spoken and written narratives are used to personify and
create moments of human-animal intimacy between endangered and disappearing species and local publics that have
limited interaction opportunities with them (van Dooren, 2014). In the United States, the California grizzly remains
lively only through its centuries long narrative that grew even as the species itself declined and disappeared (Snyder,
2003).

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in the scientific record to bolster narratives of ivory-bill presence and formed a community of
peers who “believed” in ivory-bill life.
In the chapter that follows I refer refusal community arguing against ivory-bill extinction
as enthusiasts. The community self identifies primarily as ivory-bill “believers” but alternatives
exist. I chose the label “enthusiasts” to reference the community as the term eschews the
“believer” rhetorical binary made by the group implying that expert and scientist groups do not
believe in the bird.2 That the ivory-bill is real there is no doubt. Before it’s disappearance, the
woodpecker left behind a robust physical footprint in its archival and material forms and
taxidermy is scattered across public and private collections. The rhetorical usage of “believers”
by the refusal community is instead in reference to their belief that the ivory-bill persists today.3
A point they further demonstrate by naming those who believe the bird to be extinct, or side with
official assessments of the bird, as “naysayers” and “skeptics”. Additionally, by choosing
“enthusiast” to indicate the community, I pull on the affective arguments made by Deborah Bird
Rose on love being a primary motivator for animal extancy (2013).
Beginning with the woodpecker’s presence in the International Union for the
Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Endangered Species (IUCN’s Red List), instability in the
bird’s existence on the list, as well as inconsistencies in who was believed from one assessment
to the next, undermined any hierarchies in knowledge production. As is often the case in the
sciences, the perception of “valid and error-free” knowledge is the result of a long history of
developing expert spaces through memory practices taught via universities and separate from
2 “Believers” also has religious overtones as many from the enthusiast community pull on rhetorics of faith when
discussing ivory-bill life. 3 Whether the ivory-bill is in fact extinct or extant is not particularly important to the arguments made in this chapter
and I am not arguing whether it is or is not. Rather, I am interested in the social stakes that make themselves known
through the liminal state of uncertainty the ivory-bill occupies.

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amateur storytelling (Bowker, 2005). Theodore Porter, (1996) argues that knowledge “isn’t
knowledge unless it has been authorized by disciplinary specialists. A scientific truth has little
standing until it becomes a collective product” (12). This disciplinary gatekeeping and valuation
of what is considered knowledge, seen in the hesitance of taking amateur knowledge as valid and
truthful in citizen science projects, illustrates the mistrust in individuated lay experiences of the
natural world (Golumbic et al, 2020). However, with the ivory-bill, this hierarchy of knowledge
did not overtly occur until the 2021 assessment. Past assessors of the bird relied on lay narratives
to influence their recommendations, contradictions and errors in knowledge production at the
expert and bureaucratic levels appear in print, and general ambivalence about the woodpecker
results in population levels oscillating between endangered, critically endangered, and extinct.
Science and technology studies scholars, Pam Scott, Eveleen Richards, and Brian Martin argue
that scientific inconsistencies and errors happen all the time, but controversies occur when the
researcher becomes entangled with retaining power of knowledge production on the topic on
inquiry (1990). For the ivory-bill woodpecker, lay experiences were considered enough to
continually list the bird as extant, but endangered, in biodiversity monitors. Thus, for the ivorybill, both amateur and expert knowledge making were open to critique and interpretation in the
production of dominant knowledge about the bird.
The global standard for endangered species vitality is currently the IUCN’s Red List of
Endangered Species. Ivory-bill presence in the IUCNs archives oscillated so much between
extant and extinct, that its ambivalent history allows a space for ivory-bill amateur hunters and
enthusiasts to claim that even “experts” have not come to consensus. If the bird resists verifiable
and “valid” knowledge production, amateur narratives about the bird may also be considered

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valid. Therefore, hope remains that the bird may still be alive and that there is still space for
amateur and enthusiast input in determining its final designation.
After establishing the history of ambivalence in knowledge creation about the ivory-bill, I
move into the delisting proposal of September 29th 2021, where the US Fish and Wildlife Service
proposed that amongst other species, the ivory-bill woodpecker be delisted from the US
Endangered Species Act on the basis of its extinction. This announcement galvanized ivory-bill
enthusiasts to reach out and create centralized spaces on the internet in opposition to the
proposed decision. With the flexibility afforded them by the ivory-bill’s instability across expert
spaces, amateur ivory-bill enthusiasts organized against the dominant narrative that ivory-bill
woodpeckers were extinct. These spaces became repositories of storytelling about the bird, with
enthusiasts developing a vibrant symbolic life of the ivory-bill. In these narratives it becomes
evident that ivory-bill existence is more than the bird itself, but rather the values and narratives
the enthusiast community has placed upon it. The stakes of extinction refusal find purchase in
these stories, because if the ivory-bill is extinct, then the symbolic life of the bird that hinges on
the liminality of the species also vanishes. And much is at stake. The ivory-bill’s historical
connections with the settler American south has made the bird symbolic of southern identity. Its
presence as an indicator species of the health of the southern cypress swamps, means that if the
ivory-bill has vanished then, so too will the biome. Finally, if the bird is indeed extinct, then
what becomes of the species and communities that live in relation to it?
Ivory-bill enthusiasts exemplify a trend in extinction refusal communities that showcases
how extinction is more than the vanishing of a species from a biome. It is also a deeply
emotional and social process. As the ivory-bill looms so large in stakeholder space, communities
are seeing the extinction and death of a species as a personal affair, threatening the status quo of

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familiar ecosystems. For ivory-bill searchers and enthusiasts, many of whom live in the historic
range of the ivory-bill this means the death of life-ways from the rural American south. In a
podcast released by the Science History Institute, the connection of the ivory-bill to Dixie
lifeways was broached when discussing the birds geographical range: “the ivory-billed’s range
extended from Florida up to Virginia, and as far west as Texas. Dixie, essentially. And fittingly
enough, its downfall began with Dixie’s defeat during the Civil War” (Kean, 2023). However, the
connection of the ivory-bill to Southern identity, religion, and whiteness extends further that just
in name and geographic region, coming to encompass other markers of enthusiast identity. Tenets
of manifest destiny (masculinity, land ownership, and faith) undergird the enthusiast bid to have
the ivory-bill remain listed as extant. Manifest destiny, the ideology that European settlers were
given America by divine right, has always been a concept deeply connected to American space
and nature (Manifest Destiny, 2013; Semonin, 2000). Environmentalism and land management in
the US has also been a historically conservative, faith-driven, and colonial practice because it
asserts a control of natural space that is “premised on an assumed entitlement to Indigenous
land” (Libroiron, 2021). Thus, extinction refusal of the ivory-bill woodpecker demonstrates how
the core tenets of environmental control and manifest destiny still shape multispecies
relationships. Since ivory-bill enthusiasts have adopted the woodpecker to also symbolize
masculinity, faith, and private property, its extinction is a matter of ideological significance.
Because this group has tied the bird to their identity, then if the woodpecker is extinct, their
ideology is imperiled in the best-case, or dead and outdated in a worst-case scenario. Suddenly,
the crisis of biodiversity loss and the sixth mass extinction has cropped up in ivory-bill enthusiast
communities as a force threatening not just a loved bird, but also a way of life.

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Thus, refusing species extinction means that communities are protecting the status quo of
social meanings inscribed onto a vanished body. For known species, and charismatic ones
especially, extinction is a loss of a series of relationships (van Dooren, 2013). Communities who
are invested in the ivory-bill’s existence need the bird to be alive because the ivory-bill is at its
core a lively symbol encapsulating a living community. However, because the ivory-bill hasn’t
been verifiably seen in over fifty years, the possibility of extinction shades narratives about the
bird. Returning to Deborah Bird Roses argument, that “we save those we love,” (Rose, 2020)
extinction refusal in the case of the ivory-bill woodpecker is a localized answer to the scenario
“how do we save those we love when they may already be gone?”
Ivory-bill Woodpeckers and the breakdown amateur/expert trust in Ornithology
Ornithology, the study of birds, has a unique trajectory as a natural science when
compared to similar fields that developed from the natural philosophy movement in Europe of
the 16th and 17th centuries. Originally developed as an amateur and hobbyist science, the study of
birds was deeply connected to hobby birdwatchers and recreational hunting of birds for personal
collections (Jones et al, 2018). Ornithology, in comparison to other fields of the natural and
biological sciences such as botany and zoology, is unique at its ideological core as it is deeply
connected to the coproduction of knowledge with amateur communities (Cherry, 2018). The
natural sciences were curious areas of study particularly because they emerged from amateur
interest communities. Amateur, stemming from the Latin amare (to love) originally referenced
communities of enthusiasts not bound to particular institutional epistemologies. Comparatively
to other fields in the natural sciences, ornithology during the early 20th century did not
participate as strictly as other scientific fields in boundary work to delimit their status as an
institutional and scientific field as separate from an amateur public. Rather, ornithology

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continued to depend on amateur interactions with experts to create knowledge about birds.
Developing the concept of boundary work in reference to scientific fields, sociologist Thomas
Gieryn writes that “boundary-work is an effective ideological style for protecting professional
autonomy: public scientists construct a boundary between the production of scientific knowledge
and its consumption by non-scientists” (Gieryn, 1983: 789). So, where 20th century institutional
culture and practice were engaging in boundary work, the continued dependence between
Ornithology and amateur birding remained. The result of the continued interdependence between
‘expert’ and ‘amateur’ lines was a bond of trust. Ornithological research is still often conducted
collaboratively with bird guides and local sources, and knowledge checkers within birding
community apps remain a mix of professional and amateur individuals (Adams & Leifester,
1997). Ornithology, through its cooperative history, its roots in birding and amateur science, and
its continued relevance in outreach fields, presents as a deeply cooperative space for legitimate
scientific knowledge making.
Ornithology today remains heavily embedded in co-production practices with outreach
and citizen science communities. Science education specialists Yaela Golumbic, Ayelet BaramTsabari and Boris Koichu’s project on what makes citizen science successful and trustworthy
depends on how successful community science is at building bridges between scientific
institutions and community participation. Across all types of citizen science projects, bird
censuses such as the Christmas Bird Count (the longest running citizen science project in the
world), the Great Backyard Bird Count (organized collaboratively by Cornell and Audubon), and
annual challenges such as the City Nature Challenge and Year Counts (logged on biodiversity
apps), amateur birding data has the highest rate of being published in peer-reviewed journals
(Golumbic, Baram-Tsabari, & Koichu, 2020). So, ‘trust’ in the case of citizen science projects is

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built on institutional validation of data by experts. The most important trait for a citizen science
project to be legitimated scientifically is the insistence that the room for collection error is
minimized. Participation in “trustworthy” citizen science is highly structured and mediated, with
little room through user error, a high threshold for crowd-sourced checks and balances, and
reliance on amateur participation who often have localized and internal validation techniques
already in place (Golumbic, Baram-Tsabari, & Koichu, 2020). Often, these projects tap into preexisting fields of hobbyists. Thus, ornithology projects tap into robust amateur communities in
order to create expert knowledge.
Complicating the relationship further, birding is a relatively accessible hobby with a low
threshold for participation. Birds are ubiquitous to daily life as they have adapted as a companion
class (Aves) to humans. Though gatekeeping certainly exists in amateur birding and birdwatching
communities, accessing birds and observing them is not one of the forms of amateur boundary
making. Rather, gatekeeping in amateur communities is based off of which species of birds are
seen as well as the birders relationship to those species. In bird counting practices, patch birding
is the practice of returning to a particular locality to observe the communities of birds that
frequent the space. Patch birders are considered authorities for the areas they frequent through
their intimate connection to the bird populations an environment may host. Patchers are often the
first to notice irregularities in bird populations as they are attuned to the local bird population. If
a birdwatcher is known by others4 to consistently patch in a particular park, forest, or city block,
4 eBird has made it easy to track bird patchers as birders who use the software will regularly update lists that are
geotagged. Birding however organized in the 20th century as a loose community-based activity. Thus, if a
birdwatcher today is known to patch an area but may not be using applications such as eBird or iNaturalist to list
species, they can still be considered an authority on the area based on their interpersonal connections in the amateur
community.

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their bird list and alerts of new or encroaching bird species in the area is considered true and
legitimate knowledge that might not need expert verification.
This is all to say, the intimate relationship between amateur birding and expert
ornithologists has historically been intertwined around pillars of trust, goodwill, and knowledge
co-production. In the case of the ivory-bill woodpecker however, these elements of the amateurexpert relationship were strained to the point of breaking. Unverified sightings since the late
1940s on were met in expert spaces with a level of skepticism, and resentment started growing in
amateur communities in the US South who were being told their local and patching expertise on
bird species, population counts, and identification ability were lacking legitimacy. Alongside the
bird’s status in enthusiast culture as a symbol of southern identity and values, the continued
skepticism of experts was seen as an invalidation of not only local expertise but also fed into
larger narratives of southern disenfranchisement by the North rooted in the reconstruction era
(Cooper & Knotts, 2017; Watts, 2007: 4). The 2009 expeditions mounted by Cornell and ivorybill amateur search group Project Coyote5 also exacerbated these issues as professional and
interpersonal disagreements within the searches seemed to be between amateur and expert team
members.
The fissure between amateur and expert communities was heavily felt because of the
deep historical relationship between both groups. When discussing the ivory-bill, dominant
conversations in Ornithology, which used to be sieved through a history of cooperation and coconstruction, prioritized expert narratives. The breakdown of trust resulted in a messy resentment
between both groups and ivory-bill interested amateurs quickly began engaging in boundary
5 Project Coyote, later rebranded into Project Principalis is an ivory-bill amateur organization led by Mark Michaels,
a central figure in the ivory-bill enthusiast community and based in Louisiana. In 2021 after the de-listing proposal
of the ivory-bill the group renamed itself because of its renewed focus on organizing and leading ivory-bill searches
in Louisiana and Arkansas.

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work of their own in response. Calling themselves “believers”, because they believed that the
ivory-bill was still alive, these enthusiasts set up a particular binary and rhetoric that positioned
“scientists” and “experts” as antagonists, mimicking the breach of trust from the boundary
making.
Particularly jarring to the ivory-bill enthusiast community was the fact that some of the
most famous interactions with the ivory-bill came as the result of cooperation between
institutional experts and local amateurs. The USFWS proposal to delist6 the ivory-bill on the
basis of extinction came from assessing status reports of the species which were written by
Cornell researchers and other field scientists associated with the 2009 searches for the bird.
Thus, amateur voices were minimized in discussions of the bird’s classification. When the
delisting proposal opened its public commentary section for the ivory-bill, they created a forum
for ivory-bill enthusiasts to share their accounts of ivory-bill sightings and voice frustrations of
their dismissal from knowledge construction practices that had been taken for granted by the
community.
Destabilizing the Ivory-Bill: The Red List and the Endangered Species Act
The ivory-bill woodpecker has had a curious trajectory in the records of the IUCN’s Red
List of Endangered Species due to its contested history. When the IUCN Red List was
established in 1964, the ivory-bill was already a disappeared bird, popularly believed to be if not
extinct, then at least functionally so. In a 1967 publication, Extinct and Vanishing Birds of the
World by James C Greenway Jr. lists the ivory-bill is listed amongst “Accounts of Extinct and
Vanishing Birds.” From Greenway’s prose, the bird was “in immediate danger of extinction” and
totaled the population to an optimistic 22 living individuals (Greenway, 1967: 357). Though
6 De-listing, removing the bird from its list of protected species, would also remove any protections the ivory-bill is
afforded by its presence on the Endangered Species Act’s list of at-risk species.

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Greenway’s records of the woodpecker lack the scientific rigor of a species population survey, he
was basing numbers on historical knowledge of the capacity of ivory-bill forests, known range,
and population density.7 The ivory-bill was not included among the original species seeded into
the Red List at its beginning, but rather included in the 1988 list update when the International
Council for Bird Preservation8 (ICBP) added it to a growing list of threatened and endangered
(but not extinct) birds.
At its foundation, the Red List project became the repository of expert voices on
endangered and threatened species. Today, the list sources from local experts around the globe to
maintain up to date records of which species are at risk of extirpation or extinction, and which
are stable. Because the list sources from expert spaces and partners with institutions globally, its
authority on species population risk seeds back into local legislation for species protections. The
Red List is presented as an authority on species count through expert and scientific analysis as it
is comprised of field assessments made by expert life sciences on the species they study.
Therefore, when contradictions arise, either in expert consensus, species redefinition, or
assessment changes of population numbers, the Red List site reflects this. In the case of the
ivory-bill woodpecker, changes and contradictions came about in the IUCN Red List that
undermined the authority of expert voices entirely. The bird’s trajectory and inclusion in to the
Red List is one riddled with contradictions, reclassifications, and lackluster assessments that date
back to its inclusion. When the woodpecker was added as “threatened” to the Red List in 1988,
7 It is common practice in contemporary ivory-bill enthusiast communities to similarly create their own estimates of
extant population using similar techniques to Greenway.
8 The ICBP was established in 1922 as an organizational hub to unite birding societies growing around the world.
Early partners for the ICPB were the Bombay Natural Historical Society and the Audubon Societies of America. The
ICPB was the bird authority at the outset for the IUCN’s Red List and had played an organizational part in forming
the Red List as the primary avian assessor. Later the ICPB would rename their organization to BirdLife International
(100 Years of BirdLife, n.d.).

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the status was based on historical data much like Greenway’s. According to popular expert belief,
the bird was extinct. According to the historical data the IUCN sourced from, it was extant.
In this section I trace the story of the ivory-bill across each subsequent assessment since
its inclusion into the Red-list. Each assessment of the ivory-bill includes information about the
species that culminates in an expert opinion on species life, alongside details such as generation
lifespan, ecological stressors, and projected populations should counts not be available. These
documents also take into account previous assessments, either correcting false data, changing
taxonomic organizations, and assessing the validity of previous assessments. Thus, on top of
providing an encyclopedia of endangered species, the Red List’s inclusion of assessment history
also provides historical documentation for species over time. This allows for populations to be
tracked and recorded over time.
For disappeared species such as the ivory-bill, whose inclusion was always based on
statistical conjecture of population, the Red-list offers an archive of how knowledge is
constructed about species life when the species is absent. In other words, these assessments are
expert documents about the ivory-bill but only to the extent that knowledge needed to be created
about the bird because of its inclusion in the Red List. Since the ivory-bill woodpecker was
already disappeared by its inclusion into the list, the assessments reflect how expert and
scientific knowledge about species life is made in the absence of the species. I use these
assessments to argue how the history of making knowledge about bird populations has changed
over the course of the latter half of the 20th century, minimizing amateur voices, and reflecting a
shift in scientific practices (Bowker, 2008). Below, I tease out key inconsistencies and
contradictions about the ivory-bill in its Red List expert assessments. For amateur ivory-bill
searchers, the ambivalence and errors of scientific knowledge made space for amateur

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assessment and knowledge production about the ivory-bill to gain validity and contradict expert
knowledge, thereby refusing narratives of ivory-bill extinction.
Shifting goals of the Red List from Endangered Species Monitor to Biodiversity Database
The ivory-bill woodpecker’s inclusion into the IUCNs Red List was part of a bulk
condensation of databases in the Red List as the project began to expand beyond its initial scope
of endangered species monitor to biodiversity encyclopedia. With the IUCN relaxing
qualifications of inclusion into the Red List, many new species were added whose population
data needed further clarification. The ivory-bill, imported to the list as an “threatened” bird from
the ICBP became one of many species where further assessment was needed, despite being
considered extinct in ornithological circles. Thus, the bird occupied a contradictory space from
its initial inclusion into the Red List.
The IUCN Red List of Endangered Species in 1988 did not have criteria for determining
the level of threat species face to the extent it has today. Rather, species included on the list were
either considered Low Risk, Endangered, Threatened, or Extinct (IUCN Red List Categories and
Criteria, 1988). The ivory-bill was originally listed in the Red List as “threatened” because of the
continued rhetoric of unverified sightings. The figure of the ivory-bill still loomed large in the
public imagination, alongside statistical and geographical data about potential population
numbers in known ivory-bill biomes. For species in the list not already considered extinct,
scheduled assessments needed to be made of species populations in order to keep counts up to
date to retain scientific salience and authority. Red List assessors were typically species experts
and scientists whose research revolved around the species in question. Finding experts who
studied the woodpecker was a difficult task as by the 1990s ornithologists presumed the bird was
extinct. The assessors tasked with updating the assessment thus conducted an investigation from

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available archives including historical data and previous assessments rather than finding new
data. Alongside persistent speculation of secluded populations and controversial sightings of the
bird, Red List assessors determined that there was enough speculation and rumor surrounding the
ivory-bill that could hint at extant populations.9
In 1994, the IUCN Red List reassessed the ivory-bill as extinct. The reason for this
change was in an overhaul of how the Red List was determining criteria of species population.
While ivory-bill encounters were still happening, though at much less frequent rates, the IUCN
was including models of generational10 population decline and habitat fracturing (IUCN Red List
Categories and Criteria, Version 3.1, Second Edition, 2012). Old growth forests in the Southern
US had been opened to land parceling and industry so that contiguous Cypress swamps where
the ivory-bill made its home became even harder to find. The 1994 overhaul of the Red List also
changed the categories species could be. “Extinct” remained, however an interesting liminal
category “Extinct in the Wild” was added. “Endangered” was split to nuance different levels of
endangerment with the inclusion of “Critically Endangered”. Finally, species categorized as
“Lower Risk” were divided into three sub-categories: “Conservation Dependent,” “Near
Threatened,” and “Least Concern”.11 Species status shifted in this database to reflect the
assessments of field biologists and conservationists. While the ivory-bill remained an elusive
bird present in birding myth and social circles, species assessment prioritized statistical models
and deemed the species extinct.
9 This is an example of trust of amateur and hobby birders given by ornithologists in places of knowledge
construction, the trust in the amount of speculation in the mid to late 20th century led to the co-construction of
knowledge using both amateur and expert input in ornithology.
10 Generational in this case, referring to decline of species population over generations of the species life. Ivory-bills
not having been verified had no stable population and thus generational decline could not be measured.
11 Other categories (Data Deficient and Not Evaluated) were also added to take into consideration the Red List’s
changing goals to resemble less of a list of endangered species specifically but also as a growing biodiversity
archive in its own right.

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The taxonomic reorganization of the Ivory-bill and its revival in the Red List
A reassessment of the ivory-bill in 2000, reclassified the bird from “Extinct” to
“Critically Endangered”. The reason given to this assessment made by D. Wege and D. Capper
from BirdLife International who claimed that new evidence suggested the birds persistence in
Cuba. Behind the scenes, in 2000, the Cuban ivory-bill (Campephilus principalis bairdii), which
to this point had been classified as a separate species from the ivory-bill (Campephilus
principalis principalis) was reorganized from being a distinct subspecies to being a regional
variation of the same species (Campephilus principalis).12 Thus, while the American ivory-bill
was still considered extinct by the IUCN assessment, the re-inclusion of the Cuban population
into the boundaries of what determined the ivory-bill woodpecker as a species, meant that the
species adopted the Cuban woodpecker’s “Critically Endangered” status.
The 2000 assessment of the ivory-bill incorporated documentation from the last
assessment of the Cuban ivory-bill, done in 1998 which claimed:
Campephilus principalis formerly occurred at low densities throughout the south-east
USA (nominate principalis) and Cuba (race bairdii), but is now extinct in the USA, and
close to extinction in Cuba. It was considered extinct in Cuba after intensive searches did
not find any new reports to those at the end of the 1980s. However, evidence from 1998
suggests that it survives in the highest reaches of the Sierra Maestra in south-east Cuba,
an area from which there had been no previous records (BirdLife International, 2000).
Curiously, the 2000 assessment of the ivory-bill woodpecker is not a fresh assessment at all, but
rather the product of reorganizing the taxonomy of Campephilus. The US ivory-bill was also
12 The ivory-bill woodpecker was first described as a species by Mark Catesby in 1731 and included in Carl
Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae in 1758 as Picus principalis. The genus was later changed from Picus to Campephilus.
In 1863, John Cassin, a prominent 19th century ornithologist, reorganized the species into two distinct subspecies of
ivory-bill. His assessment was that there were enough physiological and habitual differences between the Cuban
ivory-bill and the American ivory-bill, and that the populations were discrete enough that Campephilus principalis
was in fact two discrete subspecies on their way to different species entirely. The 1863 Proceedings from the
Academy of Natural Sciences first listed the distinct species population as Campephilus principalis principalis, and
Campephilus principalis bairdii (Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, 1863, 322).

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assessed in 1998 alongside the Cuban ivory-bill but was still categorized as extinct in the US.
The reclassification from “Extinct” to “Critically Endangered” marks an important moment in
the story of the ivory-bill as it bureaucratically revived the bird. When the species were merged,
the Cuban ivory-bill retained its status as a subspecies of Campephilus principalis, but the US
ivory-bill was changed from subspecies to parent species. Thus, Campephilus principalis
principalis became Campephilus principalis. This change meant that in the 2000 Red List
assessment, the US ivory-bill, as the parent species of a subspecies that was still considered
present was listed once more as extant. Upon inspection, the document is a confusing one. In a
single page of the assessment, Campephilus Prinicpalis is listed as both extant, residing in the
United States and extinct in the United States as shown in the photograph below:
Figure 2 Screenshot of the 2000 Ivory-bill assessment showing the contradictory listing of the bird. In the upper left corner, the
highlight information lists the Ivory bill as extant in the United States while possibly extinct in Cuba. The text highlighted in the
bottom right lists the opposite (IUCN, 2000).

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Ivory-bill liveliness on and off list in 2004
A 2004 assessment of the bird in the Red List continued the clerical confusion the
restructuring of the ivory-bill from two species into one which started in 2000. This assessment
listed 1987 as the last time a verified sighting of an ivory-bill occurred. What had happened was
the 1987 sighting was attributed to a possible sighting of a Cuban ivory-bill. However, this
change in the story offered alternative stories of verifiability and sightings, outside of
Eckelberry’s dominant 1944 sighting. In ivory-bill enthusiast communities, 1987 became an
updated baseline in which to redefine ivory-bill interactions in the United States, despite these
sightings being Cuban. 2004 however was a high energy time for ivory-bill enthusiasts as a
famous and highly contested sighting of an ivory-bill sparked renewed and popular interest in the
bird’s existence. During this year, Gene Sparling, kayaking in the Arkansas swamps claimed
interaction with an ivory-bill woodpecker and produced a description matching the bird.
Ornithologist Tim Gallagher, and Bobby Harrison, a local expert and birder, also reported
sightings in the same location which validated Sparling’s claim. An expedition was mounted led
by David Luneau, associate professor of Engineering at the University of Little Rock and
woodpecker enthusiast, to collect and find evidence of the ivory-bill. The Luneau expedition
captured video footage on April 25th and reportedly watched the bird fly away from their canoe
for “seven or eight seconds” before disappearing into the distance. A screenshot capturing this
defining moment of ivory-bill enthusiast lore is included below:

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Figure 3 Screenshot from David Luneau's 2004 ivory-bill sighting. The still image is one of the defining frames of the Ivory-bill
encounter with the bird circled in the lower left corner of the video (Mission Ivorybill, 2022; Luneau, 2004).
Today, the Luneau sighting of the ivory-bill is a commonly referenced and accepted
sighting in the bird’s narrative. Though not verified and officially recognized as evidence of a
stable woodpecker population, the 2004-2005 searches reignited speculation of the bird’s
existence in the United States.
Importantly the 2004 sighting of the ivory-bill was only unverified in the United States.
This means that the IUCN Red List, an international organization, took the Luneau sighting as
reputable, from assessment reports submitted to the list and updated their database to record the
sighting and reassess species population. While ivory-bill population assessments had previously
left population assessment counts blank, after 2004, the Red List used the Luneau account to
hypothesize a population of 1-49 mature individuals may still live in the United States, what
helped bolster the newly listed population count the integration of the Cuban ivory-bill whose
geographic range remained largely unexplored, unfractured, and open to speculation.
Details of the 2004 Ivory-bill Sighting and the Examination of its Red List Status
The 2004 IUCN assessment and ivory-bill sightings posit several key elements at work in
the story of the ivory-bill. It seemed the list had finally found institutional experts of the ivory-

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bill in which to base its assessments. Tim Gallagher who had validated Sparling’s claims was an
Ornithologist affiliated with Cornell University, a member of the famous bird science lab. Bobby
Harrison, a wildlife photographer and Associate Professor of Photography at Alabama Oakwood
University, was a local expert and highly regarded in birding communities as a source of
knowledge. Between Gallagher, Harrison, and Luneau, enough data was collected and
empirically analyzed in with the rigor asked of any post 1994 IUCN Red list species assessment.
Second, IUCN assessors reassessed the Cuban sighting as inconclusive evidence and
removed the 1987 sighting prioritize the 2004 mainland ivory-bill sighting. Today, the Cuban
ivory-bill remains a classified distinct subspecies of the bird and its inclusion on the justification
for Campephilus principalis, when it was in fact Campephilus principalis bairdii was deemed
incorrect. The move of ivory-bill experts to reclassify evidence of ivory-bill life, even while
validating their own, worked to undermine the foundations of expert knowledge production on
the ivory-bill as a species. Even experts could not agree on what constitutes an ivory-bill or what
proof looks like. Thus, when later events would unfold about ivory-bill life and knowledge
production, the boundaries of what constituted an expert were up for interpretation as
institutional affiliation was undermined by contradictory assessments from folks within
institutions.
A few years later, after failure to reproduce sightings of ivory-bills in Arkansas where the
2004 bird had been seen, the IUCN revised its position on woodpecker life. In regular
assessments between 2004 and 2012, the decreasing population trend attributed to the species by
biological and ornithological experts, compounded with less than verifiable information meant
that where once clear belief in Luneau’s research on the ivory-bill’s existence may have existed,
the confidence had waned. Where in 2005 the justification for listing the bird as critically

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endangered seemed hopeful about ivory-bill life in Arkansas, the 2012 assessment seemed
skeptical:
2005 Assessment
“This species was rediscovered in eastern Arkansas in 2004, 60 years after the last
confirmed North American record. Although all sightings may have referred to just one
individual, a large area of fairly suitable habitat remains. It may also survive in southeastern Cuba, but there have been no confirmed records since 1987 despite many
searches. The global population is likely to be tiny, and for these reasons it is treated as
Critically Endangered.” (BirdLife International, 2005)
2012 Assessment
“Strong claims for this species's persistence in Arkansas and Florida have emerged since
2004 although the evidence remains highly controversial. It may also survive in southeastern Cuba, but there have been no confirmed records since 1987 despite many
searches. If extant, the global population is likely to be tiny, and for these reasons it is
treated as Critically Endangered.” (BirdLife International, 2012)
Continuous assessment of the ivory-bill woodpecker since 2012 have remained static since 2012.
The 2004 sighting remains relevant to keeping the species listed as extant in the United States
and “Possibly Extinct” in Cuba.13 Though the species remains critically endangered, the 2004
sighting remains narrated with skepticism in the IUCN notes as according to the US Fish and
Wildlife Service who reviewed ivory-bill search footage, they concluded that any evidence of an
ivory-bill could also be attributed to pileated woodpecker presence in the area (BirdLife
International, 2016). The last assessment of the ivory-bill woodpecker in the Red List database
from 2020, continues to list the bird as most likely extinct in the United States.14
13 Though the status “possibly extinct” is the original assessment from the 2000 reorganization of the species as
distinct populations into one.
14 Curiously, the IUCN assessment changed their analysis of the Cuban ivory-bill from “Possibly Extinct” to
“Possibly Extant” in 2020 due to statistical analysis of unexplored and remote forests- specifically the Alejandro de
Humboldt Parque Nacional that could host a small but stable Cuban ivory-bill population (BirdLife International,
2020).

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Local experts and how knowledge is sieved in the Red List
The IUCN’s Red List of Endangered species is the global authority for endangered
species assessment, partnering with global biodiversity and biological assessment organizations
to produce continuously updated data on disappearing species. As with any biodiversity survey,
the list skews heavily towards chordates, and statistically represents birds more comprehensively
than any other chordate group (Mammola et al, 2023). Considered the international standard for
threatened species monitoring, it is also used by national organizations to assess domestic
species. Species assessments are performed by local (domestic) specialists. For the ivory-bill,
this meant North American experts.
Because a lot of the information on Aves is sourced from local experts, organized through
BirdLife International the bird Authority for the IUCN, Red List information is easily legitimized
and believed in international, national, and local arenas (Heise, 2016; Youatt, 2015). Thus, we
see national organizations such as the US Fish and Wildlife Service and IUCN Red List
assessments stemming from the same source. So, when in a 2021 assessment of the Endangered
Species Act’s list of protected species, the USFWS chose to propose delisting the ivory-bill on
account of the bird’s possible extirpation, it was partially due to the ambivalent 2020
recommendation to list the bird as extinct in the Red List.
The ivory-bill woodpecker’s checkered presence in the IUCN Red list, with its taxonomic
reassignments and constant reclassifications, established the bird as a particularly slippery
species to produce and validate expert knowledge about. The bird’s disappearance meant that the
bird resisted any attempts at creating evidence-based knowledge, restricting scientific knowledge
to historical accounts of the bird and basing statistical models off of its archival presence. Thus,
any knowledge created about the bird was open to public critique as the contradictions and errors

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in assessments were scattered across authoritative databases. Today the bird is listed as alive in
the IUCN Red list, remains critically endangered on the USFWS list of protected species under
the Endangered Species Act, and a Class 6 species15 according to the American Bird
Conservancy and the American Ornithological Association. It is generally assumed amongst
dominant birdwatcher communities that the ivory-bill is extinct as the bird is excluded from field
guides, bird counting applications, and official checklists. Amongst Red List assessors there is a
quiet consensus the bird is extinct, with recent assessments of the ivory-bill calling for delisting
the bird as extant. So why does the ivory-bill remain?
15 Class 6 species are those who are “probably or definitely extinct” (American Birding Association, 2020)

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Ivory-bill elusiveness as ambiguity in its
extinction status
When first added to the Red List of
Endangered Species, the ivory-bill was one
among several extinct and disappeared
species, included alongside charismatic and
tragic species such as the passenger pigeon
and great auk, these disappeared birds were
incorporated in the IUCN’s Red List of
posthumously to act as a baseline of what
constitutes an extinct species. The deaths of
the passenger pigeon and great auk however
were relatively public events, with the pigeon
garnering media coverage and the great auk
peppering trophy cabinets.
The ivory-bill was known to be an
elusive bird and already sequestered from the
public eye, where auks and passenger pigeons
were visually explicit in their biomes. The
ivory-bill’s broad resemblance to the pileated
woodpecker, red headed woodpecker,
and .wood duck, three distinct species it
shared its geographic region with, meant that
Figure 4 Obituary for Martha Washington, the Last
Passenger Pigeon who died in captivity at the
Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914. (Passenger
Pigeon Carried Off, 1914)

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sightings of any of these animals come with the caveat that the birder might be encountering an
ivory-bill. Conversely, “ivory-bill sightings” are also undergirded by the possibility the sighter
encountered a pileated, wood duck, or red headed woodpecker. The historical visibility in which
indisputably extinct species lived highlights two particular limitations that allows extinction to be
refused. First, extinction is sieved through knowledge structures. In order to be listed as extinct,
first the species must be known and catalogued in biodiversity data. Thus, extinction as a social
category predicates a multispecies relationship between the vanished species and the
communities that interact with them. Second, the social life of a species in symbolic culture
influences which species are allowed to go extinct. Martha’s death was a media event, she was
lauded as the last of her species, and with her passing the passenger pigeon was mourned. Her
death was an anticipated and scheduled (in the sense that people knew it was coming) event. The
great auk’s life hinged on its ability to rest and raise young in its limited habitat. The total
destruction of its conditions of life, lack of protections, and its value as a coveted hunting trophy
meant that its extinction became inevitable.
In comparison the ivory-bill woodpecker’s ambivalence and contradictory nature across
databases highlights the lack of empirical knowledge produced about the bird. The variables and
conditions of life of the ivory-bill are too debatable to make irrefutable claims. The bird’s habitat
range is not limited to distinct rocky islands such as the great auk, but rather lived in moderately
inaccessible swampland and deep forests of the US South. Further, the bird’s solitary nature
meant that no visible flocking murmurations gathered public attention. The ivory-bill had always
been a reclusive and secretive species. Thus, the majority of the ivory-bill’s social life is instead
based on intimate and irreproducible interactions with local communities. This is evinced by
early assessments of the ivory-bill in the ESA and later IUCN Red List as being premised on

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eyewitness accounts and intimate documentation of interactions with the bird. Eckelberry’s 1944
sighting that opened this chapter is an example of an intimate and idiosyncratic sighting that if
reproduced today would be unverifiable. Still, the foundations of the ivory-bill in the ESA and
the IUCN being observation based, and the lack of scientific consensus over time, means that
amateurs, whose relationship with the ivory-bill is based on producing intimate and narrative
forward interactions with the bird, are thrust into a space where they have the potential to
influence knowledge production on the species they love.
In social space, the ivory-bill is a composite of stories that bring affective landscapes,
protagonists, and settings and if allowed extinction, these narratives would become tragedies. So,
the ivory-bill remained extant and critically endangered. At least, until September 29th, 2021,
when the Fish and Wildlife Service proposed a mass delisting of species from the Endangered
Species Act.
USFWS and the Proposal to Delist the Ivory-bill
On September 29th, 2021, the US Fish and Wildlife Service published a proposal in the
National Register to delist 23 species from the Endangered Species Act “on the basis of
extinction” (Endangered and Threatened Species, 2021). The species slated for delisting came
from a variety of geographic regions and included mammals, birds, invertebrates, and fish.
Because they were believed to be extinct, the USFWS determined that they no longer needed the
protection of the Endangered Species Act that regulated interactions. Thus, while not a bid to
organize the declaration of extinction for the species, the delisting proposal was significant in its
presumption of extinction (Endangered and Threatened Species, 2021).
The September 29th delisting was the biggest batch of extinction delisting to date in the
history of the Endangered Species Act. The choice to delist in the proposal was fundamentally

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one of species triage. Species listed in the ESA are afforded funding to maintain protected
habitats and frequent monitoring, so species who had been added to the list but remained elusive
were unable to be considered healthy or recovering populations. Former President of the United
States Donald Trump had enacted cuts in the Federal budget to be allotted to the USFWS and the
ESA which greatly reduced funding available for endangered species maintenance and protection
(Funk, 2017; Center for Biological Diversity, 2020). In early 2020, the presidential office
released a fiscal budget for the next year which slashed funding in the Endangered Species Act
by $11 million (Center for Biological Diversity, 2020). The batch delisting was a response to the
fiscal state of the agency which needed to drastically re-allocate resources amongst endangered
species. Plants and animals that were protected, but had not been seen or had produced positive
assessments were attractive choices to defund.
The ivory-bill, which had failed to be verified as extant since 1944, was a prime example
of the types of species slotted for delisting. The latest assessment of the bird in the IUCN’s Red
List of Endangered Species listed it as critically endangered and had recommendations by the
American Ornithological Society and assigned assessors for changing that status to “extinct”.
The bird had also been included in the original protections afforded by the 1973 Endangered
Species Act as it rolled over from species that had been protected under the Endangered Species
Preservation Act of 1966 which established National Wildlife Refuge network in the United
States.16 The ivory-bill’s long inclusion in American endangered species legislation meant that
the bird had a deep connection with conservation history of the United States, but alongside this,
16 The Endangered Species Preservation Act was in part a response from the disappearance of the bald eagle from
the public eye. Worried about the possible extinction of the national symbol, the ESPA was established to protect
endangered fauna by providing hunting and habitat protections. While the bald eagle acted as a catalyst to pass the
legislation, other species were included in order to populate the act. When the ESPA was first passed 78 species were
included in the original protection bid.

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had a history of failure to recover as other species like the bald eagle or California condor were
able to do once protections were put in place. In United States legislation the ivory-bill has
always been present and always been at risk of extinction. In 2021 its time seemed to run out.
Thus, when the 2021 delisting proposal was published, the woodpecker’s inclusion in the list was
the culmination of approximately 60 years of association with endangered species protection
while producing disappointing results.
Figure 5 New York Times headlines from March 12, 1967 announcing the Endangered Species Protection Act which includes the
ivory-bill Woodpecker alongside 77 other species (78 Species, 1967: 46).
It was partially because of the ivory-bill’s longstanding inclusion in endangered species
legislation that the proposal to delist the bird received the community response that it did. The
ivory-bill is a species integrated into the foundation of the ESPA so its narrative of being on the
cusp of extinction and in need of protection is as old as environmental policy in the US. Figure 5

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above is a scan of the original 1967 AP press article announcing the ESPA and the species it
protected, the ivory-bill is highlighted in yellow. Today, when media outlets run stories about the
bird, its history is intimately tied with the development and growth of species protection. So, for
stakeholders, if officials delisted the bird, it would mean fundamentally changing one of the
oldest narratives in conservation history in the US: that the ivory-bill was alive and needed to be
protected before it disappeared forever. In 2023, only two years away from the delisting
proposal, the Endangered Species Act would celebrate its 50th anniversary, a benchmark in US
environmentalism. Failure stories of the ESA, and especially the failure of foundational species,
would weaken the case for continued funding. When the proposed delisting of twenty-three
species was introduced in 2021, it was a primarily a product of budgetary cutbacks. Failure
stories, especially ones that were 50 years in the making, destabilized the foundation of the act
and potentially opened the ESA to further critique.
Public Commentary and the Symbol of the Ivory-bill Woodpecker
Outside the budgetary underpinnings of the choice to delist, the proposed rule was a
shocking proposal simply because of its scope, which affirmed that a biodiversity crisis was
present and underway.17 The USFWS proposal to delist twenty-three species from the ESA was
subject to a ninety-day public commentary period on the Federal Register before a final ruling
was made about the proposed species. During this time, anyone could access and submit
commentary on the proposed removal of species provided they had access to the docket number.
Organization on the federal register meant that the proposal had a main docket page but the
twenty-three “at risk” species also had discreet commentary pages of their own. Commenters
were able to submit comments online or through the mail, writing either in support or opposition
17 This was the biggest batch delisting due to extinction in history.

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to the proposal. Because the USFWS proposal involved twenty-three unique species,
commenters could either respond to the general proposal, or on the case specific to one of the
listed species. While species such as the four types of pearly mussels (grouped together) and the
Upland Combshell (grouped with other freshwater mollusks) received few comments,18 the
ivory-bill case amassed over 300 comments between the case page for the ivory-bill and the
general proposal commentary section. A portion of these comments were letters sent in by
commenters which were scanned and uploaded to their respective sections. Some of the
comments contained attached media and photos. One comment attached a book manuscript.
The ivory-bill woodpecker’s contested nature in the IUCN’s Red List database, and the
longevity of its inclusion into federal endangered species legislation meant that though the bird
remained elusive in the wild, it remained socially salient to interested communities.
Additionally, that its social life was inherently one built on connection and narrative, “anecdotal
evidence” (Lynch, 2011), rather than primarily through population counts, the manner in which it
stayed salient in public space was through affirming its narrative role as a lively symbol. A byproduct of the 2004 Luneau sighting was a moment of fame for the ivory-bill woodpecker in the
media. The Luneau video became a media event with media outlets capitalizing on the
sensationalism of rediscovering an extinct “Lazarus” species. Though the Luneau sighting made
waves, the last uncontested sighting of the ivory-bill remained Eckleberry’s 1944 encounter with
the bird. Similar to the coelacanth, the ivory-bill was a striking bird, and its 2004 reappearance
18 The public comments received on the Upland Combshell docket were of note because while none of the
comments directly referenced the species but rather the general proposal to delist in batch. These comments
expressed sadness that the delisting was happening in the first place and rather than delisting the USFWS should just
leave the species listed as Endangered so as to keep the environmental protections in place.
Similarly, another trend in these comments in less populated comment sections from the batch twenty-three,
commenters deliberated on the role of the ESA as one with the capacity to memorialize and retain the memory of
disappeared species.

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offered a charismatic news story of species perseverance while the 10th anniversary of the United
Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 9) was underway in Argentina.
Likewise, after 2004, expeditions and scientific forays were planned by multiple
ornithology and wildlife monitoring organizations, both expert and amateur. The biggest of these
searches was a hybrid effort organized by Cornell and an amateur citizen science organization
Project Coyote, based out of Monroe, LA who would monitor the Tensas Wildlife Refuge in
Louisiana and several old growth sites in Arkansas (Michaels, 2013). Much Like John Tanner
and J.J. Kuhn cooperating to find ivory-bills in 1938 Tensas, the organized expeditions between
Cornell, Project Coyote, and affiliated interested parties, was a cooperative search. These groups
pooled resources and knowledge, so that in 2009 they mounted a search for the ivory-bill.
Several things came from this expedition. Considered a failure by the majority, the organization
of the search united a group of interested ivory-bill enthusiasts hopeful the bird may still be
alive. The search also produced copious amounts of data as evidence to be sorted through and
either accepted or discarded. Finally, it created controversy in disagreement over what the
evidence was showing.
The disagreement across groups on what was being seen from the amassed data fractured
cooperation between searchers who had different standards of what was considered evidence of
ivory-bill life. Cornell ornithologists and birding groups invested in the search were conservative
in their estimations if a recorded call or blurry photo was considered evidence. Valid proof
needed to be clear, undeniable data of an ivory-bill that could be verifiable and reproducible
rather than anecdotal reports. This distinction of what constitutes scientific evidence is what STS
scholar Michael Lynch termed the difference between “professional ornithology and mere
birding” which was a byproduct of boundary making in late 20th century ornithology (Lynch,

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2011: 100). The long association of mistaken identity sightings that peppered ivory-bill sightings
since 1944 loomed over interpretive evidence. Thus, evidence that offered the possibility of
interpretation such as blurry photographs, audio recordings without visual elements, and firsthand accounts of sightings were considered inadequate for determining ivory-bill life (Lynch,
2011: 100). In contrast ivory-bill enthusiast groups and Project Coyote pushed back on the
caution university affiliated ornithologists assessed the evidence with. For Project Coyote,
evidence was considered valid if it followed the structure of historical forms of proof and
validated that the ivory-bill was in fact alive. Championing trends in “mere birding” which
considered anecdotal evidence and quality of character valid forms of knowledge construction,
interpretation was an integral part of making knowledge about the ivory-bill.19 Tensions and
disagreements over data validity fractured the group so that after 2009 the ivory-bill became a
contentious subject in expert and amateur birding circles. Though there were outliers, a tentative
line was drawn between university affiliated experts being too cautious to claim evidence of
ivory-bill life, and amateur groups claiming any data collected as proof.
Bitter from the underlying tensions and outright disagreements begun post-2009, the
ivory-bill enthusiast community saw the public commentary period in the USFWS delisting
docket as an opportunity to have their voices heard by a governmental body with the ability to
influence the dominant narrative of the woodpecker. The USFWS was using narratives and
scientific assessments published through the IUCN made by scientists who believed the failure to
repeat a sighting after 2004 meant that the ivory-bill was extinct and recommended changing the
species status. Once the delisting proposal went live on September 29th, 2021, ivory-bill
19 Complicating this further are liminal expert-amateur spaces such as e-bird and iNaturalist which produce scientific
and statistical data about species observation that include anecdotal evidence and consider the submitters character
as valid forms of producing knowledge on species identification (Cherry, 2018).

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enthusiasts used the comment function to establish their own narratives and interpretation of
events.
By merit of the September 29th proposal being the biggest delisting to happen in the
history of the ESA and the history of wildlife protection legislation, the docket gained media
attention. Among the twenty-three species the ivory-bill was the most charismatic and drew the
most attention as it had the media history to fall back on due to the 2004 sightings and 2009
expeditions. The woodpecker also had popular cachet by merit of being thought of as a “modernday cryptid” alongside heavy-hitters such as such as bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, or Nevada’s
wild camels. The one book uploaded in the public commentary was Guy Luneau’s20 monograph
The Ivory-billed Woodpecker: Taunting Extinction: Survival in the Modern Era which was
published through Zombie Media Publishing, a company known for regularly publishing
sasquatch and bigfoot media. Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster are also commonly brought up
in online conversations with people outside of the community to explain how the main debates
around the bird are centered around inconclusive evidence and whether living individuals exist in
the wild. Compared to other species that were either too niche such as the mollusks or too
indisputably gone such as the Mariana fruit bat, the ivory-bill was primed to capture the attention
of the public. The contradictions that peppered its story and the lack of a consensus about
whether it was in fact extinct or extant reignited the attention of stakeholders.
The USFWS public commentary had a few submissions in support of the proposal
decision, citing the logic and evidence was sound from the IUCN and USFWS assessments. By
far though, voices in opposition and disagreement with the delisting dominated the public
commentary section. In direct contradiction of the few comments in support of the proposal,
20 No relation to David Luneau who was responsible for producing footage of the 2004 ivory-bill.

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there were comments critiquing the USFWS proposal to delist using the same population models
and sources from the IUCN and its past assessments of the bird. Thus, the continuation of
uncertainty about the bird through empirical assessment was sustained from the IUCN and
BirdLife International assessments and brought into the public commentary in the USFWS
delisting docket.
The majority of commenters in opposition to the delisting of the ivory-bill however
responded through a completely different set of logics, by abandoning empirical evidence and
appealing to the symbolic and relational life of the ivory-bill. In other words, these arguments
equated the social life of the woodpecker, replete with its sociocultural meanings and historical
entanglements, to embodied life. Because the social life of the ivory-bill seemed to be at stake by
declaring the bird extinct, commenters effectively denied extinction on the logics of appealing to
the bird’s symbolic liveliness. The ivory-bill “was a symbol of American wilderness,” of
“ruggedness,” and of “hope for other disappeared species”.
Prominent narratives emerged from the comments on the ivory-bill public comment
board which defined the community further as it grew beyond the USFWS docket and into
bespoke ivory-bill discussion spaces online. A rhetoric of protection developed with commenters
that attributed the stability of the Cypress swamps to the protections offered by the birds
critically endangered status. Another theme emerged on nature and nation, comments here
argued that the ivory-bill couldn’t be extinct because it was a symbol of American wilderness
and it would be unamerican to let it die. By discussing the importance of the ivory-bill to nation
and place, commenters also resurfaced discussions on who can make knowledge about the ivorybill, leading to narratives of locality and lay knowledge in relation to expert spaces. Finally, a
rhetoric of hope and faith emerged amongst the comments with commenters simply stating that

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the USFWS shouldn’t delist the ivory-bill because while there was no conclusive evidence of its
life, its disappearance was not indicative of its extinction. These commenters “still had hope”
that the ivory-bill was alive, and that this faith in the bird was enough. Faith in the bird
connected the ivory-bill to faith and religion overall.
All of these themes in ivory-bill enthusiast rhetoric evoke facets of Manifest Destiny, an
ideological framework at the foundation of settler colonialism in the United States (Semonin,
2000). Within Manifest Destiny, key themes of faith, masculinity, nation, and land weave
together to justify European dominance of the United States. The narrative posits that European
settlers, later Americans, have the divine right to conquer the North American continent and
establish a sovereign nation (Semonin, 2000).21 Popularized as a narrative in the mid 1800s to
justify westward expansion, the roots of Manifest Destiny ideology trail further back in history
thought the American Revolution and nation building project to colonial establishment on the
east coast (2014). In Manifest Destiny, American land is implicated into scaffolds of nation,
identity and faith. Later, land became entangled with nature in the United States, and the
conservation of the natural world would become a project of American identity (Cronon, 1996).
It is also a deeply raced narrative, historically premising the white settler as the “destined”
(Horsman, 1981). These values are found echoed in ivory-bill enthusiast spaces, with commenter
themes mirroring ideological narratives of ivory-bill conservation as synonymous with land
conservation.
There are many points of articulation between notions of masculinity and wilderness,
especially in the United States. Returning to Manifest Destiny ideology for a moment, American
land was seen as a resource given by God to the European settler and thus having knowledge
21 Religious community migrations such as the Puritans and later the Mormons associated the North American
frontier with religious liberation.

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about the land, owning it, and being able to work with the land were all successful markers of the
male pre-revolution settler and later the American citizen (Cronon, 1996). Communications
historian Susan Douglas traces the rise of technological expertise as a moment where
masculinity, before technological literacy and adeptness became markers of social success, the
production of masculinity hinged on the successful performance of “brawny” acts- hunting,
exploration, and so on (Douglas, 1989). For the American environmentalism movement
specifically, knowledge makers were historically “masculine” figures who were able to access
sites of untamed wilderness.
Conservation and preservation of nature spaces has always had a conservative endeavor
embedded in “brawny masculinity” practices. Geographers John Patrick Casellas Connors and
Elizabeth Carlino, and historian Chrisopher Rea, argue that the munitions industry has always
been a major stakeholder of environmental protections and the establishment of protected
ecosystem areas (Casellas Connors, Carlino, & Rea, 2023).22 In fact, the majority of funding
historically for local fish and wildlife management associations has been made possible by
hunting and fishing agencies (Casellas Connors & Rea, 2022). For birds and ornithology
especially, preservation has deep ties to hunting histories with the federal duck stamp and the
Christmas bird count.
The connection of the wildness and ruggedness of the forests the ivory-bill called home
evoked imaginaries of man’s dominion over nature: the image of the frontiersman, the hunter,
and the cowboy all encapsulated in the form of the ivory-bill searcher. In turn, because the
22 A prime example of this today is the Federal Duck Stamp, an annual waterfowl hunting permit and “among the
most successful conservation tools ever created to protect habitat for birds and other wildlife” (Duck Stamps | U.S.
Fish & Wildlife Service, 2022).

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ivory-bill narratively became an avatar of nature and land, affirming the bird’s life meant that
proxy values of nation, identity, and faith were also conserved.
Though I categorize these themes from the public commentary of the ivory-bill docket in
the National Register, these narratives could already be found thriving in ivory-bill enthusiast
space. The enthusiast community which had coalesced after the 2004 Luneau sighting produced
significant amounts of materials which I use here to bolster the typology of enthusiast narrative.
Thus, in the following section I pull from a myriad of ivory-bill conversations and enthusiast
spaces to bolster the narratives made evident in the public commentary archive. The National
Register affords a convenient and compact space to collect voices from the enthusiast community
as they function as sights of public theatre where commenters affirm their identity through
participation (Reiss & Romzek, 2020; Farrell, 2015). The ivory-bill communities on Facebook
which had lost steam following the events of the Luneau sighting were galvanized by an influx
of new folk and the reactivation of ivory-bill enthusiasts after five years of relative silence. The
growing ubiquity of Zoom as a byproduct of the Covid-19 pandemic also offered online
organizing spaces for the influx of new and old ivory-bill enthusiasts which allowed for a
dispersed community to organize and chat face to face. The themes of “protection”, “nation and
nature”, and “hope and faith” from the comments were rather indicative of preexisting themes in
the enthusiast community that I demonstrate through bolstering the narrative trends in the
comments with examples from the wider ivory-bill community.
“The Ivory-bill Must Be Protected”: The Ivory-bill as a tool for environmental protection
The first theme that emerged from comments on the delisting proposal was that of
environmental protection. Protection narratives in commentary on the delisting docket prioritize
the protections ivory-bill life provides others within the environment over the life of the bird

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itself. Broadly, this theme argues that delisting the ivory-bill on the basis of its extinction is a
misstep by legislation because it would remove habitat protections for land protected under the
ivory-bill’s threatened status. To this point, Tiffany in the comments on the delisting docket
writes,
“Keeping protections in place for those that are extremely rare also protect the habitats
which harbors other species that are struggling & helps prevent them from further
decline as well.” (Tiffany, Endangered and Threatened Species, 2021)
If the ivory-bill was delisted then that would open up land to deforestation, development, and
consequently, other species would suffer. In protection appeals on the docket, the ivory-bill
woodpecker became a stand-in for a larger biotic community to the commenters. Thus,
commenters would appeal to the USFWS not to delist the ivory-bill because doing so would
threaten species in relationship with the bird. To this end Diana writes,
“People won't bother to worry about destroying its habitat; it will be destroyed freely.”
(Diana, Endangered and Threatened Species, 2021)
Diana’s appeal primarily highlights a concern about the ivory-bill’s habitat rather than argue for
ivory-bill life. Their comment primary argues that protections keeping wildlife refuges funded
and public land united and undeveloped could legally remain protected as it had been since the
ivory-bill was listed as endangered.
Since the ivory-bill was a flagship species in endangered species protection, this meant
that the southern forests that housed the bird had been under regulation since the beginning of
environmental protection in the United States. From commenter perspectives, delisting the bird
therefore threatened massive tracts of undeveloped forests in the south which conveniently were
protected by the ivory-bill’s status. Regardless of if the bird was extant or extinct, there was
value in keeping it labelled as extant (and endangered) because doing so would preserve a fifty-

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year status quo of protected lands in the south. One such comment by an anonymous poster
reads,
“Given all of these tantalizing sightings, to de-list the bird would be to invite the outcome
of destruction of habitat that may, just possibly, still harbor ivory-bills.” (Anonymous,
Endangered and Threatened Species, 2021)
Here, the commenter argues that the ivory-bill is an important tool used to protect the habitat at
large. Their ambivalence about whether the bird is alive or extinct in the comment is also
particularly interesting as it demonstrates again, that majority bids for ivory-bill life are primarily
about the bird’s social life. An extinction status would remove the protections afforded by the
woodpecker’s symbolic presence in the ESA.
Endangered species that do not share the bird’s charisma or unknown issues in the land
wouldn’t be detrimentally impacted by the change delisting the ivory-bill would potentially
cause. Thus, commenters appealing to the USFWS not to delist the ivory-bill in this rhetoric did
so because the birds perceived life species monitoring databases allowed the potential for other
life to continue as it had been under the protections afforded the ivory-bill. To this end, Olivia
writes,
“If you remove protections for them, the fate of the potential last of this species could be
at stake. Endangered Species status serves to protect the species from harm as well as
their habitat.” (Olivia, Endangered and Threatened Species, 2021)
Another comment to this effect is made by Lauren who again cites ambivalence for ivory-bill life
in these spaces. Where some commenters like Olivia eschewed talking about ivory-bills being
alive altogether, others directly addressed the argument made by the USFWS that the ivory-bill
was presumed extinct. Lauren comments,
“Were these protections to be removed, critical southern habitat will be rendered
vulnerable and may eliminate the chance of these animals persisting in the wilds and will
furthermore imperil others which require large tracts of habitat.” (Lauren, Endangered
and Threatened Species, 2021)

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In protection narratives the ivory-bill is more than the sum of its parts because it takes on other
species life as an extension of the ESA. From public comments, the ivory-bill is also “a habitat,”
“a protector,” and “a savior” to southern cypress forests. Public commenter Kurt surmised this
position when he wrote,
“many of the existing protected areas owe their existence to the IBWO, and many areas
that were initially conserved have been lost when it was concluded that IBWO were no
longer present.” (Kurt, Endangered and Threatened Species, 2021)
Thus, the ivory-bill comes to symbolize the biotic community that surrounds it, and the
affordances of protection given by the ESA.
A running narrative of protection themed comments also approach the ivory-bill as a tool
to preserve the current status quo of protected forests and swampland to the extent that liveliness
of the bird is a secondary priority to making sure environmental protections stay in place. One
anonymous commenter demonstrated this sentiment through rhetorically asking, “even if the
Ivory bill is extinct, what harm is there in continuing to list it as alive?” (Anonymous,
Endangered and Threatened Species, 2021) Thus, for some the life of the bird is secondary to its
usefulness as a promise of status quo, ensuring that the state of nature remains safe from blatant
forms of settler impact in causing environmental harm such as deforestation or excessive
hunting. The notion of environmental stability in ivory-bill life is one that was established when
the ESPA was first implemented in the 1960s and environmental protections were introduced
across the United States, thus coinciding with the development of state and national refuges.
Ivory-bill life is inextricably tied to these protections as a flagship species in the ESPA and later
ESA, so its protections are associated with protected cypress and swamp lands in the US south.
To this extent, environmental stability and preserving the status quo in the case of the ivory-bill
woodpecker means ensuring that southern forests remained.

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Protection narratives refuse extinction for the ivory-bill through substituting the
embodied bird for a biotic status quo. The logic is as follows: the ivory-bill is representative of a
greater biotic community at risk. Since the ivory-bill symbolizes this community, then because
the biome is extant, the ivory-bill must also be alive. Therefore, the ivory-bill cannot be extinct
and cannot be delisted. Commenters that expand the boundaries of the ivory-bill to be
representative of the environment it protects are building on a historical association of the bird to
the environment. What makes it easy for commenters to refuse ivory-bill extinction is the lack of
substantiated ivory-bill sightings since 1944. When the woodpecker was added to the ESPA and
ESA it was already considered a ghost species. Thus, its “life” in environmental protection
legislature has always been determined by maintaining its habitat. Over half a century of
connecting ivory-bill existence to the preservation of southern forests and swamps meant that
when the USFWS proposed to delist the bird the decision was seen as a condemnation of
southern wilderness. Protection narratives in ivory-bill comments highlight that while
woodpecker liveliness may be of interest to these commenters, it is the bird’s relationship to
environment and forest that takes precedence over embodied life. So, the ivory-bill mediates the
relationship between communities and the southern cypress forests and swamps historic ivorybills call home. Which begs the question, what then, is so important about these biomes?
“The Ivory-bill is American”: Nation, Place, and Masculinity
“The Ivory-bill is a symbol of American wilderness” (Anonymous, Endangered and
Threatened Species, 2021)
A narrative that emerged from the ivory-bill commentary section are those who associate
ivory-bill life with “nationalist spirit”. While protection narratives focused on the land ivory-bill
protects, a nationalist narrative emerged that was preoccupied with what the land symbolized in
relation to governance and identity. The relationship of land, specifically American land, is tied

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to conservative histories of provenance (Cronon, 1986; Jacoby, 2014). Nationalist narratives
emerge in the federal docket broadly argue that listing the ivory-bill extinct would be giving up
on a symbol of American identity, and by extent, the American dream. Ivory-bill enthusiasts,
those in opposition to the delisting of the bird, are rhetorically positioned in comments of this
nature as inherently more American than others by merit in their belief of ivory-bill life. To
illustrate, one commenter writes,
“the American spirit, anchored in free thought has produced an unrehearsed confluence
of our voices declaring "this bird lives". This icon of the wilderness and tenacity
somehow lingers.” (Catie, Endangered and Threatened Species, 2021)
Catie’s appeal against delisting the bird primarily hinges on highlighting the apparent proximity
of ivory-bill enthusiasts to the “American spirit”, implying that if those who believe the ivorybill is alive have this spirit, then the opposite must also be true. This trend of argumentation
throughout the comments creates a binary: either you accepted ivory-bill extinction, thus
eschewing “America”, or you refused extinction, affirming a patriotic identity.
Catie’s comment goes on to equate the ivory-bill with other qualities perhaps more
concrete than the “American spirit” as well when they conclude their argument describing the
bird as an “icon of the wilderness and tenacity”. Nationalist narratives about the ivory-bill
elevate the bird into a stand in for the “untamed wild landscape” that has become synonymous
with the American myth of nature (Cronon, 1996).
American nature is deeply tied to narratives of masculinity as it appears in Manifest
Destiny ideology, something that John illustrates in his docket comment which reads:
“The ivory-billed woodpecker is, in many ways, a symbol of American ruggedness […]
surviving in adverse circumstances typifies all that Americans hold dear.” (John,
Endangered and Threatened Species, 2021)

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Johns appeal to bootstrap ideology speaks both to the importance of the ivory-bill as a symbol of
masculinity (as they write, “ruggedness”) and American settler ideologies (“surviving in adverse
circumstances”). The notion that it “takes a real man to go out into nature and pull himself up by
his bootstraps” in order to succeed and thrive as the ideal American citizen is a myth as deeply
rooted in the United States as the beginning of European colonization. Communication historian,
Susan Douglas’ formulation of “brawny masculinity” as the pre-industrial standard of
masculinity is replete with the notion that participating in “rugged” and physically taxing
pursuits validated masculine identity (Douglas, 1989). The ivory-bill woodpecker was already an
elusive species, but its population decline and disappearance during the industrialization and
deforestation of the south in the 19th and 20th centuries meant that the ivory-bill declined at the
same time as the now mythic image of the cowboy, explorer, and mountaineer. Thus, the ivorybill woodpecker adopts the narrative of the disappearing lifeways of preindustrial America and
its decline was taken up as a metaphor for a disappearing narrative about the United States.
Local identification with the ivory-bill
In “ivory-bill-as-nation” narratives, extinction refusal is hardly about the bird anymore
but rather about reaffirming the Manifest Destiny ideology of control over nature. Luke from the
docket comments makes this connection with his appeal to not delist the bird, qualifying it as a
“unique southern treasure,”
“Please do not prematurely abandon our efforts to protect this unique southern
treasure.” (Luke, Endangered and Threatened Species, 2021)
The ivory-bill allows a site for this argument to manifest through the geographical history of
where the bird lived. In an episode on the ivory-bill by science history podcast Distillations, the

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ivory-bill is connected to Dixie23 identity, which is an apt approximation of the bird’s historic
range (Kean, 2023).
The majority of ivory-bill enthusiasts who believe the woodpecker is extant and simply
elusive, live in the same areas the bird once populated. Woodpecker life becomes synonymous
with living in the rural south. Identifying with rural communities, many enthusiasts take
particular pride in knowing how to navigate the rural swamps where they claim the ivory-bill
still persists. John in the docket highlights the importance of locality knowledge making claims
about the ivory-bill when they comment:
“with all due respect to the fine people at Fish and Wildlife, individuals who actually live
in places in and along the ivory-bills' habitat, particularly those of working class
backgrounds, are regularly discounted for no other reason than their perceived lack of
education or refinement. People who live in these areas, regardless of how many teeth
they may have or their level of education or whatever, claim to have seen them. They
know these woods. They know the swamps, the hidden spaces where these animals may
survive.” (John, Endangered and Threatened Species, 2021)
John’s quote above resonates with trends among ivory-bill enthusiasts who argue that they know
the ivory-bill is alive because they have seen it. Crucial to knowledge about the bird for ivorybill enthusiasts is being able to navigate the environments inhabited by the bird. Thus, local
identity and local because they alone have the knowledge and expertise to be able to navigate
inhospitable conditions of backcountry swamplands.
This narrative is evidenced by the stories ivory-bill enthusiasts and searchers tell of their
encounters with the bird. Ivory-bill “believer,” Matt Courtman has repeated many times in
enthusiast discussions that that photographic evidence is missing because ivory-bill encounters
are mostly made by hunters, they either don’t care or don’t know the bird they are seeing is the
ivory-bill. In these stories the figure of “the local”, “the hunter”, and the “working class” are
23 Referencing the geographical region of the Deep South. “Dixie” states range latitudinally from Texas to Florida,
encompassing the states of Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina to the North.

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interpolated into the narrative of the “rugged,” masculine man. In enthusiast space, this
masculinity acts as a qualifier in enthusiast spaces for believing the sighting. Thus, the more
masculine and adept the ivory-bill sighter is perceived, the more truthful their claim is.
Masculinity is deeply tied to knowledge of the land and how adept the sighter is at navigating the
woodpeckers home forests and swamps.
Nationalist logics thus inculcate a narrative of masculinity alongside nation. Urban
scientists embody the emasculated elite who lack the skills to navigate the swamps and
backcountry, therefore they do not have interactions with the ivory-bill. Constant affirmations in
ivory-bill sighting narratives place emphasis on the act of spending time in old growth forests
and the backcountry alongside enthusiast’s competency within these spaces. Being familiar with
the land and being able to navigate old growth forests and swamps easier, is synonymous with
being credibility of statements. Because ivory-bill enthusiasts are the ones to have the fortitude
and ability to be in the wilderness, their narratives of ivory-bill sightings are the more credible24.
Figure 6 A screenshot taken from an ivory-bill enthusiast Facebook group. In the screenshot the poster writes about how the land
and environment where the ivory-bill can be found is “brutal” and inaccessible to only the hardiest searchers. Screenshot taken
from “Ivory Bill Woodpeckers, Fly!”.
24 This is also true of any type of rare bird sightings. Knowledge of place is constantly evoked as a marker of
expertise and truthfulness. The bird sighter “knows” the bird they saw was rare because they frequent the location
and have knowledge of the casual bird population.

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Masculinity is evoked (and denied to the scientist) in these narratives through how
enthusiasts pull on narratives of how the land is used. Communications scholar Christina
Dunbar-Hester’s exploration into the role of the “geek” explores the changing dimensions of
masculinity over the course of technological development. Her work is influenced by Susan
Douglas who delineates “brawny masculinity” from “technical masculinity,” a bifurcation that
occurred during the early 20th century (Douglas 1989). Dunbar-Hester argues that the rise of
“technical masculinity,” wherein “human minds, not bodies, are understood to be the seat of
power in late capitalism,” over the past forty years still bears the stigma as being “other” or
abnormal (Dunbar-Hester, 2016: 150). The performance of masculinity amongst ivory-bill
searchers and enthusiasts highlights the continuing “otherness” that technical masculinity and
geekiness cannot shake. Because scientists are perceived to not be able to enact “brawny
masculinity” their bureaucratic influence in determining ivory-bill life threatens enthusiasts who
hinge ivory-bill extancy on their ability to perform brawny acts. The areas where ivory-bill
encounters and sightings happen today is a mix of public hunting land, backcountry conservatory
forests, or private property. Thus, ivory-bill sightings are limited to individuals who interact with
this land in particular ways. It is a common enthusiast narrative that many sightings go
undocumented from hunters who are in the forests looking for alternative game. Thus, while they
may frequently encounter ivory-bills, they are not interested in the bird itself.25 This has led
ivory-bill enthusiasts to create outreach programming to bring awareness about the bird and the
search for ongoing irrefutable proof of living ivory-bills.
Mission Ivorybill, one of the core organizers of ivory-bill searches is co-run by Matt
Courtman’s company The Louisiana Wilds, a private wildlife research and nature education
25 Taking pileated woodpecker, a similar looking species to the ivory-bill is illegal in Louisiana hunting law and
therefore of little interest to hunters.

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organization. Courtman chose the colors “hunter orange”26 and hunter green” on the Louisiana
Wilds logo to promote the importance of the connection hunting has to the knowledge of deep
Louisiana forests (Mission Ivorybill, 2022a). Many of Mission Ivorybill’s reported sightings
come from hunters who report having seen the bird while in the backwoods hunting other game.
Across public platforms Courtman has claimed that when discussing the ivory-bill with hunter
friends, they have positive identification stories and encounters with this bird (Mission Ivorybill,
“Recent Ivory-billed Sightings”, 2022b). Courtman argues that the reason hunters are more likely
to have encounters with the ivory-bill woodpecker is that they, by merit of their hobby, simply
spend more time and have more local knowledge of the Louisiana backwoods. Their
environmental literacy also translates into credibility amongst ivory-bill enthusiasts in general.
Like a patch birder is considered more credible in informal birding communities, ivory-bill
credibility in enthusiast spaces is based off of who has more experience with the land and the
lifeways of the local fauna.
Ivory-bill enthusiast spaces place importance on the cooperation of encroaching scientists
with local guides in the narratives of documented and confirmed sightings of the bird. For
example, James A. Tanner was only able to capture his famous 1938 photographs and narrative
of Ivory-bill interaction thanks to the help of J.J. Kuhn, his local guide. In a Project Coyote, now
renamed to Project Principalis blog post, project co-founder Mark Michaels writes, “while
Tanner paid respect too and credited Kuhn, the passage of time has made it increasingly clear
that he downplayed the degree to which he [Tanner] depended on Kuhn to find Ivorybills.”
(Michaels, 2014). Despite not backing this statement up with anything past speculation, Michaels
26 It is state law in Louisiana where Project Principalis is based that hunters on public land are required to wear high
visibility clothing when hunting. They are legally mandated to wear 400 square inches of either “Hunter orange” or
“Blaze Pink” when hunting on the ground and a cap in either color when stand hunting (Hunter Safety | Louisiana
Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, 2024).

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argues that Tanner’s success in woodpecker sightings and engagement in enthusiast spaces take
on a specific narrative where Tanner’s success depends on his local guide in a way that recenters
the narrative to one that credits Kuhn at the root of knowledge produced about the ivory-bill. We
only know about Tanner’s account because Tanner had Kuhn’s help. Thus, affirming ivory-bill
life, and refusing the extinction of the ivory-bill is a masculine act since it indicates the ivory-bill
believer is able to “conquer” southern forests and swamps to find the truth.
Private property and where lines are drawn in finding the ivory-bill
The relationship of the ivory-bill to land as property is a complex and layered issue as
well. In public meetings often ivory-bill enthusiast’s love for the bird becomes entangled with
notions of land ownership and conflicting values. In a public Mission Ivorybill meeting the
tensions between ivory-bill sighting and reporting and private property were constant sites of
negotiation. One attendee claimed that while they knew where many ivory-bill woodpecker nests
were located, they didn’t want to report them because the nests were on private property. What is
at stake in this scenario is the autonomy of the land owner. In other words, if an ivory-bill were
reported on private property, the owner’s autonomy of what can be done to the land and how the
biodiversity is managed and maintained becomes restricted. The Endangered Species Act of 1973
establishes that if any endangered species is found to be residing geographically on private
property the USFWS is allowed to implement regulations as to how the landowner is allowed to
use the land (Endangered Species Act, 93-205, 1973). Laws of take, in places where endangered
species are found regulate how the land can be used for set amounts of time after species
identification, so the landowner would be limited in the ways in which they would be able to use
their land. For private property owners in ivory-bill territories, landowners (correctly) assume
that ivory-bill identification would restrict their ability to hunt on private property.

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Private property is a significant stake in the hesitancy to report ivory-bill nests to US Fish
and Wildlife personnel. Within the enthusiast community, the ivory-bill is built up as a protector
species of public lands. Returning to the point that broadly in ivory-bill enthusiast spaces, many
individuals identify the ivory-bill’s listing in the ESA as the only thing currently stopping the US
and Local government from selling public lands to developers. This narrative is well established
in the ivory-bill enthusiast community because it speaks broadly to conservationist logics: that
nature is a resource to be protected. Many public comments on the Federal Register’s
commentary section for the proposal argue that delisting the woodpecker would remove
restrictions already in place protecting old growth forests. Despite this, Courtman has stated in
multiple meetings that he would report ivory-bills to governmental officials if they were found
on public land, but not on private land. The hunters and local landowners who claim to have
ivory-bill nests yet don’t report them so as to maintain control over their land. Thus, the ESA
holds a complicated and contradictory space in narratives of the ivory-bill woodpecker
depending on the variable of private/public land.
Skeptics and Naysayers
No matter the narrative though, the skeptical interloper in ivory-bill narratives adopts
contradictory qualities that are embodied in the antagonistic figure called the “skeptic” by many
ivory-bill enthusiasts. Ivory-bill “naysayers” and “elites”, those who accept ivory-bill extinction,
in support of the delisting, or simply entertain the possibility that ivory-bill enthusiasts may be
wrong are antithetically positioned to the ivory-bill “believer”. Where enthusiasts are patriotic,
masculine, and hopeful, the skeptic is anti-American, emasculated, and pessimistic. The
interloper in the ivory-bill narrative is the figure of the scientist, or those who believe dominant
narratives and USFWS logics for delisting. They are an individual who comes in to the ivory-

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bill’s environment and produces knowledge without adequate literacy or experience in the
Louisiana backwoods. Thus, that dominant narratives come from an emasculated source,
someone separate from the rugged masculinity of being able to experience wilderness to the
extent that hunters do. Ivory-bill extinction becomes an attack on masculinity and the lifeways of
early conservationist logics that still permeate Dixie states. Affirming ivory-bill life through
extinction refusal exhibited by enthusiasts affirms space, nation, and identity in these myriad
ways.
Delisting the ivory-bill from the endangered species act introduces the interloper as
potential land developers, the corporate elite, who are interested in repurposing the land from its
current protected status. But the interloper also remains a threat in enthusiast narratives if ivorybills were found, (delegitimizing the figure of the scientist), through the threat of governmental
regulation. In this case, the Endangered Species Act of 1973 promises governmental regulation,
however takes on the status of interloper in cases where private property is at stake. The
regulation of land is good when it protects from the corporate elite, but becomes the strong arm
of the governmental elite when directed towards private property. Ivory-bill woodpecker
enthusiasts create an impossible situation to overcome if the existence of the bird were really the
core anxiety of the group. Indeed, when private property is at stake, the existence of the bird is
suddenly shuffled to secondary importance. Thus, the ivory-bill is a vehicle for defining a
complex, patriarchal, relationship to the control of land.
When Hope becomes Faith: The Lord-God Bird
The ivory-bill was further primed to carry a narrative of hope in the delisting proposal
because the bird had a history of being connected with faith during the 20th century. The ivorybill woodpecker is also known to many as the Lord God Bird, the Lord Bird, and the Grail Bird

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among its narratives. With titles like Lord, God, and Holy Grail already present amongst the
bird’s nickname, religious connection is not so much of an undertone as it is signaling the ivorybill as a receptacle of faith for the enthusiast community. The nickname “Lord God Bird”
allegedly came about because of surprised exclamations people would make (“Lord god that’s a
whacking big bird!”) upon seeing the size of the bird (Cokinos, 2000). The biggest woodpecker
in the United States, the ivory-bill cuts an impressive silhouette, however the nickname has
recently taken on alternative religious meaning granted to it by the enthusiast community as seen
in Lena’s comment on the docket below:
“It would be a horrible shame, as. it has been in the past, to let this bird, which is
referred to in some holy ways, to be finally wiped off the earth, simply because the
current government just doesn't think its still out there.” (Lena, Endangered and
Threatened Species, 2021)
Tim Gallagher’s firsthand account of his 2004 sighting and the expeditions to find the ivory-bill
referenced it as the “Grail Bird” because of its elusiveness and rarity that seeing it was
considered “the holy-grail to birders” (Gallagher, 2006).
In How Climate Change Comes to Matter, science and technology studies scholar
Candice Callison explores how faith-forward evangelical communities reckon with the science
and logics of climate change. She surmises that those evangelical orientations to the natural
world position environmentalism as a “moral issue” (Callison, 2014: 124). To become moral,
scientific facts undergo an act of “translation” as they move from one epistemological
community to another, and to become valid in evangelical space, they must be “blessed” or
accepted by respected members in the community (137). For ivory-bill enthusiasts, who view the
extinction of the bird as an attack on their lifeways, local history, and lived experience, the bid to
delist the bird is in many ways a moral issue because it invalidates the religious overtones of

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Manifest Destiny and their roles as protectors of the land. The call to delist the bird is not only
“unblessed” by community leaders but also actively rallied against and denied.
Enthusiasts, enthusiastically, pick up on the bird’s connection to religious rhetoric. A
self-proclaimed ivory-bill “hunter” (searcher) in the community is Cristopher Carlisle, who’s
blog “Kints” detailed his search for the bird from 2014-2019 with an “epilogue” bookending the
search published in early 2021. Carlisle identifies as a “faith-based ornithologist” with his blog
following his “quest” to find the elusive bird (Carlisle, 2014). Matt Courtman’s Mission
Ivorybill, and its affiliated company The Louisiana Wilds are faith-based wilderness education
groups that promote teaching the wonders of the American wilderness and biodiversity as “Gods
creations” (Mission Ivorybill, 2022a). Courtman has talked previously about how the word
“mission” in Mission Ivory-bill is a reference to mission religions who grow by spreading word
and gospel to new communities. Belief in the ivory-bill becomes synonymous with belief and
faith in religious organizing. Mission Ivorybill and Louisiana Wilds owner, Matt Courtman has
repeatedly stated that finding definitive proof of the ivory-bill’s existence is his life’s calling or
“higher calling” in both media outlets and among Mission Ivorybill weekly meetings, positioning
ivory-bill life as a moral issue and hinge their religious identity on the bird’s extancy (Mission
Ivorybill, 2022a).
Proclamations of Hope and Faith in docket comments
A prominent narrative that emerged from the commentary on the ivory-bill docket was
one of hope. The stakes of hope vary amongst the comments but are mainly centered around
either hope for ivory-bill life or for hope for other life inscribed onto the ivory-bill body.
Amongst commenters, it was a common theme that simply “having hope” was enough to affirm
the life of the woodpecker. To this end, one commenter simply writes,

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“For a species which is renowned for elusiveness, I cannot justify giving up on this
species.” (Cord, Endangered and Threatened Species, 2021)
Cord’s comment draws on the historical reasoning attributed to the century of
ambivalence about ivory-bill’s presence in biodiversity monitors. The bird’s long presence in the
ESA and later its inclusion into the Red List were narrativized in hope comments as displays of
faith in ivory-bill life rather than bureaucratic ambivalence. Comment of this kind are peppered
throughout appeals on the docket. Below, comments by Lena and Donovan in the docket read,
“I implore to you please give these rare magnificent birds the courtesy of considering the
possibility they ARE still out there, and PLEASE keep them on the endangered species
list, and do not demote them to the (relative. but look what else we have found that's also
been declared extinct!?!) to the last word list. please give these birds the chance they
deserve.”(Lena, Endangered and Threatened Species, 2021)
“Perhaps it is vain hope, but hope changes things. We cannot give up on one of the most
iconic birds in the history of American conservation, or put at risk other species in shared
habitats.” (Donovan, Endangered and Threatened Species, 2021)
In “hope” comments like Donovan’s and Lena’s, USFWS’s proposal to delist the bird was
seen as the agency “giving up hope”. Comments in this nature appealed to the bureaucratic
decision as if it were an interpersonal interaction and not a bureaucratic entity. Hope in this
manner was tied directly to the ambivalence of biodiversity databases in confidently listing the
bird as either extant or extinct. Writing that they (the commenter) had hope the ivory-bill was
still extant was a bid not to delist the bird on the basis of community support.
The second narrative of hope that took place in the comments was the narrative of hope
for humanity in the abstract. Commenters who drew on this type of hope, argued that the ivorybill needed to remain extant because if not, what hope was there for other futures.
“Please do not extinguish any hope there is of making a definitive re-discovery, by
removing protections to the IBWO's potential habitat” (Alison, Endangered and
Threatened Species, 2021)

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This type of abstract hope is exemplified from Alison’s comment above which contains a deep
anxiety about the existential threat extinction posed for the future. Comments in this vein often
also draw on narratives of protection as they overlap in how commenters perceive ivory-bill life
as a site for potential other life. If the ivory-bill was listed as extinct in this narrative, then it was
tantamount to giving up on other endangered species. Thus, the ivory-bill comes to stand in as a
harbinger of extinctions to come. Related to the narrative of hope-for-humanity, many responses
in this vein also remarked on the unprecedented proposal to delist twenty-three species. Though
done for economic purposes, the batch delisting of twenty-three species was an event that had
come on the tail of life changing global events such as the Covid-19 pandemic and a rise in
violent wildfires. These events destabilized taken for granted lifeways of many Americans, and
helped make the existential threat extinction posed imminent and real.
Hope and faith are constantly evoked in enthusiast discourse about the ivory-bill
woodpecker alongside comments about land and wilderness. Constant affirmations such as “I
want to believe the ivory-bill is still alive” and “I have faith in the ivory-bill” pepper across
ivory-bill enthusiast platforms. Callison’s theorization of how facts come to matter is later taken
up by communication scholar Emma Frances Bloomfield who writes on the communication
strategies in communicating climate change to climate skeptics. For Bloomfield, environmental
evangelicals are a complex multivocal communities whose different orientations towards
thinking about the environment necessitate different styles of communication. She draws a hard
line between climate skeptics and climate deniers, arguing that where climate skeptics are open
to communication, deniers will not enter conversation in good faith (Bloomfield, 2019). In the
public commentary on the docket, faith and hope arguments against the delisting took up denier
logics because they created a binary between those who believed in the bird and those who did

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not, ostensibly dividing the community into either those who are pro-extinction and “believers”.
Belief and hope rhetoric in USFWS’s public commentary section of the National Register
similarly echo sentiments of faith in the bird’s existence as a way to offset the culpability of
people in destroying the woodpecker’s habitat. In doing so, ivory-bill enthusiasts tap into a
longstanding rhetoric of the sacredness of American landscapes and the connection of American
wilderness to notions of Manifest Destiny.
Forming an Ivory-bill Enthusiast Community Online
The public availability of the comments from the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s
September 29th proposal meant that a community of like-minded folks coalesced. Commenters
organized off of the federal register, and searched out organizations and groups on social media
who had posted comments on the docket. The USFWS delisting catalyzed interested individuals
and stakeholder communities to come together in ways that built up the amateur community
separate from experts. United by shared outrage at the USFWS’s proposed delisting of the ivorybill, commenters on the National Register found each other primarily through Facebook. In 2011,
the original ivory-bill woodpecker interest group “The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker- Rediscovered,”
was organized by amateurs who were dissatisfied with the loss of momentum in Ivory-bill
searches post-2009. Membership to Rediscovered grew out of the September 29th delisting and
community membership spiked to 6.7k members (The Ivory-billed Woodpecker- Rediscovered,
n.d.). The early days of Rediscovered after September 29th mimicked comments in the National
Register with commenters sharing their thoughts on the decision to delist, with the added
advantage of being able to comment and engage others in discussion. In the public comments of
the ivory-bill docket, comments stood on their own, with no interaction with other commenters.
Facebook groups however allowed for members to like, dislike, and interact with posts from

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others. Content of 2021 posts in the group were typically grouped around members expressing
their dissatisfaction of the USFWS proposal (content and form), discussing the habits and history
of the ivory-bill woodpecker, and deliberating on lines of evidence that members submitted as
proof the woodpecker lived on.
The resurgence of the ivory-bill woodpecker in public life after September 29th also
catalyzed new members in the Rediscovered community to post their own sightings or proof of
ivory-bill life. A popular trend in the Facebook group that offered evidence of ivory-bill life,
were discussions about the vastness of nature and the impenetrability of the old growth forests
ivory-bills lived in. Comments discussed the inability of scientists to completely search the
cypress old growth forests thus were therefore invalid forms of knowledge production. A
consequence of disproving scientists in this way, is that ivory-bill enthusiasts associating the
critique of science structures as evidence that the ivory-bill lived. In short, because scientists who
claim the ivory-bill is extinct are wrong due to their survey, then the ivory-bill must be alive.
Here, the statistical and population models of ivory-bill assessments became invalid because they
were not assessments in conducted in the complete space and environment where the bird lived.
Burgeoning critiques in the Rediscovered opened the group to debates amongst the
commenters and posters. Because the ivory-bill was gaining media attention as the poster species
for the delisting proposal, the group attracted a wide variety of interested folks who wanted to
better understand the story of the bird. Admission to Rediscovered was open and the group took
off as the primary hub to discuss all things ivory-bill. Ivory-bill discussions existed across
various birding forums and blogs however birding forums were strict in their moderation of posts
and were attuned to the tense history of the 2009 ivory-bill searches which led to expert-amateur

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fallout. In contrast, Rediscovered attracted many amateurs and story-interested folk and allowed
for conversation to entertain a wider scope of ivory-bill speculation.
Commenters and active posters in Rediscovered quickly became siloed into two camps.
Either you were a “believer” in ivory-bill life and extancy or you were a skeptic. “Believers” in
the group would post about hoping to find evidence of the bird’s existence soon in their posts. If
a post asking for more information or critiquing believer rhetoric and logic was posted, these
commenters were termed pessimists or “naysayers” who brought down the mood in the group.
Most believers viewed skeptics and “scientific experts” who were wary of evidence of life, as
folks who actively wanted the ivory-bill to be dead. A person became labeled as a “naysayer” or
“skeptic” for choosing to believe scientific assessments of the bird or by questioning how
evidence was formed and whether it was legitimate or not. Individuals who believed the ivorybill to be extant and simply eluding monitoring and identified as “believers,”27 resurfaced the
narrative of hope that spun through protest comments to delist the bird in the National Register.
Conversations devolved to commenters critiquing others on what the nature of evidence was, and
whose evidence was to be prioritized in validating knowledge. Tensions from the 2009 search
resurfaced in these groups, Rediscovered had been made by members affiliated with Project
Coyote and other amateur stakeholders in the expedition, and, facing critique once again,
implemented massive moderation to crack down on toxic commentary.
Unhappy with the number of “naysayers” and trolls in the group, core groups of ivorybill enthusiasts, many of whom were among the National Register commenters formed
alternative groups where admittance was carefully monitored. Facebook groups such as Ivory27 The choice of the word “believer” to reference communities who maintained the ivory-bill was extant and simply
unfound, is a curious choice of word. Everyone involved in the story of the ivory-bill believed in the existence of the
bird. The “believer” label was instead in reference to the bird’s lively status in the immediate present.

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billed Woodpeckers Fly! and Ivory-billed Woodpecker Sightings, Discussion, Research, more
formed to curb “naysayer” and skeptic comments. The premise of these groups was to begin with
the belief that the ivory-bill was alive in the wild. Thus, evidence would not be based on whether
it was valid or not, but rather how that evidence built a compelling case for ivory-bill life.
Included below are screenshots about both of these satellite groups that highlight the structural
shift in how the woodpecker should be approached. In the first screenshot, taken from Sightings,
Discussion, Research, members are limited to posting to certain topics. Each of these topics
premises the existence of a stable but elusive ivory-bill woodpecker population. Fly! in contrast,
explicitly states that the “persistence of the species is not a question or topic for debate in this
forum.”

Figure 7, 8 “About” pages for the Facebook groups Ivory-billed Woodpecker Sightings, Discussion, Research, more and Ivorybilled Woodpeckers Fly! (Ivory-billed Woodpecker Sightings, Discussion, Research, n.d.; Ivorybilled Woodpeckers Fly!, n.d.)
In limiting the discussion to premising the ivory-bill as extant, these groups outright refused the
possibility of extinction. That the bird was elusive from 1944 on meant that the lack of evidence
for ivory-bill life from 1944 on became restructured to exclude death.

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Today, Rediscovered and its associated ivory-bill discussion groups Fly! and Sightings,
Discussion, Research are tamer. Hyper-moderation of chats and commentary have flattened
discussion to sharing links about extinction narratives that resonate with the ivory-bill’s story.
Popularly, videos and links about rediscovered species regularly make appearances on the
groups, a sustained narrative of hope undergirding these posts. If the species in this
article/video/podcast can be rediscovered after X amount of time, then the Ivory-bill woodpecker
can as well. These posts garner the most amount of interaction from members who respond
positively in comments in support of the message. The rhetoric of hope continues.
Finally, the Facebook groups are repositories of ivory-bill sightings in material culture. In
fact, the majority of posts that make it through the moderators in Rediscovered are posts of
appreciation about the woodpecker’s form. While posting about live sightings of the ivory-bill is
contested and rocky territory of the group, recalling some of the brutal division of unmoderated
conversations about the bird’s existence, posting irruptions of the ivory-bill in daily life is safe
territory. This is because despite Rediscovered hosting both “believers,” “naysayers,” and the
folks in between, all groups share a general aesthetic appreciation of the bird. Thus, the image of
the ivory-bill is shared through casual sightings members have with the birds form in material
culture. This takes form through images shared of ivory-bill taxidermy in museums, and of
carvings, sculpture, and art. When the rock group Foo Fighters performed at the Walmart AMP
in Rogers, Arkansas on June 14, 2023, their poster featuring an ivory-bill evoked admiration and
responses from the enthusiast community because of the bird’s presence.

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Figures 9, 10 Foo Fighters poster including three species of Woodpecker native to Arkansas. The largest bird in the center
depicts and ivory-bill woodpecker. Poster made by Pedro Correa for the Foo Fighters concert in Rogers, AR (Correa, 2023). The
second photo is a screenshot from the discussion about the poster in Rediscovered (The Ivory-billed Woodpecker Rediscovered,
2023).
Ivory-bill ephemera and its aesthetic form makes up the majority of posts across
Facebook groups today. These post documenting sightings of ivory-bill’s “in the wild” are group
users sharing where the ivory-bill crops up in social life. Popularly in this theme, ivory-bill
taxidermy is posted from its presence in museums across the United States. The rhetoric of
posting instances of interaction with the image of the ivory-bill as an encounter or sighting is
especially interesting as it coopts birding and searching language used when encountering living
birds. Thus, where searching for living ivory-bills has become a moderated and censored post in
these groups, using the same language to talk about interactions with the ivory-bill’s form in
public life has become widely accepted and celebrated.

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Figures 11, 12, 13, 14 Examples of Ivory-bill ephemera shared in enthusiast groups today. From left to right, Ivory-bill carving
(Ivorybilled Woodpeckers Fly!, 2022), ivory-bill oil painting (Ivorybilled Woodpeckers Fly!, 2022.), a post sharing Ray Nelson’s
ivory-bill art (Ivorybilled Woodpeckers Fly!, 2022., Nelson, 2006), and an ivory-bill ceramic bowl (Ivorybilled Woodpeckers Fly!,
2022).
Posts sharing ivory-bill ephemera offer sites of appreciation for group members to celebrate the
image of the bird and its social meanings. They are moments where users are able to engage with
the ivory-bill as a symbol of its life and its mediations in social life outside of the slippages of its
extant/extinct status. Paintings, sculptures, and image reproductions of the bird are always
displayed in a larger context within these groups. Not only do members engage with them by
appreciating the physical form of the bird and its associations, but also by appreciating the
“sighter,” thanking them for sharing their contribution of an ivory-bill in the world. The majority
of ephemera posted in these groups show the ivory-bill as a lively and dynamic animal, in flight
or at rest but alive.
Where posting images of a “live” ivory-bill and discussing potential sightings in these
groups have become sights where deliberation has stalled, the social life of the ivory-bill is
another story entirely. Thus, the social life of the ivory-bill and its lively forms, comes to replace
the living bird. Where extinction is a debate and concern with ivory-bill sightings in the woods,
in public life the bird remains vibrantly alive.

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The proliferation and occupation Facebook groups with reproducing the lively form of
the ivory-bill woodpecker through sharing ephemera is part of the enthusiast community’s way
of refusing extinction. The lively forms displayed in shared photos of ivory-bill materials and
reproductions present the bird as energetic and alive. The preoccupation of the community with
reproducing “living” ivory-bills is especially seen in contrast to the enthusiast community’s
interactions with ivory-bill death. Here is where taxidermy becomes a curious material that
enthusiast groups engage with.
Figures 15, 16 Ivory-bill taxidermy from the California Academy of Sciences. Photos taken by author (California Academy of
Sciences, 2022, photo by author).
Taxidermy, or the posing of animal skin into a life-like form after death, has been a craft
within birding circles since the ivory-bill was discovered. The bird, by merit of being a
charismatic and striking bird, alongside its rarity, was a particularly sought after for skin
collectors and ornithologists over the 18th and 19th century. A consequence of the ivory-bill’s
popularity meant that the hunting, preserving, and selling of ivory-bill skins was a particularly
developed industry. Today, many ivory-bill skins remain in good preserved condition.
Taxidermized ivory-bills alongside many ephemera are also posted in enthusiast spaces. Because
taxidermy is in its traditional form recreation of the animal in life, the form is life-like, often
depicting the bird at rest (for preservation purposes) though a rare few show the bird in flight.

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When enthusiasts interact with taxidermized ivory-bills there is a tension between appreciating
the woodpecker as a piece of ephemera and as reminder of ivory-bill death and dominant
narratives of extinction. As a piece of ephemera, ivory-bill taxidermy shows the bird as alive,
validating the preoccupation enthusiast communities have with depicting the birds in relationship
with the natural world as seen in the photos above where two taxidermized woodpeckers sit
perched on a branch.
Taxidermy is a craft of contradiction; it uses the stuff of once living species to reimbue
the bodies with symbolic life. Thus, taxidermy is a pastiche of life from death of that species.
Enthusiasts interacting with taxidermized posed bodies in ivory-bill communities appreciate the
symbolic life of the ivory-bill form as material ephemera of the bird, but also recognize that it
comes from the death of an ivory-bill body. While the death of an individual is by no means
indicative of species extinction, taxidermy presents an uncomfortable moment where the
enthusiast is interacting with a dead body of the bird. This discomfort is more clearly seen when
ivory-bill enthusiasts engage with study skins and collection skins of the bird. These skins are
unposed hunted forms of ivory-bills sold to study collections and museums but were never posed
for life-like presentation. In contrast to ivory-bill taxidermy, study skins make no pretense of
liveliness in their display. They are preserved stiffly and uniformly unless to showcase a
particular element of their physical anatomy that may be unique or indicative of ivory-bill
identification.

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Figures 17, 18 Ivory-bill study skins from the Harvard collection at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. (Harvard
Museum of Comparative Zoology, 2022, photo by author).
Positive engagement with study skins in enthusiast Facebook groups is most notably seen in
Fly!! And Sightings, Discussion, Research, and the Mission Ivorybill page, the Facebook groups
who broke away from interaction in the parent group Rediscovered because of “naysayer” and
“skeptic” presence. In these groups study skins and specimens are interacted with as tools in
study about the bird. These forms are sites of reference of visual markers for enthusiasts who
engage with ivory-bill searches. Taxidermized forms are among the most popular points of
comparison and reference over written accounts of legitimate sightings or artistic depiction
because they utilize the material and body of the bird itself in the creation of a lively form.
Pictured below is a post from Mission Ivorybill where study skins were used by the group to
attempt to empirically identify ivory-bill coloration for future photographic analysis of blurry
images. In another group, a commenter lamented the amount of study skins saying that while
they knew this was important for artistic and scientific purposes the sight of so many dead ivorybills made them sad. These posts demonstrate that one of the primary methods for thinking about
study skins for many ivory-bill enthusiasts is through associating them with knowledge

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production about the bird to be used in future interactions with the bird’s form. Mission
Ivorybill’s post importantly sidesteps thinking about bird death inherent in the study skins by
putting these skins to use to find ivory-bill life. Commenters who lament ivory-bill death when
study skins are displayed such as the commenter above, associate the forms with the production
of lively ephemera.
Figure 19 Screenshot from Mission Ivorybill’s page showing how taxidermized and study specimens are being used by lay
communities to continue making knowledge about the woodpecker to further the search for ivory-bill life (Mission Ivorybill, n.d.).
Dead bodies of ivory-bill woodpeckers are contested sites in enthusiast communities
because they force community engagement to associate their loved bird with death. It is in these
spaces that the groups preoccupation with ivory-bill life becomes all the more apparent. The lack
of unlively forms in ephemera alongside the refusal to consider the ivory-bill as extinct means
that enthusiasts communities reproduce ivory-bill life symbolically. The bird’s symbolic life
eclipses its embodied ones in enthusiast communities which is seen through enthusiasts adopting

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bird encounter rhetorics when interacting with the woodpecker’s form in material culture.
Replacing live ivory-bill sighting narratives with lively ivory-bill “sightings” allows groups to
minimize the threat of death and extinction in the bird’s narrative. These birds are alive and
thriving because of the reproduction of its lively form in material culture. The messiness of
extinction, and these groups relationship with ivory-bill death, are neatly sidestepped.
Conclusion
The stakes of ivory-bill life are thus myriad and layered. The refusal community who
loves the bird has a personal and communal incentive to keep the bird alive and affirm the social
meanings that the ivory-bill symbolizes. For these groups, the ivory-bill is a symbol of ecological
stability and of a nature unaffected by a rapidly transforming ecosystem. Even though the ivorybill disappeared from the public eye in the mid 20th century, expert and governmental narratives
kept it alive in the ESA and the IUCN Red List, premising that a species could be cryptic and
unknown but also alive. This narrative of liminality, of being gone but remaining present,
sustained the woodpecker’s social life until 2021 when this disparity was challenged by a
delisting proposal. The USFWS proposal however didn’t account for the importance of liminality
in affirming the life of the bird. Ivory-bill enthusiasts refused ivory-bill extinction on the basis
that while there was no indisputable proof the bird was alive, there was also no indisputable
proof to the contrary. Additionally, since the bird’s disappearance, it’s social life became a
symbol for the community that loved it. Thus, the enthusiast community saw the USFWS
proposal to delist the woodpecker as an attack on the values inscribed onto the bird. The
extinction of the ivory-bill transcends beyond the form of the bird itself but to its social live and
social value.

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The social presence of the ivory-bill woodpecker has persevered to maintain an active
social life in several forms. The bird has retained social salience through its environmental
association with the old growth forests of the Dixie states. Thus, any species extant in its biotic
community is a representation of the bird itself. We see this through enthusiast’s insistence that
the bird remain extant in order to protect other species in its environment. It is also seen through
the recollection of the myth of wild America, as a symbol of Manifest Destiny ideologies for
male settlers to establish themselves as important contributors to a nation on the rise. The ivorybill also represents a pre-industrial past free from anxieties about environmental impact and
climate change. The bird’s decline and disappearance is widely attributed to logging,
development, and the deforestation of its habitat. Despite this, the bird’s social presence is
thriving through its long historical inclusion in the history of environmentalism in America.
Thus, while the bird itself has disappeared from the public eye, its social presence is flourishing
through the connections and associations built by interaction with its image and memory.28 These
interactions are so loaded with meaning and importance, from being foundational to personal
identities, to offering a balm when thinking about environmental crises, that the delisting of the
ivory-bill becomes an unacceptable scenario for many.
28 Another association still, is the birds phenotypic similarly to the pileated woodpecker, another large woodpecker
who is found throughout the United States. Though smaller than the ivory-bill, the pileated’s crest (red for males,
black for females) and its relatively large size (16-18 inches for mature adults), make the bird consistently
misidentified with the ivory-bill. Often, well-meaning individuals will post in ivory-bill Facebook groups or birding
forums excited that they have evidence of an ivory-bill sighting and provide a photograph of a pileated.

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Chapter 2: (What) Remains of the California Grizzly
Figure 20 State Flag of California depicting the California grizzly
I recommend the Natural History Museum’s local history exhibit Becoming Los Angeles
to anyone who visits. A local history exhibit in a Natural History Museum is a curious thing, out
of place among mammal halls, dinosaur halls, and geology exhibits. But for California, and Los
Angeles is no exception, so much of historical identity is tied up in conversations steeped in the
natural world. As an urban oil field, Los Angeles infrastructure gestures towards the geological
and paleontological. The city’s history as the home of the film industry was partially due to
Southern California being so ecologically diverse that filmmakers didn’t have to travel far to
imitate scenes from the Mediterranean to Mars (Paramount Studios, 1927). Los Angeles is
particularly famous for its urban megafauna with the wild mountain lion P-22 living in Griffith

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Park until his death in 2022. There is a reason one of the taxidermy dioramas in the North
American mammal hall has a scene depicting a house cat being eaten by coyotes.
The exhibit begins with artifacts depicting Tongva-Kizh and Chumash indigenous
lifeways, these were the groups that occupied the land before settler colonization and the
California Mission system disrupted the coast. It continues through the arrival of the railroad, the
emu industry, the oil industry and then the film industry, and it finishes in a grand ofrenda to the
city, an art project gifted to the museum by artist Ofelia Esparza as a love letter to Los Angeles.
One corner of the exhibit however is out of place, a stuffed grizzly with a small diorama of the
grizzly in chapparal built into the pedestal. The bear is easy to miss, hidden in the corner beside
the door, and visitors normally continue straight through to from the story of mission revolts to
gold panning equipment. The bear as an animal is out of place in an exhibit of manufactured
artifacts. As a piece of taxidermy however, it is where it belongs, a testament to the California
that loved it to death.
***
Through the narrative of the ivory-bill woodpecker, I explored how disappeared animals
obfuscate the boundaries between extinct and extant. The bird’s liminality can be narrativized to
allow refusal communities to circumnavigate extinction as a possibility entirely, instead
transforming extinction into a problem of bureaucracy that invites narratives of identity,
knowledge production, and faith to articulate with the uncertainty of the bird’s existence. The
California grizzly is in many ways a possible future for the ivory-bill.
Representations of the grizzly form can be found across California, from state buildings
to souvenir booths. In the extreme, one could argue that the bear is a possible future of the ivorybill for enthusiast communities should they accept its extinction. So much time has passed since

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grizzly extirpation that it is not controversial to call the bear extinct. As time passes for the ivorybill with no evidence of life, the bird’s narrative slowly moves closer to that of the bear. The
California grizzly went extinct in the early 20th century, before environmental regulations and
endangered species lists were institutionalized nationally. Its disappearance was never hotly
contested, and similar to other charismatic extinction events, the bears passing was marked
through the death of an individual.29 Like the ivory-bill, the grizzly has a long and embedded
history of identification with the communities that loved it, and in consequence has a robust
social life that is affixed to (but transcending) the body.
Contemporary extinctions like the ivory-bill and recent historical extinctions like the
California grizzly are anchoring moments where communities are able to connect materially with
abstract concepts such as “extinction”, “biodiversity loss”, and the “Anthropocene” because they
leave behind receipts and traces of life. The materials of extinct bodies have always been an
important part in thinking about extinction. It is only through the material presence of extinct
prehistoric species that we are able to know that some existed at all. The fossil record is a space
of imagination across scientific and social space. Dinosaur fossils loom large in popular culture
imaginaries, and quite literally in museum displays. It is specifically the material presence of
flora and fauna fossils that make knowing about the history of life on the planet possible. Fossils
however are only one part of extinction stories. The jump from prehistory to recorded history
didn’t mark the end of extinctions. Rather, it marked a shift of how species death and the
material record of the extinct coalesced in popular public memory.
29 Martha, the last passenger pigeon died in captivity in the Cincinnati Zoo. Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island
tortoise similarly died in the spotlight in the Galapagos in 2012. Monarch, though not materially the last of its kind
(others were spotted in the wild), was presented as the “Last California Grizzly” and his death marked a public
passing for the bear.

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Where fossilized records of extinction evoked imaginaries of what the world was like
before people, historical and modern extinctions hold different narratives in popular culture.30
The fossil record has a very different place in human imaginaries apropos species death. Ancient
extinctions are removed from the anxiety of anthropogenic climate change and environmental
disruption. Dinosaur extinctions happened in an abstract past with their extinction due to
catastrophic global disasters. Even in the Miocene era, the extinctions and decline of fauna and
flora which may have interacted with early humanity, is attributed to a variety of overlapping
factors, only part of which was anthropogenic impact (Ehrlich & Ehrlich, 1981).
Modern and historical extinction in contrast, cannot be separated from environmental
impacts and the historical processes of colonization, industrialization, and development. Thus,
contemporary extinctions are inflected with power, bound to an affective landscape of loss, and
entangled into webs of multispecies interaction. In their introduction to a collection of essays that
interrogate the multispecies relationships within extinction stories, Deborah Bird Rose, Thom
van Dooren, and Matthew Chrulew identify extinction as a process located in a crossroads of
cultural and social connection. Modern stories of extinction are never solitary and always
embedded in ecology and society (2017: 5). Thus, contemporary extinctions offer sites of
analysis where we are able to interrogate how communities narrate stories of species
disappearance. Historical extinctions with long histories, as is the case with the California
grizzly, are especially salient as their narratives span centuries with some narrative threads
reaching a final, deadly, conclusion.
30 When species disappearance began being noted in early European naturalist writings it was treated as part of the
natural order. In Origin of Species, Charles Darwin tackles extinction writing that extinction is a natural part of
evolution and should be expected as a part of a healthy ecosystem. He writes: “As it seems to me, the manner in
which single species and whole groups of species become extinct accords well with the theory of natural selection”
(1902: 322).

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The California grizzly is an animal of contradiction. Known as “the bear on the state
flag,” the grizzly is lauded and celebrated as the State Animal of California. Synonymous with
the liveliness of Californian lifeways, the bear’s image runs rampant across California
identification cards, official seals, and popular material culture. Curiously, it is also the only
extinct State Animal in the United States of America.
The California grizzly’s rise to state animal coincided with its declining populations.
Thus, while the bears symbolic life was rapidly concretizing in popular culture, its species was
simultaneously disappearing from Californian ecosystems. Grizzly populations were abundant
during the European expansion and colonialization of California and was considered an
archetypal figure of Californian wild-ness. The history of Californian settler development is
entangled with the grizzly in myriad ways. Often the grizzly was an antagonistic figure in
narratives of agricultural development, gold mining, and exploration of wilderness. The bear was
a dominant figure in an uncontrolled ecosystem, so in domesticating Californian landscapes and
instituting settler dominance of the land, the grizzly’s form was an attractive symbol to adopt and
control (Snyder, 2003; Alagona, 2018). Domesticating the grizzly into the narrative of California
took the form of controlling the grizzly’s material presence in Californian life.
In this chapter I examine the ways in which the materials of recent extinct bodies come
to be negotiated in the communities that keep them alive. Returning to Deborah Bird Rose’s
assertion, that “we save those we love,” the case of the California grizzly demonstrates how the
memory and symbolic life of an extinct animal is sometimes enough to maintain the species long
after its death (Rose, 2020). Contemporary extinctions leave behind traces, remains, and
materials that bolster the lively symbol of the species in the communities that love them,
sometimes to the minimization of the animal’s death entirely. In a survey cataloguing awareness

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of grizzly absence, researchers found that only a quarter of Californians were aware of the
grizzly’s extirpation (Hiroyasu, Miljanich, & Anderson; 2019). Its social and symbolic presence
is so widespread in popular culture and public spaces across California that its death is almost
completely eclipsed.
Bearing Symbolic Life: Three famous California grizzlies
Figure 21 The Valley Center Bear (Valley Center Historical Museum, 2014)
Grizzly presence in public and civic life happens through mediated encounters with the
bear. Taxidermy presents an important liminal space between embodied life and social life of the
bear where one can see the shifting figurations of the California grizzly over the course of the
19th and 20th centuries. Where grizzly taxidermy in California begun as primarily hunting
trophies, growing awareness of the animal’s decline caused a shift to more naturalistic forms. In

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this chapter I interpret three preserved and taxidermized bears. First, I present the Valley Center
Bear, a grizzly turned hunting trophy and then re-turned into a California grizzly who resides in
the Valley Center Historical Museum. The Valley Center Bear is a charismatic grizzly whose
presence in the museum shows how California grizzly bodies are reinscribed with bear life even
after it is stripped from them. The Valley Center Bear, originally shot and mounted as a hunting
trophy, was a vehicle for an anthropocentric narrative, used to display proof of the hunter’s
bravery and prowess in killing it. At the time of the Valley Center bear’s death, grizzlies were a
difficult companion species to live alongside. Moreover, grizzlies had a stable and strong
population. Many of the grizzlies that were hunted for game or pest control in the 19th century
were hunted at a time where there was little threat to endangering the species. Though today we
view the Valley Center Bear as an example of extinct taxidermy, at the time of its preservation it
was one among many. With such a large population of grizzlies alongside a growing settler
presence, and shift towards agriculture, the species was displaced from its environments,
resulting in increased bear death. All the while, bear hunts grew in popularity as the animal was a
charismatic species and a high value hunting target. As grizzly life became unacceptable in
California, its social and symbolic life grew. As a trophy, the bear was primarily there to enact
the narrative of his death, foregrounding the hunters and present as an accessory to a hunting
story. Its presence in the historical museum of Valley Center is foremost one of upholding
community narratives of the town during settlement and development over the course of
Californian history, however its “bear-ness” was also restored as it is also displayed as a
California grizzly and not simply a hunting accessory.

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Figure 22 Monarch the California grizzly in storage at the California Academy of Sciences where he now resides (California
Academy of Sciences, 2022, photo by author).
Moving to the grizzly Monarch, a charismatic bear trapped and put on exhibit in a
paddock in Golden Gate Park in 1889, I untangle how grizzly symbolic life came to eclipse its
material life. In California communities, the life of the bear was no longer necessary for its
symbolic life, made evident from Monarch’s life and death. As a singular bear, and a lauded “last
of his kind” individual, Monarch had the burden of being an endling in captivity, shouldering
public mourning for the species. He was captured during the final days of the California grizzly
in the wild, before anthropogenic environmental impact and extinction became an anxiety of the
modern era. Captured on the behest of William Randolph Hearst, Monarch spent the rest of his
life in captivity and on display. Upon his death, he was preserved, taxidermized, and then
returned to being on display in the Memorial Museum (now the deYoung museum). During his

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life he was popularly labelled as “the last living grizzly” and posthumously known as the bear on
the flag.31 Monarch’s material remains present a particular moment of extinction is refused for
the California grizzly. His form has been out of the public eye these past few years while
preparators restored him to the vibrancy of a freshly taxidermized specimen, and he only
returned to being on display in August, 2024. Some of his treatment plan included fur fills,
stuffing replacement, skin toning, and a polarized glass case.
Figure 23 The Santa Barbara "California" grizzly bear on display in its diorama at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural
History (Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, 2023, photo by author).
Finally, the Santa Barbara bear is a grizzly taxidermized and mounted after the California
grizzly had gone extinct. The Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History’s California grizzly
display is an impressive and deeply indexical diorama of Californian wildlife. Every plant
choice, background detail, and addition to the diorama is made with the intent to represent
Californian nature. The centerpiece of the diorama, the taxidermized grizzly itself is thus
31 This popular narrative about the bear is incorrect. Monarch is not the bear on the California State Flag.

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inscribed with Californian identity and place through the narrative of its surroundings. A quick
trip to the Wikipedia page for general information about the California grizzly produces an image
of the Santa Barbara bear (California grizzly bear, n.d.). In every way, the Santa Barbara bear is
the quintessential California grizzly. What is particularly interesting then, is that the Santa
Barbara bear it is not a California grizzly at all. Rather, it is a Kodiak grizzly hunted and
mounted after the grizzly’s disappearance in 1924. The Santa Barbara bear is an important
specimen in denying extinction as it eschews species boundaries in favor of narrative and visual
vibrancy and demonstrates that people relate to extinct animals through the narratives people tell
of them.
Extinction Refusal of the definitely extinct
Though a species may be accepted as extinct, extinction refusal can still occur. The
California grizzly has not been allowed to die, and its memory and form have been continuously
reinvigorated and kept alive, obfuscating its extirpation. In contrast to the ivory-bill woodpecker
who has been embedded in a narrative of extant/extinct deliberation, historically accepted
extinction like the grizzly means that the act of maintaining liveliness happens elsewhere in the
bear’s social life. In the case of the California grizzly, this social life is maintained by the bear’s
continuing visual presence in form and in body across Californian public space. It is almost
impossible in California to enter a taxidermy hall or history museum without seeing a stuffed
California grizzly. Taxidermy is a curious way of maintaining social life as the animal’s presence
remains connected to its material form. While the species may be extinct, Californians are still
using its material remains to uphold its social presence, and we see this through the reanimation
and reclamation of California grizzly life through taxidermy. Once the California grizzly’s
decimation became a popular account, displayed skins shifted to accommodate the narrative.

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Where hunting trophy taxidermy of grizzlies were once the norm, grizzly taxidermy stylistically
shifted when people perceived their decline. An important quality of this shift in taxidermic style
from trophy taxidermy to capturing life with bear remains, was that the use and narrative of the
material skin adopted different qualities.
With the gradual decline and disappearance of the California grizzly, bear bodies in
natural poses became more and more common in the public eye. Poses where the bear was on all
fours was determined to be more lifelike showing how the bear might look if not stressed from
environmental factors and going about its day. “Natural forms” were ones where the grizzly was
exhibited outside of its interactions with people. While the bear’s presence in hunting stories was
that of a prize, bears in casual and relaxed poses gestured at narratives of the bear as part of an
ecosystem. In displaying the bear posed “naturally”, the taxidermy referenced the species in
abstract. In this case the California grizzly symbolized a California grizzly.
Through preservation, grizzly remains stay lively. Californian state narratives refuse
identity of the grizzly by premising lively narratives, footnoting the extinction of the grizzly in
favor of extending its lively symbolic narrative. The taxidermy of California grizzlies reflects the
choice to prioritize the symbolic life of the grizzly over the bears extirpation, either because they
were made during a time of grizzly abundance, free from anxieties about bear death and
extinction, or they were done in specific service to furthering the bears symbolic life. California
grizzly taxidermy allows for the bear to remains socially and tangibly salient. Extinction, as an
act of species disappearance, is refused.
The Stuff of Taxidermy
From lively species, to symbol, to material remains, the California grizzly is enacted in a
multitude of ways. Where science and technology studies scholar Annemarie Mol’s argument

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that “what we think of as a single object may appear to be more than one,” holds true for
extinction as a process, this is also the case for extinct species, and especially so for the
California grizzly (Mol, 2002: vii). Mol’s proposes the term enactment for thinking about how
known objects, whether a disease or a bear, are a mix of material and ‘how that material is
known’ by agents (Mol, 2002). Enactments are the situational collaborations of these actors who
work together to construct an object through the doing of the object. Ostensibly, how we know
an object is defined by our relationship to the object along with the situation we encounter it in
(Mol, 2002). For Mol, the interpretation of objects are inextricable from the conditions they are
met in. Thus “it is possible to understand [objects] as things manipulated in practices. If we do
this—if instead of bracketing the practices in which objects are handled, we foreground them—
this has far-reaching effects. Reality multiplies” (Mol, 2002: 4). In the case of the California
grizzly, one way the bear has been enacted through its encounters with hunters, ranchers, and
naturalists; the bear has been constructed as a living entity and a threat. For hunters and ranchers
who encounter the grizzly, they enact the threat of the bear by responding antagonistically. Thus,
the grizzly is created as a villain to Californian development, a symbol of “wild”-ness, and a
lively entity. However, contradictory narratives can be found where the grizzly is enacted as vital
to Californian development. The bear took up space an apex predator keeping an ecosystem in
balance and living in balance with other native species. In reference to Californian biodiversity,
the bear is enacted as a charismatic species and a representation of wilderness. In this situation,
the California grizzly is a species of importance and pride to the biodiversity and varied
ecosystems of California.
“California grizzly” does the work of many things. Initially, California grizzly references
the historical bear, that is, the living Ursus arctos californicus as it was when extant and present

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in the ecological communities of a past California and the topographies that would one day
constitute California. The historical grizzly is living and extant, reacting to the developing
environments around it. Later, California grizzly comes to reference a symbol, a set of meanings,
and a narrative that have been placed upon the image of the bear. California grizzlies as vehicles
of meaning persists past grizzly death and extirpation. This is seen through the prevalence of
grizzly symbols across popular and California statehood culture. California grizzly also comes
to reference a third thing; the remains and traces of the lively bear. Because the extinction of the
California grizzly is a modern event, only a century old, material traces remain of grizzlies still
remain. That is, their fur, teeth, and bones can be found in public and private spaces across
California. Often, grizzly remains are articulated in taxidermic forms, given the semblance of
animal life from human craftsmanship.
The social presence of the California grizzly has in many ways eclipsed its material forms
with many people often surprised by the bears extinction status (Hiroyasu, Miljanich, &
Anderson, 2019). What separates the California grizzly from most other taxidermic forms on
display in museums, is the bears extinct status alongside its lively narrative. Often, taxidermy of
the extinct is an unsettling curiosity, representing loss and the consequences of the multispecies
impacts the anthropocene has caused (Bezan, 2019). Animal studies scholar Sarah Bezan
suggests that for extinct species specifically, taxidermized forms hold greater emotional and
narrative weight as they are objects to anchor our anxieties about such concepts like species
extinction and species futures upon (211). But California grizzlies are examples of extinct
taxidermy that do not premise the story of how the species became extinct. Instead, as seen
throughout the cases that follow, grizzly taxidermy is fundamentally lively with the bears
extirpation a footnote in its display.

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Today, the core of what the California grizzly is, is the symbolic representation of the
bear. Combinations of grizzlies also exist in this chapter when I reference the California grizzly.
On enactment, Mol (2004) continues: “since enactments come in the plural, the crucial question
to ask about them how they are coordinated” (viii). The grizzly and its various social lives may
appear distinct, but they must be recognized for their collaborative effects. So, I return to the
collaborations between enactments of the California grizzly. The three disparate California
grizzlies I mentioned previously still remain inextricably tied together as they act in the domain
of “California grizzly”. I grapple with two particular connections across the many types of
California grizzly. I consider the material bear, which indexes the skin, bones and organic
presence of the bear in society. The material grizzly may be alive or dead, making it a
combination of the historical grizzly and the remains of the Californian grizzly. Similarly, the
modern Californian grizzly is a combination of the ways we interact with the grizzly in
contemporary space and as such, is a combination of the remains of the bear alongside is robust
social and symbolic presence. Thus, the California grizzly is a bear of multitudes. In the chapter
that follows, unless it requires precise clarification of which instance of the California grizzly is
being indexed, I refer to the bear in the singular: ‘The California grizzly.’
While the priority in modern taxidermy is presenting liveliness, we need to acknowledge
the death of the animal as prerequisite to taxidermization. For grizzly taxidermy, in order to
index bear life, bear death needs to occur. Early cabinets of curiosity and natural history
museums in Europe and North America would request collectors and travelers to take
particularly charismatic species and preserve them for study and spectacle. Though a small trade,
specimen collection companies were created to source unique or hard to obtain species and sell

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them to museums and private natural history collections.32 Thus, many species were killed
simply to be taxidermized to mimic life once more in an environment where they can be easily
viewed.
Taxidermized and preserved species have social capital in society in that they mediate
how humans look at the natural world (Haraway, 1984; Poliquin, 2012). Much like study skins,
taxidermized animals represent both the species in abstract and an individual in particular. In
cases where the animal is charismatic or known this differentiation becomes easily distinguished.
For example, Los Angeles cougar P-22 is both an individual (“LA’s famous mountain lion!”) and
representative of cougars as a species (Pratt-Bergstromm, 2016, Dell’Amore, 2013). In certain
cases, events of an individual species life become representative of more than its species
(Berland, 2019). As such P-22 came to represent Los Angeles urban ecosystems and urban
megafauna (Pratt-Bergstromm, 2016). The interest that natural history and museum taxidermists
have in creating a lifelike rendition of the animal from skin is often informed by a pedagogy of
learning and connecting with the natural world. So, unless tasked to taxidermy a pet or a
charismatic individual, their work is in how to represent a species through a singular body.
Getting the animal true to the dominant knowledge of its species is why dioramas often shift and
change to accompany the latest scientific findings about the species they are representing
(Portner, 2019). Thus, museum specimens have a vibrant social life as a pedagogical tool.
The California grizzly is created as symbolic life imbues the taxidermized skin. All three
bears discussed are instances where the stuff of the bear is inextricable with its symbolic
32 This is the case for the ivory-bill woodpecker. In the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, the biggest
collection of ivory-bills in the world, most of the the birds come from 3 specific sources: the Bryant collection, the
Kennard collection and the Brewster collection. Study skins and posed skins are always tagged with collection
information that is included in their accession card and their specimen tag. California grizzly skins, by merit of
being primarily skinned for trophy purposes and not for natural history collections have a more diffuse practice of
including information.

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narrative and life. All three major enactments of the California grizzly are at work in the domain
of the bear’s body. Preserved Grizzlies take their space front and center to demonstrate that
though the historical grizzly may be extinct, the bear, and crucially the remains of the bear, has
not been allowed to die. Rather, through taxidermy and preservation processes, the California
grizzly’s material body has been revivified in myriad ways. In grizzly taxidermy, the materials
that once made-up living bears are shaped post-death into lively re-animations of themselves. In
their re-animation, they are inscribed with new symbolic and civic life alongside any bear-ness
the taxidermist or curator chooses to show.
Grizzlies were a difficult companion species. A growing symbolic narrative of the grizzly
was threatened by the potential of live Grizzlies to unpredictably challenge it through their
behaviors. The extinction of the grizzly was the ultimate form of domesticating the bear so that
its social and symbolic potential wasn’t challenged. Domestication happened through extinction.
After extinction, domestication became about preserving grizzly life to represent bear-ness in the
symbolic way it came to be known. But, because preservation is not perfect, and bear materials
decay. Consequently, this decay defies California’s domestication of the grizzly into a symbol.
By refusing to be fully domesticated, rotting the archive, and refusing dominant narratives, the
California grizzly is still a player in social life. Decay is the agentive defiance of preserved skins.
And because these skins are grizzly skins, it is the defiance of the material bear to its symbolic
counterpart. The material bear is two things, it is the living grizzly and the dead grizzly.
Even in extinction grizzly bodies prove troublesome to dominant narratives of the grizzly
in public and civic life. As such they are agential, acting unto themselves in ways that may or
may not cooperate with other actors. The domestication of California grizzlies through
extirpation allowed people to determine the when, where, and how of grizzly encounters. In

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other words, the complete control of the setting acts as an apparatus of control for grizzly
presentation in society. Thus, the California grizzly today is entangled in human sociocultural
processes. The multispecies entanglement alongside the drive to domesticate the bear through
defining its parameters of encounter, echo’s themes in science and technology studies scholar
Karen Barad’s posthuman performative philosophy of agential realism. Barad speaks to Neil
Bohr’s philosophy that people come to knowledge through measurement control apparatuses.33
Barad continues his philosophy through theorizing that these apparatuses function beyond
physics. The way we know the world is constituted of moments of more-than-human cooperation, that is, intra-actions between “entangled agencies” (Barad, 2007: 33). Knowledge,
and in a less structured setting, knowing, is done through moments of connection. This
connection premises the importance of the material.
The material of objects, she argues, offers more than a narrative and meaning through
sociocultural interpolation of the object. Rather, matter has agency in addition to its space in
constructed scaffolds of knowledge (Barad, 2003). Materials and matter intra-act with people
and co-constitute meaning phenomenologically. Because matter is agentive, the non-human is
thus empowered through its materiality in the world. California grizzlies have a robust material
presence due to their historical charisma, civic importance, and long history of identifying
Californian lifeways as “Californian.” Though their material is often preserved and curated in
highly controlled spaces, the stuff of the bear still finds ways to act agentively, either performing
in harmony with dominant narratives, or disrupting those narratives through failing to perform to
narrative standards. This is often the case for bear hunting trophies-turned-museum taxidermy,
33 From a Western ontological frame. The claim of empirically measuring and relating to an object in order to know
it (objectively) is a Western and European centered philosophy (Shapin & Scafer, 1985) and a settler-colonial
philosophy to delegitimate indigenous and non-western practices of knowing (Grossman, 2023).

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where the pelt is left in bad condition from death wounds so that a second specimen needs be
sewn in to bolster the controlled image. Often in museum taxidermy exhibits, pelt aging and
decay leads to newer specimens being cycled through from time to time. In some cases, as was
the case in Santa Barbara, the initial grizzly on display was simply not impressive enough in size
and was swapped out for a larger bear. Monarch at the California Academy of Sciences was
recently considered an inferior specimen as his fur lightening over the century on display. Where
living species may be able to bolster displays through grafting or substitutions, California grizzly
bodies now only materially exist through their remains and as consequence are a capped, and
decaying, number.
Barad’s theory of agential realism allows us to consider the agency grizzly remains still
have in the archive. California grizzly remains act in defiance to maintaining the quality and
image in which they were popularized through age and wear which poses an uphill battle for
curators. In cataloguing the actions grizzly remains still take, the reactions of preparators and
curators to grizzly decay, and the materials available that can represent the material and symbolic
grizzly, the consequences of grizzly extinction for symbolic domestication start taking shape. To
continue making grizzly life, extinction must be refused.
Set on preserving the grizzly as a lively creature, preparators refuse the material
consequences of extinction through their bid to recover grizzly liveliness in the collection. The
commitment to maintaining the liveliness of California grizzly bodies is an act of extinction
refusal as it replaces the extinct bear with a lively social maquette of one. For grizzly bodies, life
is imposed upon them from their environments. True California grizzly skins and taxidermy

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today are aging and decaying despite their preservation to the extent that preparators are now
taking on tasks of skin restoration. 34
The California Grizzly’s Rise to State Animal
California grizzlies were a difficult companion species, yet their symbolic presence had
become core to California over the decades and centuries since settler presence. In 1846, prostate American farmers occupied the Mexican state house in Sacramento for three days, this
occupation became known as the “Bear Revolt” as the pro-statists adopted a flag with the
California grizzly on it (Snyder, 2003). When California later joined the United States as the 31st
state in 1850 it adopted Bear Revolt imagery as its official state seal and flag. The next 60 years
saw the decimation of already depleted grizzly populations while its symbolic presence rose to
replace grizzly numbers. Ultimately, the extinction of the grizzly allowed for full control of
grizzly narratives to be domesticated by Californian communities. If grizzlies were no longer an
unpredictable threat, their growing popularity as a vehicle of meaning and state narrative could
flourish sans clashes with living grizzlies. With advances in taxidermy and animal preparation,
narratives of California grizzlies were even able to use the fur and bone of the grizzly to
materialize the symbol in its domesticated, bodied form.
The stuff of the grizzly becomes a particularly interesting site of investigation where
extinction is constantly negotiated and even denied through animating skin and bones. Grizzly
bodies become sites of contest where the preservation and continuation of the bear’s social life
happens through the constant defiance of its death. The historical California grizzly is extinct, of
34 Preservation practices of animal skins is not a perfect art and as we move further from the extirpation date of the
California grizzly, these skins continue to defy dominant narratives through their decay and aging.

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that there is no doubt, however its bodies remain life-like and socially alive across museum,
civic, and public spaces.
The Natural History of the California Grizzly
The last California grizzly is widely believed to have last been seen in 1924 outside of the
Yosemite Wilderness (CA Grizzly Alliance, 2024; The California Grizzly Bear | La Brea Tar Pits,
2022). As California’s only species of grizzly, the bear strikes a charismatic silhouette distinct
from other species of native bears.35 At one point the biggest of California’s megafauna, the
California grizzly is a distinct subspecies of Ursus Arctos, the grizzly bear (Storer & Tevis, 1996;
Miller, Waits, & Joyce; 2006). Most closely related to the Kodiak grizzly of southern Alaska and
the Canadian Yukon, the California grizzly was a distinct subspecies due to their relative docility
and low aggression, along with their lack of a hibernation pattern (Lee et al, 2021; Snyder,
2003). California grizzlies were active year-round and populated most of the Californian
landscape. Preferring to stay west of the Sierra Nevada range and south of the Klamath Range in
Northern California, Ursus arctos californicus were isolated enough to have notable genetic
differences from other grizzly populations (Miller, Waits, & Joyce; 2006).
According to the state of California, the story of the California grizzly and its relationship
with statehood begins with the arrival of Europeans on the west coast (Snyder, 2003). Of course,
grizzly-human interaction goes back much further, with this bear interacting with indigenous
groups and appearing as an important figure across many indigenous cosmologies. But, it was
Juan Gaspar de Portolá’s 1769 expedition through California that first introduced the California
35 Today Californian geography hosts only the Black Bear. Several popular species of black bear reside in California:
the American black bear, California black bear, and Olympic black bear. While black bear species are charismatic
bears in their own right they are only a fraction of the size of a grizzly, with adult weighting an average of 300
pounds. Grizzly bears, in contrast weigh on average 500 pounds and are typically 1.5 to 2x the size of a black bear
(Know the Difference, n.d.)

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grizzly to the colonizing world (Snyder, 2003). The introduction of the bear to “Western society”
was a memorable event made in no small part by dramatic descriptions of meeting the species by
those in the expedition:
“In the afternoon as they had seen many traces of bears, six soldiers went out
hunting on horseback and succeeded in shooting one. It was an enormous animal:
it measured fourteen palms from the sole of its fee to the top of its head; its feet
were more than a foot long; and it must have weighed over 375 pounds.”
(Costansó & Brandes, 1970: 24)
The bears were so noteworthy to the expedition that they named a valley, “Valle de los osos,”
Valley of the Bears, after encountering dozens (Snyder, 2003).
The grizzly continued to figure in California history throughout its colonization and road
to statehood (Alagona, 2013) California grizzlies developed a reputation as being a badge of
honor for hunters and trappers. To successfully hunt and kill a grizzly was a display of
masculinity amongst 18th and 19th century society. Further, the grizzly’s troubling relationship
with new developments encroaching into their historic range meant that grizzlies increasingly
came into contact with the burgeoning ranching economy of California. Bear baiting and “Bear
and Bull” fights were common spectacles when “problem grizzlies” were captured instead of
killed due to their social status. So popular were bear fights that bear capturing became sought
after in some locales across California.36
Grizzlies also became symbolically associated with statehood and the narrative of
American Manifest Destiny. The first instantiation of the grizzly on a flag was in July 1846
during what would become known as the Bear Flag Revolt. Under control of the Mexican state,
California would not become a State in the USA until four years later on September 9th, 1850.
36 California grizzly bear and bull interactions and altercations in California also migrated back east where their
names became the moniker for types of markets in the establishing stock exchange. Today “bear” and “bull”
markets, which signify the rising and dropping of stocks, is in reference to these moments of California history.

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Unhappy with Mexican governorship an American group of settlers in California stormed and
occupied the capitol during the month of July under a flag with a California grizzly on it and
declaring California an independent republic (The Bear Flag Revolt, 2023). When California
joined the United States of America as its 31st state in 1850, it adopted a flag in ohmage to the
Bear Flag Revolt by keeping, but repositioning, both the star and California grizzly bear on the
fabric (Snyder, 2003). The new flag of California swapped out the stiff grizzly silhouette from
the Bear revolt for a more detailed sketch of the Ursus artcos califonicus, filling the animal in
with detailing the rather than simply silhouetting a shape onto the fabric. Later the bear on the
flag would be swapped once again for an 1856 sketch done by Charles Nahl for Hutching’s
Illustrated California Magazine, a naturalist publication that ran from 1856-1861 illustrating,
“the natural wonders of California” (Hutching’s & Co, 1856). Nahl’s grizzly was posed similarly
to the bear on the flag but consisted of more detailed sketching of the body of the grizzly with an
expressive face. Enthusiastically grinning, the expression on the bears face was so memorable
that Durbin van Vleck, the engraver responsible for turning illustrations for Hutching’s into
printable copy included the bears expression in the final printable illustration.
Figure 24 Charles Nahl's "Grizzly" (1852): This California grizzly is the model for the bear on the current iteration of the
Californian Flag (Nahl, 1852).

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Figure 25 Durbin Van Vleck’s rendition of Charles Nahl’s “Grizzly” 1855, the published engraving of Nahl’s bear that brought
his art to greater public consciousness alongside an article describing the charismatic bear in nature. This engraving was
published in “Hutching’s Illustrated California” magazine which was largely publishing naturalist and nature-oriented
narratives about the uniqueness of Californian landscape (Van Vleck, in Hutchings Illustrated California Magazine, 1856: 106).
The continued presence and charisma of the California grizzly in the public eye, as well
as the contested nature of the species interactions with humans, meant that grizzly populations
began to decrease and dwindle so that by the beginning of the 20th century the bear had become a
rarity in the wild, even while growing symbolic and civic importance. Today, the California
grizzly maintains a charismatic presence in Californian social identity, with constant occurrences
of their skin, bone, and likeness, in contemporary space. The confluence of their natural history
presence and state presence mean that grizzly skins and taxidermies are coveted by history and
science museums alike. Their symbolic fame supports a successful commercialization of grizzly
branded products. Finally, their connection to extant grizzly populations, and even more general
shared charisma amongst bear species of any type, mean that images and videos of live bears

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permeate news outlets, wildlife film streams, and even political gatherings.37 With the imagery
and vitality of the California grizzly as a lively and alive symbol, it is surprising for many to
learn of the bears extinction, because the stuff of the grizzly remains. Core to the grizzly’s lively
image is the presence of its material body. Furs and taxidermies of the bear offer sites where
people interact with the bears material legacy in often tactile and life-like experiences.
Of course, interaction with animals through their material traces is hardly a new notion.
Zoos, museums, private collections, and commercial shopping offer moments of human
interaction with animal and plant species where the display of nonhuman bodies is the primary
goal (Gregory & Purdy, 2015). Life itself is not always a requirement in these moments, as life
can be imitated through the taxidermic and preservation arts or imagined through the viewers
interactions with the dead. What makes the case of the California grizzly a curious site to
explore is that interaction with this animal’s materials can only happen through imagining life
and from life granted from without the Grizzly’s body. California Grizzlies exist only in a
posthumous social life. As more and more species face extinction, exploring how life is
distributed among the dead and disappeared is a calculated process. Some bodies tell better
stories, happier stories, and more useful stories than others. The California grizzly is only one of
these useful characters, with their bodies kept lively through taxidermy and public imagination.
Taxidermy as Mediated Representations of Life
Studies of taxidermy in culture exist interdisciplinarity across visual studies, art history,
and science studies. Feminist science and technology studies scholar, Donna Haraway’s
touchstone article, Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City
1908-1936 documents the relationship between taxidermy and the patriarchy. In her chapter she
37 In 2021 amidst the gubernatorial recall vote of Gavin Newsom, opponent John Cox campaigned around California
with a live, but sedated, Kodiak bear as a campaign stunt.

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argues that taxidermic display of animals fulfills the domestication of nature into a human
aesthetic of masculine dominion over nature (1984). These displays typify masculinity in
Rooseveltian naturalism which premised an extractive view of nature. That is, how nature could
be used to uphold societal constructs of patriarchy (Haraway, 1984). The emergence of museum
taxidermic displays and animal preservation in the American Museum of Natural History stems
from the history of big game hunting and trophy taxidermy (the preservation of animals for
trophy and conquest narratives). As with any art though, seeing the preservation of dead animalsturned-hunting trophies as indicative of taxidermy as a whole, diminishes the field to just one
aspect. The etymology of taxidermy stems from the Greek “arrangement” (taxis) and “skin”
(dérma). Thus, conceivably any craft that makes use of skin arrangement falls under the domain
of taxidermy. As such, skin preservation for study, the conservation of organic remains outside of
skin, and alternative practices of preserving organic remains in their “lively” state all come to
associate with taxidermic practice.
Art historian Rachel Poliquin (2012) identifies eight particular types of taxidermy in her
book The Breathless Zoo, which reclassifies taxidermy as an art form that is interested in the
connection between humans and the longing for witnessing non-human life. Taxidermy she
argues, is a moment of hybridity between animal and material that gestures to the species and is
made from the species, yet is missing a significant quality that separates the maquette from the
animal. An “animal-thing” so to speak (32). As an animal-thing, taxidermy oscillates between the
qualities and agencies of both animal and ephemera as a complex site that needs connections
with others in order to solidify into a particular set of meanings. For Poliquin, the connection
needed to extract meaning from taxidermy is the human. The hunter, creator, artist, viewer that
shapes meaning through the interactions with the body on display (32). Thus, where I use Jody

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Berland’s argument that people make meaning from the images of animals in digital spaces
throughout all of my chapters, core to the California grizzly is the material stuff of the animal
itself. Poliqiun as an extension of Berland, shows how meaning is made and circulated with the
bodies and remains of animals themselves.
Poliquin begins where Haraway stops in her classifications of taxidermy, with hunting
trophies. Taxidermy can certainly be trophy making, but it can also be voyeuristic in myriad
other ways (2012: 4). Scientific taxidermy and preservation curates skins for museum and natural
history records. Often, specimens are judged in correlation to the criteria of how that animal is
taxonomically described, with outstanding matches to the description becoming type specimen.
Outliers and the collection of unique specimens that showcase phenotypic difference are also
often preserved. Taxidermy can be emotional, through the preservation of loved pets or famous
animals (Young, 2019; 127; Bezan 2019). Finally, taxidermy can be fashionable. Alongside the
presence of trophy hunting, taxidermy for décor and commercial style, as well as in clothing and
haberdashery has its moments throughout history. The practice of cryptic taxidermy which is the
making of fraudulent creatures such as mermaids or jackalopes, also fall under trends in fashion
taxidermy (Poliquin, 2012). These types of taxidermy, of which Haraway’s trophies are but one,
hint at a broader impact animal parts and bodies have in social life. While taxidermy can uphold
patriarchy, reducing it to that scaffold ignores the ways in which taxidermy railroads and
minimizes the complexities of how we engage with the non-human.
Newer notions of what is considered taxidermy troubles the body of the animal entirely.
If taxidermy is simply the manipulation of skin, then leather goods are considered examples of
commercial taxidermy. Similarly, books bound in human skin would also fall under the domain
of taxidermy. Art historian Giovanni Aloi complicates these boundaries through theorizing

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taxidermy as simply organic remains we imbue with liveliness (Aloi, 2018). If we consider
liveliness as the root of taxidermy, then the very reason for moving the skin is to imbue life into
preserved remains. Aloi presents the imperative of liveliness in taxidermy through the example
of Degas’ original statue of the Little Dancer, a wax maquette with human hair. In Little Dancer
no skin is involved however the organic traces of animal (the hair) and the liveliness at the root
of the piece grants the piece title of taxidermic art (8). Thus, Aloi circumnavigates skin
manipulation as the sole marker of taxidermy by redesignating the root of taxidermy as the
liveliness of the piece in articulation with the organic. A leather purse or instances of
anthropodermic bibliopegy are not taxidermy as they do not pretend at life.
Figure 26 Speculative taxidermy at the Tartu University Natural History Museum, the piece displayed here, “Lycanthrope” by
Uku Sepisvart, is an example of a speculative taxidermic form, the pelt is posed dynamically and artistically in space and though
as traditional taxidermy it remains unfinished, as an artistic representation of non-human life it is a lively representation of the
species (Sepisvart, 2024, photo by the author, 2024, Tartu University Museum of Natural History)

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Aloi further complicates his notion of speculative taxidermy through arguing that if
taxidermy is not merely skin, then what other boundaries can be complicated? If artistic
representation of liveliness is the core of taxidermy, then it is fundamentally a performative
media (Aloi, 2018). Taxidermy then, could be a skin posed dynamically (fig 2.), or an
interpretation of a species altogether. The representation of life is triaged and found secondary in
importance to lively representation. Thus, for Aloi, taxidermy as an artistic style may eschew
boundaries of traditional forms of presentation or species loyalty as long as the representation of
liveliness resides alongside the presence of organic matter. Helen Gregory and Anthony Purdy
take up this thread of troubling boundaries of taxidermy and abstract intent-to-enliven (2015).
They argue that there is fundamental connection between taxidermy as a sculptural medium and
taxidermy for representation which may seem ontologically distinct. Instead, the two are
profoundly intertwined as the aim of taxidermic sculpture is to unsettle realistic taxidermy by
achieving liveliness (Gregory & Purdy, 2015).
Further distancing taxidermy from its etymological root, taxidermy can sacrifice the
focus of representing individual skins in its definition to emphasize life. Prepared skins are
attuned to the trauma of the state of the body at death. Historically collected and recovered skins
from personal collections are as imperfect as their method of collection. Hunting and trapping
technologies during the European “era of exploration” were imperfect tools often scarring and
damaging taken species. This is a problem with modern species collection as well; big game skin
retains bullet holes and pellet spread, and quick field skinning often separates fascia unevenly
which can lead to tears and varying degrees of skin flexibility. Further, early scientific
“collectors” were often skinning and preserving skins quickly and in the field, not ideal
conditions for securing an undamaged skin. Transporting collected species also came with its set

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of obstacles. Myriad preserving agents were used to varying degrees of success. Variations in
humidity, temperatures, and climate during travel meant collected specimens were exposed to a
variety of elements each potentially damaging to the skin. Which is all to say, skins, both
historical and current, are often collected damaged and showing signs of trauma. Trauma and
damages to specimen skins were considered unacceptable to wealthy collectors who wanted a
“perfect” skin on display. Often “imperfections” in an animal’s coat, that is, death wounds, scars
from life, damages from posthumous field preparation, and travel were hidden or grafted over.
Taxidermy practice that works with damaged skin however often prioritize liveliness over
attention to working solely with the single specimen (Patchett & Foster, 2008). Cultural
geographer Merle Patchett and artist Kate Foster’s dive in to the repair work to “reclaim the
mess” of taxidermy and show the labor behind the animal observe taxidermists who undertake
rescue practices (100). They observe that it is common practice that museum taxidermic displays
to often combine multiple individuals of a species into a singular organism (99). Even botanic
collections can present grafted together specimens which each petal or leaf selected for aesthetic
value and rearticulated into a complete, singular specimen.38 A well-known example of a
composite taxidermy piece is the Age of Mammals Polar Bear at the Natural History Museum of
Los Angeles County. It is a common talking point amongst tours and educators in the museum
space that this bear is in fact two individuals grafted into a complete skin. Thus, one posed
specimen, in this case a bear, is comprised of several dead entities working together to hide the
trauma and tear of death upon the skin.
38 The Ware Collection of glass models of plants in the Harvard University Peabody Museum is often lauded as one
one of the finest and most accurate displays of plant biology. Curiously, some of the glassworks in the collection are
even considered type specimens, used for teaching the species they are representing although they are blown glass.
In making this collection often multiple specimens of a species were selected to use as reference for one glass plant
(Glass Flowers: The Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants | Harvard Museum of Natural History,
2023). This is an example of the more extreme ways plant preservation and identification are subject to composite
composition where multiple individuals of a species come together to create one particular referent.

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Composite taxidermy is especially popular amongst hunting trophy taxidermizing
because it prioritizes an aesthetic product. From personal experience taxidermizing hunted quail,
I have pulled feathers from different specimens of the species entirely to glue onto the bird I am
taxidermizing if flank feathers are missing, or the pattern is lacking the desired aesthetic. The
popularity of animal busts in hunting taxidermy emerged from being able to show a killed animal
in a way that excluded the death wounds on skin damaged by shotgun pellet spread (Poliquin,
2012). Composite taxidermy was an affluent way of showing off a hunting trophy while also
preserving the body in full, as extra skin could be repurposed for grafting over gunshot scars on
the trophy animal. Thus, even in hunting taxidermy, wherein the animal body is reimagined as a
trophy and proof of hunter conquest, the completeness of the skin was a primary goal in animal
preservation. The preserved trophy needs to look either fearsome or lifelike so as to undergird
the hunter’s accomplishments (Poliquin, 2012). Showing bullet scars on skin accomplished
neither of these goals.
Taxidermy and vitality are inextricably intertwined (Thorsen et al, 2013). As long as a
taxidermic specimen presents liveliness, it is considered a taxidermy display. There is a clear
distinction amongst collectors and curators that taxidermy and study skins are distinct from one
another. Prepared skins do not pretend at liveliness through how they were preserved but rather
are preserved in a way that transforms the skin to be used as a scientific tool, a guide for
scientists and curators to reference and use in knowledge production.39
39 Even still the boundaries between preserved study skins and taxidermy is nebulous and permeable. Often study
skins are pulled from to supplement damaged and disintegrating taxidermy figures. In a visit to the Mammalogy
collection at the California Academy of Sciences I met Monarch, a taxidermized California grizzly as well as his son
who was a preserved study skin. Though Monarch’s child was a hybrid Grizzly and not technically the same species
at all, the collections manager mentioned that in preserving Monarch, preparators were considering pulling from the
hybrid fur to patch Monarchs bald muzzle which had deteriorated from years of mistreatment and incautious
conditions. In the end, I found out through an email interaction that conservators chose to color match cow fur with
well-preserved grizzly pelts, though whether these pelts were full California grizzlies or hybrid is undetermined.

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When I attended her class on bird taxidermy, taxidermist Allis Markham taught that the
goal of taxidermy is making a skin look life-like. In Stuffed (2019) a documentary about the
World Taxidermy Championship, director Erin Durham follows taxidermists including Markham
throughout the taxidermy competition season. In these spaces of expert taxidermy competitions
judges consider the rarity of the animal alongside its technicality to reproduce a life-like result.
Key to the contestants final scoring however is the “vitality” the specimen instills upon
inspection (Durham, 2019; Desmond, 2002). Archival taxidermy is used by practitioners like
Markham and Bovard for animals on museum display. Today, they are preserved through simply
drying the skin to set the shape, rather than drying and using preserving additives, so taxidermy
skins are able to be moved around again once they are re-wet to adapt the taxidermy to growing
knowledge structures. This pliability of skin is important in that it allows for animal skins to be
reset again and again (though skin fragility compounds with each repositioning) while the artist
works to maximize the liveliness of the specimen.
Recent advances in the field of taxidermy have demonstrated the commitment to
liveliness that is at the heart of the field (Durham, 2019). It is more and more common to see
glass and epoxy eye inserts for animals which contain a mirror at their base for reflecting light.
Diorama design even works towards imbuing liveliness into preserved and posed animals. A fact
often taught to visitors who visit the diorama halls in the Natural History Museum of Los
Angeles County, is that resident taxidermist Tim Bovard hides mirrors within his dioramas to
better reflect light in animal eyes (Bartlett, 2024). Dioramas are also constantly being updated to
In another moment at the Academy while looking through their “extinction cabinet,” I came across a line of
Carolina Parakeet skins. While most were preserved as study skins, two in particular were posed and given the
taxidermic treatment, with wires passing through their limbs, glass eyes and stuffed chests hinting that these birds
had once been on display in a diorama. Thus, two birds showing vitality were moved to the categorization of study
skin. While these are only two examples, the permeability between boundaries of study skin and taxidermy are
evidenced as being nebulous and open to interpretation.

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match scientific findings about animals they contain, thus not falling into narratives of tradition
and original intent of the artist or curator (Portner, 2019). This practice is common in
contemporary archival dioramas (Desmond, 2002). Dioramas instead are constantly in flux
disregarding the artist and designer completely to change with how we know these animals live.
But what happens when the species on display refers to an extinct animal? The taxidermy
of extinct species is a particularly interesting terrain to navigate in how taxidermy is discussed
amongst scholars. For art historian, Rachel Poliquin, extinct animal taxidermy merits its own
category amongst her taxonomy of taxidermy. Extinct animal preservation presents souvenirs of
an environment and ecosystem lost and is imbued with a narrative of nostalgia and loss. In
Poliquin’s words, “a souvenir is a potent fragment that erases the distinction between what
actually was and what we dream or desire it to have been” (Poliquin, 2012: 43). Thus, extinct
animal taxidermy for Poliquin memorializes species through sieving how this animal is evoked
in social life. Extinction taxidermy presents a particular type of story that premises the loss of the
animal in the living world, and in doing so it highlights the taxidermized individual as a body
anchoring memory of the species in embodied form. Extinct bodies in museums preserve the
memory of past environmental systems while interpolating the visitor as voyeur to alternate
realities where interspecies relations remain stable, fulfilled, and not at risk by environmental
disruption. Contemporary dioramas are attempts to offer glimpses into interspecies connection
separate from anthropocentric stories.
However, I argue that there are two distinct types of extinct species preservation. Preendangerment extinct species preservation, in the context of taxidermy and study skin
preparation, is the preservation and presentation of animals while individuals of the species are
still functionally alive. Examples of this type would be historical taxidermies of California

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grizzlies or passenger pigeons that were made in the late 19th century before these species
became extinct. Both the California grizzly and passenger pigeon were historically known for
their robust population numbers and were popular species to taxidermy, either for the spectacle
they caused (the passenger pigeon) or their impressive presence (the California grizzly). This is
to say that while today we interact with grizzly and pigeon taxidermy as reminders of a species
that was lost, some preserved bodies were taxidermized without the threat of species
endangerment and extinction shadowing the process (Poliquin, 2012). Thus, it is not uncommon
to find examples of California grizzly taxidermy classified as hunting trophies or passenger
pigeons used in late 19th century fashion and design choices.
Taxidermy today operates with limitations to which species are available to be
taxidermized and which are not.40 Protections exist so that commercial and amateur taxidermists
work with only readily available and abundant species. The taxidermizing of endangered and
extinct species is always a spectacle and always done with careful consideration and associated
with museum and institutional support (California Fish and Game Code, 2023; US Congress,
1925). Thus, the second type of extinct taxidermy is using study skins from endangered species
and preserved extinct animal skins to reanimate and recall the species, either as its presence fades
from the public eye or after it has disappeared and is considered extinct. In this latter case, skins
are taken from collections and turned into a simulacrum of the species as it had been in life.
While historical skins are often too delicate to make the change from study skins into taxidermy,
newer endangered species skins are prepared with preservation techniques that allow more
40 California has a law banning the taxidermy of native species unless a special permit is requested and granted by
state authority. Taxidermists caught working with a native species, even if it was collected ethically face the risk of
being fined or jailed. Thus, only exotic species and non-native invasive species are free to taxidermy without a
permit. Even owning a native bird that has been prepared is subject to a fine. Curiously, crows are an exception to
this law. A taxidermist can collect and pose a crow however cannot buy or sell the body. If a taxidermized crow
changes hands it must be in the form of a gift.

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flexibility in how the skin can be used.41 Grimly, not being able to pull from historical collections
to create extinct species taxidermy does not limit the field of extinct and endangered species
taxidermy. As we are currently in the midst of a biodiversity crisis and extinction event, the
presence of extinct and endangered species is all too common in licensed preservation spaces.
Recent advancements of skin preservation in the case of restored mammoth and
mastodon dermal maquettes, means that taxidermy and study skin preservation can happen
drastically posthumously (though semblances of life are absent). Contemporary taxidermy thus,
has developed tools necessary to reinvigorate the social presence of animals in public life
(Patchett & Foster, 2008). With the history of taxidermy tied to mimicking life, and specifically
mimicking extant life, extinct species taxidermy undermines our understanding of extinction as
species disappearance. Aggressive projects of maintaining species as symbolically and materially
present, as in the case of the California grizzly, further refuses extinction by continuously
producing lively objects to interact with.
California grizzly taxidermy is a curious site as it highlights and complicates the
conversations across taxidermy scholars by localizing taxidermy within the specific and
localized cultural histories of human-animal relations. Where the explorations of taxidermy
discussed above center on how life comes to be represented and to what ends, grizzly taxidermy
is so entwined with Californian history and identity that their bear-ness becomes a footnote in
their narrative.
41 Historical taxidermy and study skin preparation and preservation methods often used inorganic arsenic as an
antibacterial preserving agent which meant that skins dried stiff and brittle and discouraged insects from damaging
skins (Marte et al, 2006). Museum preparation techniques today use minimal chemical and drying agents to preserve
the skin, favoring a natural technique of just allowing the skin to dry. At most, sawdust, borax, and chinchilla dust
are favored by museum grade taxidermy methods for preserving a skin however these agents are also primarily used
to clean the fur or feathers of a wet skin. Changes in display and diorama upkeep during the late 20th century meant
that insect damage was mitigated in other ways that didn’t need to come from the preservation of the skin itself.

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I argued earlier that California grizzly taxidermy is a form of extinction refusal because
it is the preservation of bear life to reproduce bear social life. “Bear”-ness in the case of the
California grizzly is inextricable from “California”-ness which hints that preservation of the bear
is in service to preserving it for its social life. The bears robust and visible population in early
settler Californian history meant that it was hunted as sport, or out of necessity when
communities that were establishing property lines saw the animal as a threat. Thus, the grizzly
has a robust presence amongst is earliest taxidermy as hunting trophies. The decline of this
charismatic bear in the late 19th due to hunting and displacement was noticed by the public as the
bear was adopted as the state symbol at California’s inclusion into the United States. This
publicly known decline led to one of the most dramatic shifts in the taxidermy style of a species.
By the time William Randolph Hearst’s bear, Monarch, died rather than preserve the bear as a
trophy, Monarchs public identity as docile, and his moniker as “the last of the California
grizzlies” meant that his taxidermy was a work of extinct animal taxidermy. Grizzly taxidermy
during the bears known decline were often posed as natural and nonaggressive, attempting to
represent the life of the grizzly outside of human encounters as much as possible. As time moved
ever forward from the bears extirpation, skins became harder to work with while the bears status
as a lively symbol remained engrained in Californian identity. Artistic representations of species
liveliness that eschewed the boundaries between Ursus arctos californicus and its parent species
Ursus arctos entered the scene as these different populations were visually similar despite being
genetically, geographically and behaviorally distinct.
California grizzly taxidermies are thus interesting sites to consider how people face
contemporary extinction because they are always complex forms. The Valley Center bear is an
example of the work trophy taxidermy (the majority of preserved California grizzlies) does to fit

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within extinct taxidermy. Monarch exemplifies the active transition and the growing public
consciousness about extinction and preservation in early conversations about environmental
degradation and extinction. Finally, the Santa Barbara bear exemplifies the lasting power of the
California grizzly’s social life after extinction, and that “species” can become a fluid category
when it comes to representing and reproducing California grizzlies in lively ways postextinction.
Extinct Trophies: How hunting taxidermy becomes more than a trophy
Figure 27 The Valley Center Bear, an old hunting trophy, on display in the Valley Center Historical Society (Valley Center
Historical Society, 2022).
Valley Center is a small town located an hour drive outside of San Diego in Escondido
wine country. The town in nestled inside chapparal hills, bisected by the Pacific Crest Trail, and
takes pride in its connection to the surrounding environment as well as its local history. Valley
Center is also a relatively old town, with a local narrative reaching back to early Californian
settlement from colonial expeditions, Spanish, Mexican, and American. Its location outside of
the immediate coastal zone primed Valley Center as an agricultural hub with easy access to the

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Southern California Missions of San Diego, San Juan Capistrano, and San Luis Rey. Later, the
town’s location amidst mountains in a natural valley carved by Miocene era ocean recession
would become a hot spot of gold panning during the California Gold Rush in the mid 19th
century. Later, the area was established as ranch land because the town’s location in a natural
valley was primed to host semi-contained cattle droves. With its easy access to key population
hubs as well as fertile land, Valley Center grew as an essential agricultural and husbandry town
in an industrializing California that was rapidly changing due to developing infrastructure up and
down the California coast.
The Valley Center Historical Society hosts an eclectic mix of artifacts and documents
from the town’s history. It details the many hats Valley Center has worn in the story of California
colonial settlement along with some information on Kumeyaay and Payómkawichum (Luiseño)
history. It portrays community adaptability and resilience, from gold, to cattle, to crops across the
greater narrative of California as a rich historical setting. At every step in the historical center,
local pride is translated to state pride, with exhibits detailing how Valley Center was present
through it all. Small historical societies like these often document greater narratives through
attending to the mundane. They provide proof of the daily lives and imponderabilia that were
essential in building greater historical myths. In her book documenting the history of house
museums, Patricia West argues that these spaces are always political, that is, engaged with
bolstering a narrative of identity and value in service of larger national myths (West, 1999).
Local history archives and societies such as the Valley Center Historical Museum function
similarly to house museums as they draw from domestic spaces and intimate archives to
construct daily-life approaches to overarching narratives of identity. The historical museum tells
the story of California through mundane artifacts and the materials of rural living. Valley

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Center’s exhibits include a model home from 1862, robust exhibits on farming and local
husbandry histories, and a small post office. The museum taps into other popular connections to
Californian identity as well, connecting to the film industry through detailing films that had been
shot in the valley, and the California Gold Rush through showcasing archival maps and tools.
The crown jewel in the Museum’s collection is a 12-foot-tall taxidermy of a California
grizzly bear rearing on its two back legs with its arms akimbo. It seems at once both out of place
amid the domestic exhibits of village life, a sudden shift into the natural history and biodiversity
of California, and right at home as a hunting trophy in an affluent Californian manor. The
information plaque on the side of the grizzly writes that this particular bear had menaced “both
man and cattle” of the Valley Center community in 1866. The Valley Center Historical Website
mirrors the language in the exhibit:
“A giant grizzly bear, which had been threatening both man and cattle, was killed near the
home of James and Ada Lovett in 1866. Lovett and several men dragged the giant animal
to where it could be loaded onto a wagon and drove eight miles to the Vineyard Ranch of
Col. A.E. Maxcy who had been offering a reward for the capture of the bear. The bear
was hoisted onto Maxcy’s cattle scales where it weighed 2,200 pounds and was declared
to be the largest grizzly bear ever killed in California” (Grizzly Bear – Valley Center
History Museum, 2010).
Grizzlies by the mid-19th century were already on their decline to extinction. Seen as
popular hunting stories and trophies, grizzly life was incompatible with an industrializing
California. Grizzlies around Southern California, and Valley Center specifically, had their
historical ranges cut through with cattle trails, settlements, and the developing infrastructure
mechanisms of settler communities, and were amongst the most frequently hunted megafauna.42
Alongside many animals who were adapting to take advantage of animal husbandry and
agriculture, the Valley Center Bear had been reportedly menacing livestock and trespassing onto
42 The last known grizzly to be hunted and killed was shot by Cornelius B Johnson in Sunland, California in 1916.

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fields and ranches and unacceptable to a thriving Valley Center community. 43 The hunt, led by
James Lovett to trap and kill the bear, was not an isolated experience for grizzlies. All up and
down the Californian coast stories similar to the Valley Center Bear’s, were played out. Killing a
grizzly, especially one that had been directly antagonistic to Californian communities, was seen
as a feat of heroism, pride, and masculinity indicative of sport and trophy hunting (Secrest,
2008).
The written description next to the Valley Center Bear proudly proclaims this California
grizzly was the biggest specimen to ever be hunted and preserved. The taxidermy skin is an
impressive specimen, belonging to a bear that weighed in at around 2000 pounds, and seemingly
a continuous pelt with little damage showing other than age.
44 It is a prime example of trophy
taxidermy, meaning that upon the bears death, care was taken to skin the animal in one piece to
preserve pelt integrity so as to cut the most imposing figure possible. It is posed aggressively,
rearing up on its back two legs with the front ones in the air as if ready to swipe down. The
mouth is open in a roar, showing off large teeth in an aggressive fashion. Everything about this
bear is meant to convey aggression, hostility, and intimidation. Similar to many bear deaths of
the time, its claws and skull were also taken for the personal collections of those who funded the
hunt. For the Valley Center Bear, this was Colonel Maxcy, the ranch owner whose property the
bear was threatening (Grizzly Bear – Valley Center History Museum, 2010).
It is a curious and almost irreverent moment to see a hunting trophy celebrating the death
of an extinct animal. The Valley Center Bear was never meant to be displayed in an educational
43The historical society does not engage with narratives that it was ranch and town development that disrupted and
displace the bear from its naturalized territory.
44 Reports of the bears weight differ from one story to another. The presiding narrative is that this Grizzly specimen
is the largest ever killed weighing approximately 2,200 lbs. Other accounts have differing weights for the bear
giving 1,000 pounds and 1,950 pounds, which seem more reasonable as often Trophy Taxidermized specimens are
overstuffed upon mounting to make the specimen more impressive to an audience.

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capacity at a museum, but rather remain as a trophy and a testament to the bravery of those who
hunted it. Rather, this bear is an example of a trophy display in taxidermic practice opposed to
taxidermy for educational or artistic means. The posing is meant to look intimidating, the
aggressive posturing of the bear foregrounding the events leading to his death and minimizing
narratives that the California grizzly was a relatively docile species. As such, the bear body is a
vehicle for a story about Valley Center, with its remains indexing primarily the hunt and hunters
rather than the bear as a disappeared species. As a hunting trophy the taxidermy process was
undertaken outside of scaffolds of anxiety and realistic representation of an extinct species. This
individual was preserved at a time where Grizzlies were a stable population and a threat to be
overcome by Californian settlers. Thus, the death of the bear was an event to be celebrated and
commemorated, a declining California grizzly population was not an event to be worried about.
The bears death allowed the agricultural and economic stability of Valley Center to continue to
thrive so his death is celebrated as a community victory. This narrative remains with the bear as
he is displayed in the Valley Center Historical Museum. Upon entering the main room, the visitor
is immediately greeted by the bear rearing at them. Its placement in the space is meant to arrest
the attention of the visitor, to draw them to the artifact, and to see the bear as an object deserving
notice. Only once at the bear does the visitor learn the story of his troubled relationship with
Valley Center and his resulting death. Almost as an afterthought are visitors given history and
context to the bear as a California grizzly, a member of the local ecosystem, and an extinct
species.
The bear’s presence in a local historical society allows the bear to take on a local
narrative of an event in the history of Valley Center which made the town the place it is today.
The rest of the historical society importantly, showcases other human-interest stories about the

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history of the community’s foundation. The bear takes up space next to historical artifacts such
as 19th century imponderabilia, the “World’s Smallest Post Office,” and stories of famous
historical figures who visited or came from the town. Thus, the bear skin on display is not only
indexing the bear itself, but rather the narrative of the bears interaction with the town and death
by the hands of local men. In this manner, the skin becomes a vehicle for the events leading up to
the grizzly’s death, and its story presents the bear as living and present. Curators of the historical
museum continue the tradition of inscribing the narrative of this bears death onto its body
through enacting the bear as a trophy and artifact of Valley life first, and wild animal second.
The story of this specimen as displayed in the museum interpolates the bear primarily as
antagonist to Californian development and minimizes its presence as part of a dynamic
Californian environment. To an industrializing population, the bear posed a threat to the
economy of the new community. Ranchers banded together to track and kill the bear as its life
became unacceptable to Valley Center human livelihoods. Core to the Valley Center Bear’s
exhibit is the connection of the California grizzly to the economic concept of the “Bear market,”
which once again interpolates the bear as antagonistic to settlement livelihoods. So only in
afterthought is the bear referenced as a grizzly. As a hunting trophy taxidermy, the bear is
resistant to non-anthropocentric narratives and when these moments do crop up in the exhibit
they are minimized and awkward. The Valley Center Historical Museum, by merit of being a
history of the settlements in the valley, is not able to fully breach discussing and presenting the
bear as anything outside of a mundane relic of settler life. As such, discussions and encounters
with the grizzly’s extinction and disappearance falls short. The bears story as a hunting trophy
champions the narrative of hunting at a time of grizzly abundance, and in doing so, encourages
the visitor to also think of the bear as a lively and extant figure.

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The Valley Center grizzly tells a particular story about the bear that is only partially about
its species. The bear is a character in the story of the town, a moment of time, and one story,
among many, that energetically displays the history of the Valley Center community. The bear
here is not symbolic of the bear species, but rather of a dramatic event where Valley Center
ranchers banded together to overcome an antagonistic force threatening their economic
livelihood. The material skin of the grizzly that remains as a hunting trophy is a prop to this
narrative first, and then only secondly, and somewhat awkwardly, allowed to be a material
California grizzly, a disappeared species. Taxidermic hunting trophies like the Valley Center Bear
embody these contradictory narratives of human-animal encounters. Their bodies are
simultaneously a bear, a prop, and an identity.
Endling Spectacles: Monarch’s life and death on display as the last California grizzly
The shift of narrative from the grizzly as a prop for hunter narratives to a symbol of its
own species coincided with the bear’s decline. Grizzly encounters with settlers and the
boundaries of a rapidly population growth in California meant that grizzly sightings were on a
decline since settler development. Grizzly life was incompatible with the construction of
California. The grizzly was a threat to rising trades of agriculture and animal husbandry that
needed space to properly support an expanding economic structure. Grizzly culls were constant
in places where cattle were housed as a safeguard against loosing cows and bulls. In a similar
show of incompatibility grizzly populations were displaced further and further by merit of towns,
homesteads, and ranches establishing and partitioning the land.
By the late 19th century, the bear had become so rare in California that sightings and
interactions with these Grizzlies became a spectacle. In 1889 as a publicity stunt looking to
capitalize on the spectacle of the California grizzly, newspaper magnate William Randolph

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Hearst assigned San Francisco Examiner journalist Allan Kelley with a blank cheque budget to
find and trap a California grizzly in Ventura County and transport it back to San Francisco.45 In
homage to Monarch of the Dailies, a publication of Hearst’s, when Kelley actually managed to
capture a bear, he named it Monarch.
Figure 28. Monarch in Storage (California Academy of Sciences, 2022, photo by author).
After his capture Monarch lived the rest of his life in captivity both in a private paddock
belonging to Hearst, and later in an enclosure at the San Francisco Zoo which used to be located
in Golden Gate park.46 His presence was a spectacle as California Grizzlies were all but
45 Kelley was ridiculed for this assignment. 46 Today, the bear pit that housed Monarch is the National AIDS Memorial in Golden Gate Park. There is no mention
of Monarchs captivity or enclosure in this space though it is identifiable as the “Bear Pit Grove” through park maps
and on mapping technologies. When I visited the AIDs memorial I found that there is a scannable QR code that links
to a guided tour of the Grove. No mention is made of the site’s history as the old San Francisco Zoo’s bear pit and
Monarch’s place of captivity.

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extirpated from the California landscape. Representing the scarcity of grizzly sightings, he was
marketed to the public as “the last of the California grizzlies” and “the only California grizzly in
captivity” (Our History, 2021). He lived in captivity for twenty-two years, surviving the San
Francisco 1906 earthquake and died in 1911. Upon Monarch’s death his body was immediately
slated for processing and preservation. While grizzly sightings would still be documented, the
species was invariably on the cusp of disappearance and functionally gone. Monarch’s life in
captivity, marketed as a rare site of a disappearing species meant that he was a charismatic public
figure, easily accessible to any visitors to the Golden Gate Zoo, and the most interacted-with
member of his species in history.
As the California grizzly had long been in decline, and human engagements with grizzly
were rare47, Monarch’s presence as “the last grizzly” symbolically marked the species extinction
in popular narratives, with subsequent sightings being anomalous and exciting moments but not
indicative of species health. Monarch’s body, thus, was an example of a case where preservation
came at the cusp of extinction but before interventions to species life and species rehabilitation
programs were even considered in environmental studies. It was the death and disappearance of
the California grizzly that catalyzed 20th century conservation efforts in the United States and
broke ground for conservation legislation in the United States (Alagona, 2018). In his
exploration of the role of the California grizzly in conservation politics, Peter Alagona
documents that the growing concern for endangered and disappearing animals stems back to the
extirpation of the California grizzly. The role of the grizzly as a civic symbol was what allowed
for its disappearance to be as visible as it was to large groups of people (Alagona, 2018).
47 Even though literature and original documentation lauds California Grizzlies for being numerous- it is in reference
to other Grizzly and nonspecific bear species. Thus “numerous” when taken comparatively was in reference to other
bear sightings. Compared to more common animal-human interactions such as squirrel or pigeon interactions grizzly
sightings would still be relatively rare.

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Monarch’s role on display as “the last grizzly” was a unique case were for one of the first times
in the history of the United States, the death and extirpation of an entire sub-species would be
narrativized in popular media and public culture. The narrative construction of Monarch as “the
last of his kind” though not factually accurate, signposted the death of the species. With
Monarch’s death, the California grizzly was functionally extinct. He was euthanized in 1911, a
decision made in response to his dwindling health and advancing age, alongside growing public
interest in the grizzly pit at the zoo. With Monarch’s death however, his social life transitioned
into a new period of fame.
At death, his skeleton, other than his skull and feet were donated to UC Berkley’s
Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. His pelt was given to a preparator, V. Shepard who mounted and
taxidermized his skin.48 A now taxidermized Monarch was once again put on display moved
around amongst public collections in the Bay area, he remained on display at the Memorial
Museum (now known as the deYoung museum), before finally settling in the permanent
collection of the California Academy of Sciences on the 30th September 1953. He remained on
display49 there until travelling to the California Museum in Sacramento in 2016 for their exhibit
Bear in Mind: The Story of the California Grizzly where he was displayed in front of a backdrop
of the Californian State Flag. Since on display in Sacramento, Monarch returned to the California
Academy of Sciences and has been kept in climate control storage until a safe exhibit can be
constructed for pelt integrity. Summer 2024 saw his return to being on display after undergoing
extensive restoration in the academy’s new exhibit “State of Nature” (Monarch the Grizzly Bear
- California Academy of Sciences, 2024).
48 Infamously, Shepard overstuffed Monarch. 49 Monarchs display changed internally at the California Academy of Sciences, from 2010-2012 where he was
exhibited amongst other endangered and extinct animals in the museum exhibition Altered State: Climate and
Change that engaged with the various ways the Anthropocene was changing California’s nature and ecology.

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Walking sedately and naturally on all fours, Monarch’s taxidermy is posed in a similar
fashion to Charles Nahl’s drawing of the California grizzly which appeared in Hutching’s
Illustrated California Magazine in its September 1856 issue.50 Amidst the overwhelming types
of content on display at the academy, Monarch holds a commanding spot in a visitors experience
of the museum. When I visited Monarch at the California Academy of Sciences in 2022, museum
staff mentioned that despite Monarch having been in storage for the past few years, many visitors
would still come to the California Academy of Sciences asking about him. He was once housed
on independent display in the museum however was taken into cold room storage due to light
and temperature damage received from his long history in uncontrolled conditions. When he was
on display at Berkeley and the Memorial Museum during the years following his death, the skin
was mounted and displayed without a barrier and due to these conditioned he has suffered from
losing the fur on his muzzle.
50 Charles Nahl had drawn his grizzly Bear referencing one from “mountain man”, menagerie owner, and showman
John Boyden Adams, more popularly known by his moniker “Grizzly” Adams.

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Figure 29. Full body of Monarch in Storage (California Academy of Sciences, 2022, photo by author).
Figure 30 Monarch after restoration. His fur has been colored and hair fills added around his muzzle. (California Academy of
Sciences, 2024).

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As of summer 2024, Monarch is back on display with a new case that protects his skin
from curious hands and the light conditions in the California Academy of Sciences. The new
display polarized, as the previous light damage was causing his fur to discolor and lighten.51 The
display he is a part of is the Academy’s California: State of Nature exhibit which covers the
“uniqueness of four Californian Ecosystems” (Monarch the Grizzly Bear - California Academy
of Sciences, 2024). In the promotional email for the new exhibit, Monarch is on display
associated with the Redwoods and Yosemite, a curious choice as he was originally captured
outside of Santa Barbara and exhibiting the ecosystem preferences of the California grizzly’s
nickname: the chaparral bear. The museum’s choice to associate Monarch with the Redwoods is
not a surprising choice, both the bear and the woods hold particular narratives in Californian and
US civic histories. The Redwoods and the High Sierras inspired early nature writing and
environmentalist philosophies in the United States (Cronon, 1996). This decision though,
demonstrates that Monarch is primarily on exhibit for a narrative on the role nature in California.
Monarch’s capacity as a bear is secondary to his position as a prop of statehood and a greater
narrative of California.
Throughout his continued museum presence across the 20th century, Monarch is always
posed as a solitary bear. Like the Valley Center Bear he is separate from any diorama or setting to
index his display as anything other than a trophy. Thus, Monarch’s body possesses the quality of
51 Ironically this discoloration of the pelt may have caused Monarch’s fur to look the closest to his species than
when he was in life. That is, when Monarch was initially captured there was some speculation amongst experts as to
whether he was a bona fide California grizzly. Monarch had darker fur than typical of his species and while it was
later refuted was thought to be either a hybrid or pretender to the California grizzly throne. Monarch’s death and
skin preservation caused the fur to lighten through the materials used. Finally, in death, Monarch looked the part of a
California grizzly, and not a hybrid bear or separate species entirely. Despite Monarch’s now close approximation to
how Californian grizzlies look in popular imagination, the Monarch exhibit development team at the California
Academy of Sciences have plans to dye his skin back to the pelts color on record.

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trophy taxidermy practices, with the animal body primarily as a vehicle for human narrative.
This is evidenced from the narrative of his exciting tracking and capture funded by William
Randolph Hearst. While not at first glance a hunting narrative, Monarch’s resulting life in
captivity was primarily one of spectacle.
As a taxidermized grizzly, Monarch indexes the transition between taxidermic forms. As
much trophy as he is museum taxidermy, his death and preservation came at a time of reckoning
of grizzly disappearance. Posed naturally, on all fours and docile (as California Grizzlies were
said to have been), Monarch’s taxidermy reflects how a grizzly would appear if seen in the wild.
With the realization that the species that held such state importance was disappearing from the
world, taxidermists and museums started expressing interest in seeing grizzly life represented
outside of trophy spaces. The appropriated forms of extinct and disappeared species as vehicles
of meaning tell particular narratives about an extinct species posthumously through how their
likeness and material remains are taken up symbolically and given new life (Snyder, 2003; Aloi,
2018). Taxidermic forms of the grizzly that imitated life were a substitute for the lack of grizzly
life in the wild. Monarch’s taxidermy is a case of extinction refusal because it stems from a push
to populate museums and collections with grizzly (instead of hunter) life.

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Post-extinction taxidermy: When is a grizzly a California grizzly?
Figure 31. The Santa Barbara Bear display (Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, 2023, photo by author).
The Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History’s (SBMNH) Mammal Hall is a series of
dioramas of native animals to California in their respective environments. The room is dim, with
dioramas lit from the inside and visitors walk the border of the room engaging with each animal
at a time. Charismatic species such as the Channel Island grey fox and California sea lion make
appearances here. The crowning diorama of the hall however is the California grizzly on display,
the title of the diorama proclaiming the viewer is looking at a California grizzly bear, “Ursus
arctos californicus”. Visiting the Museum’s website, the California grizzly diorama dominates
the web presence of the Mammal Hall. For good reason too, the grizzly in the mammal hall is

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one of the biggest taxidermized animals from the museum on display. The SBMNH is well
known for the quality of its taxidermy and dioramas among California museums. The animals in
these exhibits are well preserved and upkept regularly. While the museum doesn’t have a
taxidermist on staff, the dioramas are protected from outside environmental stressors by glass
and dim lighting.
The California grizzly diorama displays a vibrant scene with the bear walking through the
mountains of Santa Barbara. The painting backdrop of the diorama claims to be a view from the
Upper Oso Campground in the mountains north of Santa Barbara52. Around the grizzly, native
plants are in bloom, chaparral yucca, and coffeeberry frame the grizzly’s path through sandstone
coastal mountains. Every environmental choice in this tableau is carefully selected and curated to
index California. Specifically, this diorama references particular coordinates to a local sight in
the Transverse Ranges, chosen for its natural beauty to the observer and aesthetic encapsulation
of the chaparral biome. The diorama is a combination of native plants, a local backdrop, and the
state animal, ostensibly depicting a possibility of a scene that one could come across if the
grizzly were still extant.
Information around the diorama tells the story of the California grizzly, how before settler
colonial presence in California, the state held a stable and vibrant bear population. That the
grizzly’s decline correlated with California’s growing domestication and industrialization of the
environment, and that the bear finally went extinct in the early twentieth century. A population
meter, standard in the diorama hall measures California grizzly population as extinct. The bear
52 The museums “diorama explorer”, a tablet that provides information on the dioramas themselves rather than their
contents, shows a map of the backdrop’s location. If the visitor were to travel an hour north then they too could
occupy the same space as the grizzly in the museum.

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we see displayed is a dermal relic of Californian history and a reminder of the biodiversity the
state held during the construction of wilderness in 19th century California.53
The bears presence as specifically a California grizzly (Ursus arctos californicus) further
ties the bear to the state. The range of California grizzlies was smaller than the state geopolitical
boundaries determined 1850 with California’s admittance to the United States. Thus, unlike
species such as chapparal yucca or western tiger swallowtails, species that can be found outside
of state, or even charismatic megafauna like black tailed deer (whose genetic population exists
anywhere west of the continental divide) and bobcat (found nationally and internationally) the
California grizzly is a distinct subspecies of bear particular to Californian geography.54
The range of the California grizzly was always connected to place, and in particular
Californian place. Ursus arctos californicus was a genetically distinct subspecies of grizzly, and
though hybridization with Ursus arctos was known to occur, biological and phenological
differences were present in the California grizzly enough to distinguish them as a distinct
population. The bears disappearance and extinction combined with the timeline of Californian
industrialization and establishment into statehood meant that the Californian grizzly died before
53 The notion of Californian wilderness is as much an ideological project as it is a conservation project with its roots
in the 19th century when industrialization in California started picking up speed. There is a long history of naturalists
and mountaineers who have been drawn to the landscapes and sights of California. Yosemite, Sequoia, or the
Redwood groves in Marin County are notable examples of sites that drew figures such as John Muir and Theodore
Roosevelt (amongst many others) to declare Californian nature as unique, sublime, and fundamentally core sites of
Californian exceptionalism. Amongst many other states, in the growing United States of America, Wilderness,
ruggedness, and biodiversity made California unique. Thus, Wilderness (Cronon, 1996), became an identity project,
tying Californian ecology to state identity.
54 California holds a particular spot in taxonomy culture due to its connections with colonial histories of the
American West and its ideological connections to the natural world. Scientific species names often reflect the
conditions of “species discovery” (Youatt, 2015). Scientific names can thus reflect conditions of place (where this
species was first “discovered” and described) amongst many other modifiers that tie species into a complex
interpersonal web of connection.
California’s history of attunement to the natural world thus produced a swathe of species discovery. Further,
the state’s geogological complexity allows for a diversity of biomes that in turn hold extreme biodiversity. A result
of these factors lead to a large subsect of species being taxonomically organized in relation to California- regardless
if the species range extended out of geopolitical boundaries or not. Species such as California Coffeeberry
(Frangula californica) and the California Sea Lion (Zalophus californianus) amongst others have a range that
extends past state boundaries but whose conditions of discovery by humans resided in California space.

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moving beyond state lines. Contemporary ex situ conservation strategies mean often that
endangered animals in captivity are brought outside of their natural range for breeding programs
or conservation initiatives (Braverman, 2015). California Grizzlies went extinct before
biodiversity monitoring and sensitivity towards extinction became a prominent anxiety in
conservation and naturalist conversations. Additionally, the fast decline of the grizzly, combined
with the bears incompatibility with cattle farming and popularity as trophy game meant that the
species was never displaced, only extirpated. Thus, the California grizzly lived and died inside of
the geography that would be bounded as California in 1850.
The California grizzly’s presence in Santa Barbara’s Museum of Natural History mammal
hall therefore offers a deep narrative on place, statehood, and native biodiversity. Amongst the
other native species dioramas in the mammal hall the grizzly diorama adds to an overarching
narrative that this hall showcases the story of Californian biodiversity and natural history.
Diorama and taxidermy displays communicate narrative. For Donna Haraway, the African
mammal hall of the American Museum of Natural History communicates the patriarchal
domination project over the natural world (Haraway, 1984). The Santa Barbara mammal hall
constructs a narrative of Californian nature, synonymous with statehood. Attentiveness to detail
is put into constructing the dioramas that showcase Californian native plants animals and
scenery. These diorama’s work together to bolster narratives statehood through pride in
biodiversity, offering plausible scenes of wildlife and multispecies encounters the modern
naturalist, hiker, citizen might come across exploring Californian nature. Preserved in a museum,
these scenes construct the witnessing of endemic species as experiencing California.

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The concept of endemic in the mammal hall is superimposed onto politically determined
state boundaries.55 Range maps for the different species are shown displayed on the geographical
shape of California as it is recognized in geopolitical maps, thus, the hall constructs the natural
world and species movement relating not to species range, but rather to species range within state
lines. “Native” species are sieved through the filter of statehood and the species displayed within
these dioramas function to build a narrative of distinctly Californian flora and fauna.
The grizzly diorama is titled, a plaque displayed above the diorama declaring that the
scene before us contains the California grizzly bear. Directly under the common name, the
scientific name is displayed: Ursus arctos californicus. The specimen on display, the
taxidermized skin made animate again through the artistic manipulation of the pelt over a
model’s displays the official state animal.56 Therefore it is particularly interesting to note, that the
skin on display does not come from a California grizzly at all.
The Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History opened its California grizzly diorama in
its Mammal Hall in 1932. Common to museum practices looking for perfect animal forms to
aesthetically display at the time, a specimen was collected specifically for the purpose of display
in the mammal hall.57 A grizzly was hunted in 1932 in British Columbia, well outside the time
and habitat range of the California grizzly. No accession records appear for the specimen skin
denoting information such as subspecies, sex, or further collection location details. All that is
56 As with any broad Google search, a Wikipedia link to “California grizzly” is amongst the first websites churned
up in a search. The accompanying photo on the California grizzly Wikipedia page is of the Santa Barbara specimen
(California grizzly bear, n.d.). 57 California Grizzlies, as they were coveted trophy animals and big game conquests often produced imperfect pelts
when skinned due to trauma and damage made to the animal’s skin during death. Bullet spread from 19th and early
20th century hunting rifles often meant any damage to the pelt needed to be patched and subsequently produced
weak spots that needed to be closely monitored during the taxidermy process. Hunting for museum display meant
that skin trauma was a primary concern for collectors and effort was made to minimize damage.

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recorded about the 1932 bear is that this grizzly was collected specifically for museum display
and taxidermized by the James L. Clark Studio in New York.58
The 1932 bear was later replaced with a smaller specimen in 1935. Museum narrative
simply lists the reason for the exchange of bears as due to the original bear being an “inferior
specimen,” though this was because the original bear was simply too big for the dimensions of
the diorama display. The 1935 grizzly curiously was even more displaced geographically from
the historic range of the California grizzly and was a specimen collected in Alaska.59 Though
small for its species the bear pelt was deemed higher quality than its predecessor and was once
more taxidermized through James L. Clark’s studio to be put on display in the mammal hall.
Since the establishment of the 1935 grizzly, there have been no significant changes to the
diorama.
The Santa Barbara bear diorama presents a curious contradiction. The display and
narrative around the bear itself weave a story of endemic species, Californian nature, statehood,
and biodiversity loss. The skin of the bear however comes from a bear population that is extant,
unthreatened according IUCN Red list categorizations60, and geographically distant from
California. The Santa Barbara bear ostensibly becomes a vehicle for the California grizzly
narrative to attach itself to. In this manner then the material skin of the bear becomes both
incredibly important and inconsequential to the narrative.
58 James L. Clark was a taxidermist and naturalist of the 19th and 20th century. Clark apprenticed for a time under
Charles Akeley, taxidermist for the American Museum of Natural History and the Chicago Field Museum. Upon
Akeley’s death, Clark assumed the position of chief Taxidermist for the AMNH. His taxidermy studio in New York
City produced specimens for museums and prominent hunters through the early 20th century.
59 Though accession information does not exist for the grizzly pelt taxidermized in the Mammal Hall, Alaska
contains the entire species range of the Kodiak grizzly, which is the closest phenotypically to the California grizzly,
in coloration and size.
60 Ursus arctos is listed as stable and categorized as ‘Least Concern’ in the latest assessment (McLellan et al, 2017).

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Rachel Poliquin’s construction of the term animal-thing discusses the messiness of the
obdurate materiality animals have when we engage with taxidermy (Poliquin, 2012). In death,
the taxidermized bear skin is transformed into an animal-thing containing multitudes. Where in
life the bear from the diorama belongs to a distinct population entirely, the death of the bear
allows the California grizzly to symbolically achieve life. Posed animal skins are an
amalgamation of meaning. They are simultaneously the animal (its skin), a representation of the
animal (in life), a representation of how humans perceive the animal (its presentation), and as is
the case with the Santa Barbara bear, a narrative (upon which all previous meanings are
negotiated). In the Santa Barbara mammal hall diorama, the bear is the material remains of the
animal that was hunted and killed. It is also represented as alive through the taxidermic molding
and manipulation of the skin. The form of museum and big game taxidermy developed by
Charles Akeley and James L. Clarke was distinct from trophy taxidermy as it endeavored to
mirror animal bodies in life. Detail to realism and achieving life-like poses was particularly
important early 20th century museum taxidermy and thus, the Santa Barbra grizzly becomes a
representation of how the bear would be in life. The diorama and the bear in its place in the
diorama, is in community with the species also represented. Despite this, as a manufactured
artifact replete with state meaning it presents a narrative of a specific Californian settler
perception of nature The diorama is how dominant narratives of the California Grizzly’s social
life presumes the presented animal would be in the natural world.
But let us address the elephant in the room, or rather, the grizzly in the diorama. The
narrative of the Santa Barbara diorama, constructed by curators, taxidermists, and hunters, is that
the species displayed inside is a California grizzly. Thus, the narrative modifies the meanings this
bear skin can possess. As the exhibit itself refused to present the grizzly as it had been in life, the

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Kodiak population this grizzly came from becomes inconsequential to the presentation of the
bear. In other words, the narrative transforms the bear skin on display into that of a California
grizzly, ostensibly eschewing the experience of the bear in life. The skin, presented as a
California grizzly, becomes one. The California grizzly’s narrative possesses the bear skin in
death and with curators and preparators superimposing a Californian narrative onto the
specimen. The diorama presents a scene that validates this point further. This diorama shows a
California grizzly in a Californian space.
Yet, this irrelevance of species is also particularly important to the diorama. The narrative
of the California grizzly diorama requires a bear. A specimen was selected for its characteristics
in resembling a California grizzly, so attention to how the bear is remembered and how it looked
is important. Visitors to the diorama hall come with expectations about how a grizzly looks as
well as the characteristics associated with its species name. The bears disappearance in the early
20th century alongside its already established narrative as tied to the history of settler presence in
California meant that the bears social life had the time to gain a social presence and life of its
own, one that is not necessarily tied to bodies and skins but to public memory which determines
where, when, and how the California grizzly manifests. A narrative was built around civic and
mediated qualities imposed upon the bear, not necessarily tied to its physical presence and
genetic differentiation from other grizzly species, but from socially granted qualities from long
term entanglements with Californian populations. The bear needed to look a certain way to fit its
narrative.
The California grizzly diorama was a posthumous project for the bear. When the decision
to add a grizzly exhibit was made in the museum California grizzlies were already gone. While
the decision to hunt and collect a specimen from British Columbia and later Alaska was made

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from a point of convenience61, exhibit developers were already working in a space where
preserving the narrative of the California grizzly was the main concern of the diorama.
The mediated social life of the California grizzly, upheld by the narrative its symbolic
presence had cultivated, demanded a lively taxidermic specimen to possess. While the
preservation and presentation of extinct animals through osteological articulation and
reproduction was prevalent in paleontological spaces, California grizzlies were animals whose
social lives were premised on their flesh and blood representation. An articulated skeleton would
not achieve the life-likeness asked of by a diorama in a mammal hall. Further, a skeleton simply
wouldn’t carry the narrative of the bear forward. The California grizzly was widely visible across
the state flag and peppered throughout settler history in its lively form. To show the material
animal-thing of Ursus arctos californicus as reduced to nothing but skin and bones would be
counterintuitive to the social life representations of the bear had built over its historical
entanglements with California. Thus, taxidermy became the only space where the bear could be
materially present and still retain its symbolic value.
Conclusion
Extinction refusal operates in the case of the California grizzly through the attachment
people communities have to the material of grizzly bodies. Where the majority of California
Grizzlies taxidermized today come from its long living history of being hunted and driven
towards extirpation, few grizzly trophies still solely function as such. Bears such as the Valley
Center bear are hunting trophies, and function still as such, but also function as extinct
taxidermy, carrying a story of species disappearance alongside its individual death. The Valley
61 Museum staff and curators made the decision based off of where they had institutional contacts. It was easier to
source a cryptic species to the California grizzly rather than purchase or go through the process of taxidermizing a
already-preserved and fragile skin.

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Center bear’s narrative is a vibrant social life, tied to what its narratives come to represent. It was
taxidermized at a time where people were not worried of the species decline and extirpation, as
such the trophy comes to celebrate a narrative where grizzlies are alive. The historical museum,
in premising this narrative continues this tradition. The narrative of anxiety that grizzly
populations were decreasing is not attached to material examples like the Valley Center bear.
Because many grizzlies were taxidermized as hunting trophies, the representations we have
today are in this style. Museums and centers that hope to display bears in a natural pose like the
Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History have a smaller pool of aging and decaying taxidermy.
In order to achieve liveliness in their California grizzly, the SBMNH looked outside of the subspecies entirely, electing to represent the California grizzly with a Kodiak grizzly. Tying the
California grizzly to a living population of bears, extinction is denied through circumnavigating
facing the death of the grizzly entirely. By electing to display a Kodiak Bear as Ursus arctus
californicus the SBMNH further refuses grizzly death and the difficulties of dealing with
decaying skins or sourcing historical bears. Some museums, like the California Academy of
Sciences choose to work with the aging number of California grizzly skins posed in a natural
style and work to restore them to a lively representation of the living bear despite a century
passing since grizzly disappearance. The state narrative came to supplant the anxiety of species
disappearance in this iteration of the bear posed in natural form. Because the natural walking
bear was the type of grizzly display that remained in fashion through the species decline, it was
the familiar shape of the bear to attach to Californian identity. Once the grizzly disappeared for
good, the function of the bear posed as natural was no longer needed to narrate bear life outside
of human engagement, this narrative wasn’t happening because there were no bears. The form

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had space to symbolically gesture to another narrative entirely. Thus, the California grizzly came
to symbolize California.
Contemporary extinctions offer sites of analysis where we are able to interrogate how
human communities narrate stories of species disappearance. Historical extinctions with long
narratives such as the California grizzly are especially salient as their stories span centuries with
only some narrative threads reaching a final, depressing, conclusion. At the beginning of this
chapter, I argued that contemporary extinctions are salient sites to explore different social groups
relations to the non-human other in the “Sixth Mass Extinction” and the “Anthropocene” in
discussing the consequences of environmental impact on the environment. Modern and historical
attunements to extinction highlight the ways people relate to eventual ends.
In the past two chapters I have highlighted the lengths and manner communities will go
to circumnavigate these ends through denial or symbolic incarnation. The transition of California
grizzly taxidermy to more speculative representations of bear life through the use of genetically,
behaviorally, and geographically distinct groups to represent California grizzlies stand out
because they erode the already troubled boundaries of “species” to favor visual similarity and
representation. Extinction of the California grizzly is most clearly refused through the
repurposing of genetically distinct groups to circumnavigate the increasing scarcity and slow
degradation of Urus arctos californicus skins. This move to prioritizing the aesthetic form and
representation above all highlights the core of extinct lively symbols to be primarily visual.
This confluence of the material with the visual is seen elsewhere in sites of extinction
refusal. Imaginaries of scientific and technological capacity alongside the growing anxiety of
contemporary extinction has led to the development of de-extinction companies and programs,
who at their core ask: What if the lively symbol is once more imbued with actual life?

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Chapter 3: De-extincting the Woolly Mammoth
In the preface to her 2020 edition of “How to Clone a Mammoth”, molecular biologist
Beth Shapiro doesn’t let the reader get through the first paragraph before dashing expectations.
“To avoid any unnecessary or additional disappointment,” she writes, “it’s not possible to clone a
mammoth […] because it is too late. They are already extinct” (p. ix). Perhaps paradoxically,
Shapiro is on the board of directors for Revive & Restore, a non-profit promoting the genetic
rescue of endangered and extinct, as well as the chief science officer for Colossal, a for-profit deextinction company. Nuance is essential it seems when talking about de-extinction, as Shapiro
navigates between advocating the science and tossing it aside completely. However, only too
often the need for specificity is passed over in favor of sensationalist science narratives that pull
on the popular imaginaries of de-extinction in the style of Jurassic Park. After all, what is more
exciting than bringing something back from the dead?
De-extinction, broadly defined as the return of disappeared species, has made waves in
the last decade within popular science and culture. De-extinction scientist Ben Novak defines it
as “the ecological [and phenotypical] replacement of an extinct species” and Beth Shapiro from
the paragraph above, names it as the ability to “bring species that have gone extinct back to life”
(Novak, 2018, 5; Shapiro. 2015: 7). The notion of extinction not being a terminal status has
always made headlines in popular science news. Rediscoveries of disappeared species such as
the coelacanth or silphium created mass media events historically (Smith, 1958; Wright 2001).
The concept of de-extinction was notably introduced into the popular zeitgeist through 1993’s
Jurassic Park, directed by Steven Spielberg and based off the 1990 novel by Michael Crichton.

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Jurassic Park was a massive success and catapulted notions of species resurrection into public
interpretations of de-extinction. In the movie, scientists use traces of dinosaur DNA preserved in
amber to de-extinct dinosaurs for capital gain, opening a wildlife park where visitors could visit
to see dinosaurs in the wild (Spielberg, 1993). Though the movie was a cautionary tale on ego,
science, and capitalism, the film’s success spurred a decades long franchise that kept deextinction as a consumable topic in pop culture.
Due to its public profile so tied to popular media, de-extinction as a concept parallels the
charismatic ancient creatures such as the mammoth by having a popular and consumable social
profile. Which is to say, the lay narrative of de-extinction is fundamentally what drives its social
life. People engage with de-extinction project rhetorics not from a blank canvas but from a space
of preconceived ideas about what the science is, how it functions, and what its ultimate goals are
from their experience with the topic in from its media profile and social life.62 Of course, deextinction is also more than its social profile, it is a concept containing multitudes and is a salient
topic across biotech entrepreneur and environmental conservation spaces alongside its pop
culture presence. In scientific fields such as evolutionary genetics, microbiology, and
conservation science, the notion of de-extinction finds purchase in scientific discourse and
practice. It is also a developing field of scientific practices and technologies premised on
developing capacities of cloning and manipulating gene expression (Minteer, 2019).
De-extinction projects refuse extinction narratives through circumnavigating the affective
social landscape that undergirds so many contemporary extinctions. The ivory-bill case presented
earlier demonstrates that contemporary extinctions are deeply emotional and personal affairs,
affecting communities in intimate and ideological ways. Woolly mammoth de-extinction projects
62 Though the most famous, Jurassic Park, is not the sole piece of media about de-extinction. John Brosnan’s
Carnosaur, and Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker are other significant fiction books focused on de-extinction.

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specifically, draw on rhetorics of hope and positivity. De-extinction is one product among many
in a wider culture of techno-solutionism, the notion that technological development can solve
social problems (Kneese, 2023). De-extinction companies narratively promise on their websites
that through investing time and belief (and, for a very select few, money) into de-extinction, then
it will result in a solution to the biodiversity crisis. Thus, de-extinction projects offer an attractive
orientation to extinction that bypasses the need for engaging with unhappy feelings by refusing
extinction through minimizing the roll of mourning, and ultimately promising a fix to the
condition.
In this chapter de-extinction offers a consumable panacea to growing anxieties about the
abstract and overwhelming threats of biodiversity loss and climate change in a way that removes
culpability from the equation entirely. In this chapter I look at how affect is leveraged across deextinction sites and the narratives contained within, honing in on the mammoth de-extinction
project, as its presence in de-extinction spaces is foundational and key to their public profile. Deextinction companies spend so much time on their website working to present a return to an
unattainable and idealized past with their science. I argue that by examining these narratives with
affect Lauren Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism and Sianne Ngai’s conception of stuplimity, deextinction narratives stagnate more sustainable and cathartic ways of living with mass extinction
(Berlant, 2011, Ngai, 2007). Thus, de-extinction rhetorics are engaged with producing and
maintaining a cruel optimism. The choice of the mammoth as a poster species is also a calculated
decision. In choosing a species like the mammoth, which is not a contemporary extinction by any
means, de-extinction rhetorics circumnavigate the emotional burden of mourning if (and when)
the project fails. Simply put, the project embodies the adage “you cannot miss what you never
had.”

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Revival projects are orientations to extinction refusal that blur the affective boundaries
between the living and the extinct. De-extinction companies sell discursively lively and
optimistic imaginaries of the future that encourages their publics to minimize thinking about
biodiversity loss in the present. I follow the de-extinction narrative of the mammoth as it
migrates across private research companies, from the Long Now Foundation, to Revive &
Restore, to Colossal, and how it relies on a robust social presence to maintain salience. The
biggest of Ice Age and Miocene megafauna, mammoths are ancient relatives of modern
elephants. Through a combination of environmental stressors and hunting, mammoths went
largely extinct roughly 10,000 years ago, with small populations living on until 4,000 years ago.
The mammoth holds a charismatic spot when thinking about ancient animals due to its
impressive fossil remains and its impressive interpretations in cave art, that de-extinction
companies exploit to their benefit.
The Long Now Foundation, Revive & Restore, and Colossal Biosciences are key deextinction companies whose founders were key contributors to the 2013 rebranding of genetic
rescue technologies into “de-extinction”. Crucially, these companies also mark the movement of
the mammoth project, the keystone charismatic revival promised by the rebranding, over time.
They use mammoth de-extinction to establish themselves in public life and discursively promise
a fix to biodiversity loss, banking on and perpetuating the mammoth’s social life and symbolic
liveliness to establish themselves in biotech. The mammoth’s space in popular culture bolsters
de-extinction narratives, which in turn refuse contemporary extinction by designating species
death as a curable condition. Thus, de-extinction companies narratively refuse extinction by
circumnavigating rhetorics of environmental disruption and culpability in contemporary

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extinction. Death and disappearance become porous states which can be negotiated. Instead of a
consequence of the Anthropocene, extinction becomes a treatable symptom.
Why focus on the mammoth?
Like the California grizzly the mammoth is also many things. What some refer to as a
singular type of animal, “mammoths” are not one particular species. Instead, Mammuthus is a
genus, encompassing many distinct species and subspecies. Of the genus Mammuthus,
Columbian and Woolly mammoths are often the symbolic standard for the animals as they are
most heavily associated with the charismatic size and identifying features that distinguish the
“mammoth” in popular culture. Partially this is due to the found material remains of woolly
mammoths that are preserved in ice. Of the genus Mammuthus, primigenius has the most
material remains and DNA traces, the woolly mammoth (Debruyne et al, 2008). The woolly
mammoth’s iconic silhouette and heavy coat further distinguish the animal from other related
mammoths. Primigenius looms large because of its woolly coat in popular imaginations of the
Miocene and its associations with the famous era known as the Ice Age.63
Mammuthus columbi, or the Columbian mammoth also frequently indexed when talking
about mammoths in the abstract because of its large size and broad geographic range from
modern day northern Canada to Central America.64 Interbreeding between both of these species
further blurred the need for meaningful distinctions in lay understandings of the genus because
they produced hybridized but still fertile offspring that caused genetically distinct populations
(Enk et al, 2011). Though the mammoth is many species, narratively, it is often condensed into a
63 Ice Ages are geological portions of time where the temperature of the earth cooled globally and resulted in
increased polar activities. Though the earth has gone through multiple Ice Ages, over its geological time, “The Ice
Age” in the singular typically references the global cooling of the Miocene era (Petterson, 2021). 64 More broadly dispersed the Woolly Mammoth’s historical ranged crossed the northern hemisphere. Today
primigenius remains are found across Europe, North America, and Asia.

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singular image of a charismatic megafauna unless species distinctions are important to the
animal’s character. In this chapter unless the species of mammoth is of direct consequence, I will
refer simply to the genus as a singular entity: the mammoth.
Distinct further from mammoths, mastodons are also important players in the arguments
ahead. Mammoths and mastodons are from different genuses, only relating to each other through
their taxonomic order, Proboscidea. Still, their visual similarities often mean that they are
confused at first glance, considered interchangeable in popular culture, and are often narratively
associated with the other. Mastodons and mammoths share space in general and lay imaginations
of the Miocene era due to the species’ broad physical similarities. This conflation of discreet
populations and species into one umbrella species is not an uncommon practice amongst how
people know a species (Monro & Mayo, 2022).
The history of what a species means is fraught with negotiations about known organisms
in the world. The varied ways of organizing organisms from cladistics, to taxonomy, to
biological nomenclature each derive from particular projects of organizing organic bodies in the
world (Grant, 2003; International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature, 2000). Species
move through these systems renegotiating where the boundaries of their types are in each, with
respect to the different organizational structures cultivated in the organizing system. For instance,
Yellowfin Tuna may be taxonomically one species but cladistically several (Grewe et al, 2015).
That the concept of a species is so malleable is further shown through cultural and linguistic
differentiation (Tsing, 2015), political regimens (Youatt, 2015), or simply through moments of
bureaucratic shuffling and reorganization. Anna Tsing writes about the cultural specificity of
distinct species as a fundamentally phenomenological exercise where mushroom diversity in
Chinese taxonomies is much more varied than European organization of the same bodies: “they

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claim to have twenty-one species of oyster mushrooms in Yunan but there are only fourteen
species recognized in the world” (Tsing, 2015: 230). The history of taxonomy as a field is also
one historically premised on phenotypic assessment of individuals (Montoya, 2022). The
holotype of many species for instance, distinguished one species from another in Carl Linnaeus
Systema Naturae, was premised on the biologists visual description of the specimen (Ereshefsky,
2000).65 Classification and reclassification of species today is often petition based by experts in
larger biodiversity databases such as the IUCN Red List, the Web of Life, or ZooBank.66 Species
are thus distinguished and classified based on scientific interest or attention from people who
have stakes in knowing the species. In this manner, the concept of species is a fundamentally
social category influenced by human attunement to the biodiversity of the natural world.
The species boundaries between mammoths and mastodons are troubled in myriad ways.
The visual similarities between the mastodon and the mammoth are so strong that these species’
social presences often intertwine with one another. Phenotypic similarity is not just skin deep
between these species either, as pachyderms, their skeletal structures also bear visual similarities.
Mammoths are confused for mastodons or mastodons for mammoths depending on how they are
presented to the public. Success of the animated film, Ice Age (Wedge, 2002) and its sequels,
have also popularized the image of the woolly mammoth so much so that in my personal
experience with educational programming at the La Brea Tar Pits, I and other educators often
introduced the mastodon maquette on display by distinguishing it as different from what students
may think it is (Manny from Ice Age). A consequence of this visual similarity extends to the
65 The holotype is the name bearing specimen of a species. Holotypes, or Red Label specimens are the material
bodies that are considered the standard of a new species. As the theoretical linchpin between the symbolic and
material world, the organic body of a holotype acts as the direct signified material connected to the scientific name.
Though a holotype refers to only one individual a scaffold of type specimen, that is other bodies that exemplify the
phenotypic traits of the species uphold the narrative that species are distinguished visually. 66 ZooBank is the International Commission for Zoological Nomenclature’s (ICZN) official registry.

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social role that these species play in popular culture. The social life of the mastodon may have
had historically is often inextricable with the mammoth and vice versa.
In the previous chapter, the case of the Santa Barbara Bear as a California grizzly on
display despite its life as a Kodiak grizzly further demonstrates the porousness of the concept of
“species” when discussing the social lives of a charismatic extinct organism. “Species” can come
to mean a performance in the social narrative of an organism. That is, as long as the stuff and
narrative combine to index a particular species, then the specimen is performing that plant or
animal. Additionally, that these species were known to interbreed and produce fertile young
further complicates the boundaries between these species as distinct social entities even in
popular culture (Enk, 2011). Hybridization between American mastodons and Columbian
mammoths further trouble the species boundaries in found fossils and material remains in the
United States as they obfuscate physiological differences between the two (Enk, 2011). American
mastodon fossils are thus inextricably intertwined with the social presence of the mammoth, and
the mammoth in turn adopts qualities of the mastodon. Much like the argument I made for
distinct species of mammoths, unless the distinction needs to be made for the species as a
genetically distinct mastodon in reference to the mammoth, “mammoth” adopts the symbolic
meanings and social life of the mastodon as well.
These narrative obfuscations between mammoth and mastodon symbolic lives are
important because the American mastodon, played a key role in contemporary orientations to
extinction in the United States. In American Monster (2000), historian Paul Semonin draws
connections between the role of a developing nation with mastodon material presence. Mastodon
bones were crucial in developing ideologies of Manifest Destiny and the national imaginary of
an establishing United States. Mastodon skulls, along with other pachyderm skulls bore

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resemblance for many to biblical giants, so when mastodon fossils were uncovered by early
colonial settlers, their presence was justification that God had left settlers the land (4).67
Semonin argues that the mastodon, known in historical paleontological circles as the incognetum,
“stood as an emblem of not only the white man’s dominion over nature but also the discovery
and conquest of prehistoric nature” (361). Mammoth bones and hybrid bones, sharing this social
history, are thus similarly intertwined with histories of Manifest Destiny and settler colonialism.
Though long distanced from this narrative today, this moment in history for the
charismatic form of the mammoth and mastodon meant that particular care was put into
preserving and marking their material remains, with the consequence of the mammoth and
mastodon being among the best documented Miocene megafauna (Debruyne et al, 2008).
Mastodons and mammoths retained a robust presence in imaginaries of a prehistoric United
States because of its prolific remains. The choice of de-extinction companies to de-extinct a
mammoth is premised on several reasons, notably the animal’s charisma, but also largely in part
due to its robust material presence in museum and private collections. Though separated by time
from its connections to settler colonialism ideologies, the stuff of mammoths is still inflected
with these scaffolds of power, because without them, the social life of the mammoth may have
had a less persistent presence in American culture. The de-extinction of the mammoth then, is a
consequence of these systems of colonialism and Manifest Destiny which helped construct the
mammoth as a lively symbol in popular culture.
The Sublime and Stuplime of De-extinction
A professor of environmental ethics in the Life Sciences, Ben Minteer writes that deextinction technologies may be “stopgap measures [which] distract us from striking a more
67 It is also popularly theorized that mammoth and other pachyderm fossil presence around the Mediterranean where
the material inspiration for Greek giants and cyclops in mythology (Mayell, 2003).

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respectful and sustainable relationship to other species and to the land as a whole,” (Minteer,
2019: 14) which highlights the problematic nature of Novak’s definition, that de-extinction is
simply “the […] replacement of an extinct species” (Novak, 2018: 5). Minteer warns that by
cultivating an extractive orientation towards other species and seeing de-extinction as a means to
maintain these relationships, this ultimately promotes an unsustainable connection with the nonhuman, “frustrating the development of a more meaningful environmental ethic” (109). So, deextinction technologies for Minteer need to be accompanied by a critical ethic if they are to
succeed in sustainable change. Currently, where de-extinction is seen as a manifestation of what
Minteer cites as the “technological sublime” (107) these processes are more intertwined with
narratives of technological development and innovation, than they are about establishing
meaningful connection with the non-human world that benefits the nonhuman as much as the
human. De-extinction thus, in the manners defined by those engaging in these practices, is at its
core, not about the extinct, but rather the human.68
Minteer further draws borders between de-extinction and its subjects when he writes that
de-extinction references specifically the range of scientific imaginaries about life from death
through advances in cloning and genetic engineering technologies (2019: 5). Thus, de-extinction
comes to reference not only the scientific and technological responses to the environmental
effects of the Anthropocene, but also the narratives they are contained within (12). Stories of reevolution and life-from-death, though thematically similar, become distinct through the
specification that de-extinction is fundamentally intertwined with technology and scientific
development. Science and technology serve a constructive discursive function in popular
narratives about de-extinction. Minteer writes, “although de-extinctionists claim that revived
68 This is further made clear by the rise in tech companies’ interest in funding research trends in human extinction.

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species will be proper objects of appreciation, awe, and wonder […] they are in fact trading this
aesthetic regard for the sublime qualities of wild nature for a celebration of our own
technological ingenuity, power, and control” (108). Where historically, the natural world
correlates with the sense of the sublime, de-extinction tech in assuming control over nature, and
environmental equilibrium, become sublime.
Minteer’s use of the sublime in discussing technology stems from particular
conversations about American wilderness and frontier during the 19th century. The term, from
Edmund Burke (1757) and Immanuel Kant’s (1790) philosophies on the beautiful and
destructive, was quickly adopted in the United States as an affective orientation to thinking about
nature and the frontier, in ways which also validated nation-making projects of Manifest Destiny
and expansionism. William Cronon distinguishes the American sublime from its European roots
because of this ideological project. What he terms the “romantic sublime” was a “cultural
movement that helped transform wilderness into a sacred American icon during the nineteenth
century” (1996: 76). The romantic sublime is deeply intertwined with ideologies of extractivism
because “wilderness” served a larger narrative of establishing the nation as a lasting power.69
Ben Minteer is not the only scholar to connect the sublime to processes of sense making in the
Anthropocene. Eco-critic Matthew Lear connects the emotional threads between the
overwhelming feeling of confronting the sublime with anxious orientations to thinking about
climate. He posits that since precarious ecological states such as climate change and mass
extinction are such encompassing anxieties, that thinking about human impact can mimic the
69 It is not surprising that 19th century nature writing in the United States that engaged with the concept of the
sublime (John Muir writing about Yosemite, Henry David Thoreau writing about Katahdin, etc) correlated with the
development of national and state park systems that preserved these sites at the expense of displacing indigenous
groups to maintain the ideology of an “untouched, pristine Wilderness” (Cronon 1996).

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sublime (2024: 14).70 Perhaps more insidious than the romantic sublime though, Lear particularly
pulls on Sianne Ngai’s caricature of sublimity, stuplimity (2007).
Literary scholar and critic, Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings (2007) provides a cultural
analysis of the consequences of non-cathartic emotions in literature and society. Non-cathartic
emotion, she writes, are those ugly emotions that do not spur actions and “offer no satisfaction,
[…] therapeutic, or purifying release” (6). Non-cathartic emotions linger, causing the
connections between subjects and objects to stagnate and decay. One of the emotions Ngai
grapples with is the mundane sublime. Stuplimity, or the feeling “in which astonishment is
paradoxically united with boredom” (Ngai, 2013) is the non-cathartic orientation to moments of
sublimity. In terms of the ecological, stuplimity may be clearly seen through the fatigue publics
have to overwhelming helplessness when thinking about climate futures. For instance,
overwhelming rhetorics of doom without hope when discussing climate futures may stymie
restorative actions.
De-extinction companies narratively employ affective orientations to extinction in
consequential ways. I argue that Revive & Restore and Colossal have stake in encouraging
audiences to adopt a stupliminal orientation to thinking about extinction, and specifically
anthropogenic extinction, because it validates their own technologies as sublime. That is,
contemporary extinction is such a pervasive threat, that any actions people could possibly take
would be useless in fixing the biodiversity crisis. De-extinction tech becomes the only possible
solution and way to think about a functional multispecies future. Thus, de-extinction tech offers a
70 Lear is not the only scholar to write about the grappling with the encompassing scale of anthropogenic precarities.
Timothy Morton coins the term “hyperobject” to discuss things that are so spatially and temporally extensive they
are difficult to fully understand (Morton, 2013). Bruno Latour writes about the linguistic and rhetorical incapability
that people face when describing the effects of human impact on the environment, arguing that these topics are so
incommensurable that language fails (Latour, 2014).

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cathartic solution to thinking about contemporary extinction, promising a solution to narratives
of overwhelming hopelessness about the future. In this narrative, de-extinction becomes sublime
by pushing a non-cathartic vision of the present onto their audience, they then promise catharsis
and release alongside hope, from the worries that plague popular biodiversity narratives.
However, non-cathartic emotions are “dysphoric or experientially negative, in the sense
that they evoke pain or displeasure” so de-extinction companies, who I argue reproduce
stupliminal orientations to profit from, may have affective reasons for maintaining destructive
narratives to extinction as well (Ngai, 2007: 11). In addition to making the de-extinction process
sublime, de-extinction companies also promise that biotech practices offer hope and good
feelings. Revive & Restore and Colossal build the affective argument that, not only is deextinction the only constructive way forward in a paralyzing setting of contemporary mass
extinction, but also offer the capacity to feel happiness when thinking about species
disappearance. They principally do this through circumnavigating the need for negative emotion
entirely, focusing on life instead of death, clemency from culpability, and promising overall
optimistic climate futures with de-extinction.
These companies conflate happiness with achievement of their de-extinction goals,
broadly imbuing the objects of de-extinction practices with the promise of happiness, a promise
that feminist affect scholar, Sara Ahmed argues is a performance and benefit from living in
agreement with hegemonic values (2004: 197). The correlation of happiness with dominant
narratives and practices of living, inextricably tangle happiness with capital and nation in
culturally specific ways (2004: 197). To this end she argues that “the promise of happiness is the
promise that the lines we follow will get us there” (2010: 32). De-extinction companies who
profit from the corporatization of biotech and benefit from lingering values of Manifest Destiny

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which undergirds nationalistic capitalism, offer happy narratives that echo these values and
processes. This is to say, it is through corporatized science and Silicon Valley values, that publics
are offered a happy solution to thinking about extinction: de-extinction.
De-extinction companies achieve happy narratives by objectifying their processes
through focusing primarily on the end results. As political scientist, Amy Lynne Fletcher argues,
de-extinction companies are foremost operations that benefit from biotech corporate spaces with
“life-on-demand” as their product (2019). It is easy for de-extinction companies to objectify their
technological practices to lay audiences. Broadly, the companies promise the life of extinct
animals as their intended product. The story of mammoth revivification is particularly one that
has seen massive success from its objectification as a business product, gaining enough traction
to seed an independent nonprofit (The Long Now Foundation to Revive & Restore), and
maintain enough cultural salience so that when it was deemed unproductive for non-profit
growth, it easily transitioned into being privately funded in the for-profit sector (Revive &
Restore to Colossal). However, the mammoth is already a lively symbol, imbued with cultural
salience, charisma, and social presence through virtue of its popularity as a Miocene megafauna.
The de-extinction companies that are currently working on revivifying the mammoth pepper
their public profiles with images of living mammoths, obfuscating the boundaries between their
material product, the mammoth alive, and the lively symbol of the mammoth.
Ahmed argues that some objects may be more discursive than material when she writes
that “the evocation of an object can be pleasurable even if we have not yet experienced an object
as pleasing: this is the power after all of the human imagination as well as the social world”
(Ahmed, 2010: 27). I contend that this is the case of the mammoth, and by extension other
animals slotted for de-extinction because in de-extinction narratives they take on a victorious

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rhetoric, manifesting a positive orientation towards extinct animals by narratively promising
imagined vital life alongside their social life. When publics interact with the narratives told by
de-extinction companies, they are offered a positive orientation to thinking about the Sixth Mass
Extinction that allows an alternative to the other choice offered by these companies; unhappy
feelings of culpability, hopelessness for the future, and helplessness for the present.
De-extinction companies produce narratives that are examples of cruel optimism in the
light of the Sixth Mass Extinction. Their public profiles foster fantasies of past environmental
stability and promise future happiness in a temporal narrative that devalues the present. When
companies such as Revive & Restore and Colossal promise happy alternatives to thinking about
the human role in anthropogenic impact on the environment, they present a fantasy of
biodiversity and ecological stability that is not only misrepresentative of present conditions, but
encourages people to see de-extinction as the only viable future. For Lauren Berlant, cruel
optimism is what “exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing”
(Berlant, 2011: 1). This attunement to the present is picked up by Amy Lynne Fletcher when she
argues that the choice of animals slotted for de-extinction substantiates narratives of the past,
present, and future. She argues that “the woolly mammoth […] lingers right at that crossroad
between a deep time in which early humans were present, the problematic Anthropocene, and the
promissory future” (Fletcher, 2019: 57). De-extinction companies focus on returning the present
to an unattainable and idealized past, prioritizing revivifying species which have greater
symbolic value and social life (like the mammoth) than potential environmental impact.
The objects of de-extinction, the mammoth, thylacine, and passenger pigeon among
others, become “objects of desire” or narrative vehicles that people imbue with the fantasy of the
good life, in this case, a balanced and stable environment. Berlant writes that these objects

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comprise “a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make possible
for us” meaning that the lively symbol of de-extinct species delivers a particular fantasy about
ecological stability and the capacity to fix the consequences of biodiversity loss in the natural
world (Berlant, 2011: 23). De-extinction companies lean heavily on the narrative that bringing
disappeared species back is the only way to fix the biodiversity and climate crises facing our
time. Colossal and Revive & Restore foster particular worldviews about what biodiversity looks
like and which animals should take up space, favoring charismatic megafauna, and weaving
these species into narratives of labor for human benefit. Thus, de-extinction animal projects and
their subjects communicate a utopia where these precarities are solved.
De-extinction companies have a vested interest in maintaining overwhelming pessimism
about the state of biodiversity and the threat of extinction today. They create a foil to a narrative
of hopeless where de-extinction technologies offer the only viable solution to the extinction
crisis. Positioning de-extinction tech opposite of stupliminal narratives renders it sublime. The
objects of de-extinction become desirable and happy as their presence is dependent on successful
revivification. Finally, companies such as Revive & Restore and Colossal offer a desirable
circumnavigation of unhappy, guilty, and negative feelings so ingrained in contemporary
anthropogenic extinction, by offering an encompassing “fix” to extinction. All of these affective
orientations to extinction manifest a particular form of extinction refusal that is dependent on
obfuscating and tangling the boundaries of a charismatic species social life with molecular life
and narrative liveliness, resulting in an extractive (Fletcher) and ultimately unsustainable
(Minteer) relationship with the nonhuman. Nowhere is this clearer than in the mammoth revival
project.

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Mammoth de-extinction across companies
How de-extinction is defined within revival companies
De-extinction critics such as Amy Lynne Fletcher and Ben Minteer agree on the
reintroduction of de-extinction into popular culture as stemming from the same source. Where
de-extinction comfortably already held space in a science fiction space in popular media thanks
to the success of the Jurassic Park franchise, it was associated with speculative but ultimately
fantastical visions of de-extinction in practice. Rather, Fletcher and Minteer both reference the
events of a 2013 TEDx Talk “The Dawn of De-extinction: are you ready?” where self-described
longtermist, entrepreneur, and founder of the Whole Earth Catalogue, Stuart Brand’s Long Now
Foundation reshaped de-extinction as a scientific probability that relied on available scientific
technologies and developing research trends in genetics.71,72 At the TEDx event that reintroduced de-extinction, the process was publicly rebranded as a viable scientific process based
in practice. Brand’s final words in his speech, declaring it the project of the century, were: “We
will get woolly mammoths back” (Brand, 2013).
According to the entrepreneurs and scientists who participated in the conversations
surrounding the de-extinction rebrand and TEDx event, de-extinction is a broad term to reference
the myriad of technological and scientific processes of species re-emergence after they have
disappeared. Beth Shapiro, one of the leading science advisors for de-extinction projects defines
71 Stuart Brand also self describes as a predatory “innovator” who capitalizes on grafting ideas together to form
something new. In his bio-note on the Long Now Foundation’s website, he writes “I find things and I found
things. Things I find include tools, ideas, books, and people, which I blend and purvey” (Brand, 2013). 72 Fletcher writes that the beginning of de-extinction as a scientific narrative (opposed to fantastical) was galvanized
by the 2013 TEDx event “The Dawn of De-extinction: are you ready?” which was a collaboration between Brand’s
Long Now Foundation and National Geographic (2019:2-3) Minteer introduces this connection when he claims that
“Stuart Brand, the influential writer, entrepreneur, and techno-environmentalist, is one of the driving forces behind
the [de-extinction] idea, which has grabbed considerable media attention in recent years. Brand’s Long Now
Foundation is currently supporting scientific efforts to re-create the passenger pigeon […] within its “Revive &
Restore” project” (2019: 5).

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de-extinction as the ability to “bring species that have gone extinct back to life” (Shapiro, 2015:
7). Her definition is vague, deliberately so, in order to encapsulate the myriad technologies and
scientific processes at work in “de-extincting” disappeared species. She cites cloning
technologies, theories and practices of back-breeding73, advances in understanding and decoding
species genomes, and CRISPR74 (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats)
gene editing as the methods at work in de-extinction work (Shapiro, 2015). As both the primary
science advisor for Colossal, and on the board of directors for Revive & Restore, her expertise
and understanding of de-extinction in practice is unparalleled. The Shapiro lab at the University
of California at Santa Cruz excels in research on paleogenomics and is a dominant force in
defining the scientific concept of de-extinction. The role of the genome and the molecular is
premised in her definitions of de-extinction technologies as the aim of de-extinction she writes,
is “to resurrect, via cloning, identical copies of extinct species” (2015: xv). De-extinction for
Shapiro, is thus the return of the living bodies of extinct species in space. Her discursive choices
of using terms like “resurrection” and “life” paradoxically narrow Shapiro’s broad definition of
de-extinction. This is to say, while she broadly offers a range of practices and methods of what
de-extinction looks like, the end goal of de-extinction is relatively narrow: de-extinction success
hinges on the presence of life.
73 Back-breeding is the practice of selectively “breeding back” phenotypic traits of disappeared or endangered
species in its closest living relatives. Back-breeding groups recreate the form of extinct species through artificial
selection of desired phenotypic characteristics in individuals of the species, literally “going back” to extinct animal
phenotypes by breeding it through generations. One successful back-breeding campaign has been in “reviving” and
reintroducing the auroch to Europe. In order to accomplish this, scientists selectively bred back the aurochs defining
phenotypic characteristics in contemporary cattle populations (Tauros | Rewilding Europe, 2024) 74 CRISPR is the name of a particular type of genome editing technologies developed in mammalian genetics that
can be used to edit DNA at precise and repeatable locations (Questions and Answers about CRISPR, 2014). Some of
CRISPR’s popular uses are in regenerating cell lines, or nullifying or manipulating mutations, and creating animal
models on the cellular level (Simcox, 2018: 139; Questions and Answers about CRISPR, 2014)

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Other de-extinction scientists such as Ben Novak75, the scientific lead on the Passenger
Pigeon restoration project at Revive & Restore, define de-extinction not through a species’
genetic markers, but rather through their ecological function. In a 2018 article, Novak defines deextinction as “the ecological replacement of an extinct species by means of purposefully
adapting a living organism to serve the ecological function of the extinct species by altering
phenotypes” (5). De-extinction for Novak is primarily two things, the phenotypic resemblance to
the original disappeared species, which is where he cites genetic manipulation as being
particularly important, and the species ecological function in maintaining a stable ecosystem.
Novak’s definition highlights first, that how a species looks matters rather more than its
molecular and genetic composition. Extinct species can become functionally de-extinct for
Novak if they are able to visually perform the role of the disappeared species. Species life thus,
relies primarily on the visual performance for others (notably people) who see its form. In this
argument, Novak echoes the arguments made by the taxidermists and curators of the Santa
Barbara California grizzly, that genetic species matters less than the continuation of the species
social life through bodily presence with the appropriate narrative to accompany it.
Critiques and limits of de-extinction as a practice
De-extinction is also a salient concept outside of the biological sciences. In her keynote
address at Traces of Extinction, a 2024 extinction studies conference, artist and researcher Linda
Knight argues that extinction may be interpreted as a form of protest against the conditions of
living imposed upon them in a time of climate precarity and the destructive consequences of
75 Like Beth Shapiro, Ben Novak is a charismatic name in de-extinction sciences. His project, to de-extinct and
reintroduce the Passenger Pigeon was one of Revive & Restore’s main projects and considered a significant project
to follow in Stuart Brand’s 2013 TEDx event “The Dawn of De-extinction: Are you ready?”, co-produced with
National Geographic (Brand, 2013). Novak’s Passenger Pigeon project is considered one of the foundational
projects of the Long Now and Revive & Restores rebranding of de-extinction from science fiction into a viable
scientific field.

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human impact (Knight, 2024). She cites scholars such as Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie (2015)
who argues that the nonhuman are political actors in their own right. Knight furthers the conceit
that if animals have politics, then they have the capacity to protest, and extinction may be
considered ultimately, a refusal to participate in living (Knight, 2024). De-extinction, and
specifically Novak’s definition of it, is itself a refusal of the non-human rejection of conditions of
life in a way that disregards the bodies of the disappeared species itself in favor of a phenotypic
approximation, and puts these bodies to work to maintain an ecosystem that performs to
scientific standards of stability.
De-extinction scientist Ben Novak’s second premise, that the revenant species must
occupy the same ecological function means that extinct species are not simply their bodies, but
also their interspecies relationships. Deborah Bird Rose (2004) calls the loss of these
multispecies relationships when a species disappears the double-death of the extinct. The first
death is the loss of the animal, the second, of its relationships and the interdependencies that
hinge on its existence (Rose, 2004). Despite Novak’s surface similarities to Deborah Bird Rose’s
concept of double-death, he approaches the notion of relationships lost from a different angle.
Where double-death considers the consequences of extinction from a nonhuman standpoint,
Novak’s definition of de-extinction is rather calling for a reignition of these relationships to
perform the labor of maintaining equilibrium in the ecosystem. “Balance” however, is sieved
through dominant interpretations of what an ecosystem is supposed to look like, often through
scientific knowledge scaffolds identifying which species exist there, and how they are supposed
to act to maintain stasis (Egerton, 1973). Thus, not only would de-extinct species need to
perform the symbolic value of looking like the species they represent, they must also perform the
same ecological labor of that species in an ecosystem. Novak’s definition of de-extinction is

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therefore an anthropocentric and colonial orientation to extinction where the nonhuman is valued
for its appearance and its ecological labor. De-extinction is the method wherein these valuations
of the extinct can be controlled.
Mammoth revival across three de-extinction companies
The Long Now Foundation is a nonprofit founded in 1996 by tech entrepreneurs Danny
Hillis and Stewart Brand. The foundation’s website claims the company was founded to “foster
long-term thinking” on a timescale of 10,000 years (The Long Now Foundation, n.d.). What this
means practically, is that the Foundation funds projects that resonate with its goal to “encourage
imagination at the timescale of civilization (The Long Now Foundation, n.d.). Long-term
thinking according to The Long Now, is premised on the idea of thinking about the temporal
units of “today” and “now” as more akin to geological eras as an orientation to thinking about
humanity’s future on the planet. In-house projects of the foundation include the Clock of the
Long Now, a clock designed to keep accurate time for the next 10,000 years,76 and the Rosetta
Project, a database with the goal of compiling and storing all human languages. The foundation
also funds proposed and independent projects under its incubator program which resonate with
the Long Now’s ideals and goals. Of these projects The Long Now takes particular pride in the
successful incubation of Revive & Restore, which originated as a nested project in the company
but has since branched off to become its own independent non-profit.
Co-founded in 2012 by Ryan Phelan and Stuart Brand, Revive & Restore is a
bioscience77 project that proposed an “enhanced [attunement to] biodiversity through the genetic
76 The clock is in its third and current prototype and is funded primarily by Jeff Bezos. In addition to funding the
clock, Bezos also owns the mountain the clock is being built into (Danny Hillis Answers, 2024). 77 Distinct but entangled with biotech, the biosciences are an economically attuned orientation to the production of
scientific knowledge. Science and technology studies scholar Sheldon Krimsky writes that the biosciences emerged
as a commercial venue driven by the idea that scientific knowledge needed to be made economically valuable in the
wake of decreased scientific funding (Krimsky, 2004). Bioscience companies thus, create marketable scientific

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rescue of endangered and extinct species” (Revive & Restore | What We Do, n.d.). The Revive &
Restore project, then still affiliated with the Long Now Foundation, went public in 2013 through
a co-produced series of talks and events co-produced with National Geographic on the subject of
de-extinction. In the TEDx talk that Stuart Brand gave, “The Dawn of De-extinction: Are you
ready?” the notion of de-extinction was drastically renegotiated as “from science fiction to
science fact” (Brand, 2013). In “The Dawn of De-extinction: Are you ready?” Brand talked about
how de-extinction was determined as a viable scientific endeavor based of a series of
conversations and workshops run by Ryan Phelan and Harvard geneticist George Church to
determine the viability of genetic de-extinction. Three projects were proposed in the 2013 deextinction event, the restoration of the passenger pigeon, heath hen, and the woolly mammoth, all
of which eventually became the core projects for the still incubating Revive & Restore.
Figure 32 The 2016 banner for Revive & Restore when it was being incubated at The Long Now Foundation. Screenshot taken
from the landing page for the mammoth revival project. (The Long Now Foundation, 2016.)
advances and products and exist in close relation to biotech as they are structurally similar but come from
historically bounded fields of scientific knowledge production.

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In 2017, Revive & Restore split from the Long Now Foundation, becoming an
independent non-profit. The company retained its control of the major de-extinction projects it
proposed in 2013, but also grew to accommodate more projects that fell under its stated method
of biodiversity maintenance through “genetic rescue.” Newer projects taken on by the company
shied away from declarations of extinct animal revival to favor alternative uses of de-extinction
technologies. Instead, Revive & Restore shifted to focus on genetic rescue for endangered
species where living individuals still remained. Cloning technologies became used in projects for
restoring Przewalski horses78 and coral colonies (The Woolly Mammoth Revival, 2014), and gene
banking and biobanking samples are being repurposed for stem cell editing and creating
technologies to support endangered species. Today the landing page of the Revive & Restore
website doesn’t feature its revival projects, choosing instead to feature biotechnology projects for
biobanking or conservation.
78 According to the IUCN Red List of Endangered Species, 178 mature individuals of the Przewalski Horse remain
globally. Additionally, they also list that this population number is increasing, due to global efforts of breeding and
cloning (King et al. 2015).

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Figure 33 Screenshot of the projects page of Colossal Biosciences. (De-extinction, 2023)
In 2021 the mammoth revival project moved house from Revive & Restore to for-profit
company Colossal Biosciences. Colossal, co-founded by “serial tech entrepreneur” Ben Lamm79,
and Revive & Restore woolly mammoth project lead George Church, was a direct continuation
of the Revive & Restore project. It could be that ambivalence and stagnation of revival projects
in favor of viable genomic conservation projects precipitated this transfer, however the project
site describes a shift of company goals: “While Revive & Restore continues working to revive
extinct species, like the passenger pigeon, we have focused most of our attention on endangered
species in need of genetic rescue” (The Woolly Mammoth Revival, 2022). Colossal (Slogans:
“Restoring the past, for a better future” and “The science of genetics, the business of discovery”)
is a bioscience company that plays into the sensationalist nature of de-extinction, focusing the
majority of its social presence to revival projects over conservation ones. Here, the woolly
mammoth project found its footing alongside other revival projects such as the revival of the
79 Ben Lamm seeded 15 million into starting up Colossal in 2019, two years before the project officially transferred.

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thylacine and the dodo. From 2021 to today, woolly mammoth revival is Colossal’s seed project,
inspiring its other projects, company goals, and dominating its presence in popular culture.
The mammoth project’s migration through these companies meant that its presence was
constantly being reinvigorated internally through organizational changes, but in popular culture
as well. Alongside the mammoth’s veritable charisma as a megafauna, this meant that the project
was always on the forefront of publicity campaigns, fundraising, and promotional media. Despite
discursive differences between the mammoth narrative across these companies, it reflected how
de-extinction (specifically revival de-extinction) is built as a solution to avoid thinking about
culpability in the biodiversity crisis. The following section pays particular attention to the public
profile of the mammoth project and its trajectory across these three sites. What labor the
mammoth revival project is doing in these sites is salient for thinking about what it is that deextinction promises for thinking about contemporary extinction and biodiversity loss.
Longtermism and its role in de-extinction company ideology
Projects like mammoth de-extinction incubated in companies like The Long Now, and
later Revive & Restore and Colossal, purport to provide not only solutions, but also reimaginations of the material and emotional toll of our current biodiversity crisis. All three
company websites prioritize narratives of de-extinction as a sensationalist science project that
feeds into an imagination of a world where extinction is a fixable state, even when the species
may be, without a doubt, gone. Revive & Restore and Colossal Biosciences are also companies
embedded in long-term thinking. Initially incubated by The Long Now Foundation, mammoth
de-extinction is the keystone project for bringing longtermism into conversations about
extinction and in this particular chapter, extinction refusal. Science and technology studies
researchers, Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres write that long-term thinking (longtermism)

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emerged alongside other ideologies such as transhumanism and cosmism as a manifestation of
modern eugenics, interested in sacrificing the present for an “ideal future” (Gebru & Torres,
2024). Silicon Valley and the biotech industry are driven by these modern eugenic ideologies,
embroiled as they are in capitalist practices and technological development and founded on
colonial structures of knowledge (Liboiron, 2021; 10). Philosopher Alice Crary summarizes that
“longtermism calls on us to safeguard humanity’s future in a manner that both diverts attention
from current misery and leaves harmful socioeconomic structures critically unexamined” (Crary,
2023: 50) echoing sentiments expressed by affect scholars Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant who
write that happiness and optimism (respectively) can be hegemonic orientations to stagnate
action in the present in favor of an idealistic future.
Longtermist ideology in de-extinction companies minimize contemporary extinction to
the point of refusing it as a meaningful consequence of environmental impact. Paradoxically,
they achieve this by amplifying the biodiversity crisis to a point of overwhelm and emotional
stagnation in their narratives. Then, they offer de-extinction, which puts non-human bodies to
work as receptacles of hope and happy objects to envision a future where extinction is
inconsequential. These companies are also highly specialized spaces, hiring scientists and
engineers who package extinction refusal within a rhetoric of expertise, a key part of their
narrative, as it hides familiar narratives of refusal in new and specialized registers. I argue that
though the science and packaging of these companies may seem novel, the ideology underlying
their narratives parallel cases like the ivory-bill’s, where hope and optimism are important
ideological frameworks keeping the ivory-bill (symbolically) alive.
Thus, de-extinction companies offer a new way of approaching a familiar attunement to
the biodiversity crisis, by refusing it. De-extinction companies accomplish this by amplifying

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narratives of hopelessness in the biodiversity crisis, making it out to be an abstract and
unapproachable concept to lay publics. In Pollution is Colonialism, anticolonial science and
technology studies scholar Max Liboiron draws from anthropologist Joseph Masco’s arguments
that dominant narratives of crises today are “[counterrevolutionary] means of stabilizing an
existing condition” to argue that what is really needed for critical analysis is an examination of
how narratives are influenced from their histories and localities (Masco, 2017 in Liboiron, 2021:
13). De-extinction companies hinge on the stabilization of the biodiversity crisis as an
overwhelming and stagnating force to better sell their solution to the public. They rhetorically set
up de-extinction up as the only possible solution, narratively creating a happy future through
disavowing engagement with extinction stories in the present except for the ones they co-opt for
happy science narratives. Colossal Biosciences and Revive & Restore recycle narratives and
ideologies seen across cases such as the ivory-bill and the California grizzly which rhetorically
prioritize the social lives of extinct animals in narrative to refuse confronting extinction. By
merit of recycling an old narrative, albeit in a new form, de-extinction companies perpetuate
capitalist and colonial ideologies of how people attune themselves to nature, the extinct, and the
turbulence of the biodiversity crisis.
Vicarious Life and how “Life-on-demand” shows up across De-extinction Sites
When Political Scientist, Amy Lynne Fletcher summarizes de-extinction technologies as
the promise of “life-on-demand,” she highlights the connection between de-extinction and the
politics of future making. De-extinction exists intertwined with corporate and bio-technical
competition, and its success depends on being able to sell the most attractive future to investors
and donors on the promised future. Thus, the discursive field of de-extinction companies is as
important, if not more so, than its material practices, as it is in these narratives that futures are

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sold (Fletcher, 2017: 6). De-extinction, promising “life-on-demand,” not only drastically
reimagines culpability for extinction, but simultaneously also validates the development of
biotechnology and the corporatization of the techno-sciences. By positioning extinction as a
fixable and avoidable outcome of environmental destruction in the Anthropocene, narratives on
de-extinction neatly offer a solution to tragic stories of “human caused” extinction. Further, that
these narratives are packaged and sold in corporate biotech spaces, de-extinction is one project
among many that builds the myth that innovative commercial tech centers such as Silicon Valley
‘are the future’. Research in these spaces endorse the privatization and commercialization of
science, with funding allocated towards the most charismatic future. Corporate sites like Silicon
Valley “extract applied and commercial value from research in order to keep the biotechnological
innovation ecosystem alive and functioning” (5), thus projects that are in these spaces also
engaged in selling a product. That the majority of de-extinction projects, and certainly for
sensationalist projects like the mammoth, exist in corporate biotech ecosystems such as Silicon
Valley, means that de-extinction discourse is always engaged with future-making, profit-making,
and solution-oriented narratives.
De-extinction and genetic rescue, Fletcher goes on to write, are “emergent forms of
techno-life, exist[ing] somewhere between the real and the artificial” (65). The hybridity of life
and technology thus offers futures where extinction is something that can be circumnavigated
and even overturned because the technology in play is controlled and developed by these deextinction companies. Life, by its association with technology, becomes a controllable condition
for disappeared species. Fletcher coins the term “life-on-demand” when discussing de-extinction
technologies because it becomes the solution promised by Silicon Valley associated groups such
as the Long Now Foundation, Revive & Restore, and Colossal. “Life-on-demand” is more than

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the sum of these technologies however. The term also describes how these companies show up
narratively in public. Thus, “life-on-demand” is the product of companies like Revive & Restore
and Colossal who participate in the competitive arenas of biotech innovation, their narrative
presence is designed to sell the concept as a solution to contemporary anxieties about climate
change, environmental destruction, and the biodiversity crisis.
Mammoth remains and molecular life as mammoth life
In de-extinction, the preeminent material is the molecular. From DNA, to proteins, to
stem cells, the microscopic becomes the means to which extinct life is to be made anew. In the
last chapter I discussed how the remains of California grizzlies were key to maintaining an active
and salient social life of the species. Mammoth remains function, perhaps contradictorily,
similarly and completely different. In one manner, the stuff of the mammoth is integral to its
social life. As a species that went extinct 4000 years ago after having a declining population for
10,000 years, what we know of the mammoth today is sieved through prehistory. It was only at
the turn of the 19th century that Georges Cuvier named and described the species as a prehistoric
and long extinct animal. Fossils and cave paintings for centuries were the backbone for
knowledge about the megafauna, but the 20th century heralded a series of documented encounters
and excavations with mammoth and mastodon skeletons that were preserved across the world,
through tar pits and in permafrost. The discoveries of these specimens were particularly
important because the bodies found still contained organic remains of fur, skin, and flesh. The
social profile of the mammoth’s skin and bones, alongside with its impressive size meant that the
animal maintained a robust social presence in the popular imagination. Unlike the grizzly
however the stuff of the mammoth was not preserved aesthetically for public interaction. While

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frozen mammoth specimens like Lyuba and Dima (Figure 3)80 were popularly displayed across
the world, the presence of mammoth stuff (flesh and hair) as organic materials also drew
attention from the developing fields of genetics and microbiology. Unlike the California grizzly,
mammoth remains were molecularly salient. The chance to extract and sequence DNA from long
extinct animals was novel enough that paleogenomics gained traction in the sciences.
Figures 34, 35 Lyuba, (Left) and Dima (Right) are mummified baby mammoths (Mannix, 2017, Lozhkin & Anderson, 2016).
DNA has a robust social life of its own. In popular public imagination, DNA validates
community, identity, and familial histories due to genetic markers and genealogies (Tallbear,
2013; Nelson, 2016). As a molecule, DNA is not scientifically considered alive. DNA however
has a lively role in building cells and forming life and living organisms. In genetics and
medicine, DNA is used to identify and treat diseases, design preventative health plans, and
facilitate drug or vaccine development through editing. Thus, while not alive in and of itself, its
association with the process of being alive, renders the molecule lively. This is further seen in
80 Lyuba is a frozen mammoth calf found mummified in Siberia in 2017 (Mannix, 2017), her discovery was
important as was remarkably well-preserved for a mammoth mummy. Dima is a famous mummified mammoth calf
discovered in 1977 in Siberia, her discovery was notable as it “provided the first opportunity for detailed study of
the anatomy of a mammoth calf” (Lozhkin & Anderson, 2016: 104).

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popular imaginaries and narratives of what DNA can tell us socially. Alondra Nelson explains
that DNA has massive social capital and biopower, with the capacity to navigate social politics in
reparation projects and liberatory social ways alongside its presence in the medical fields (2016).
The presence of mammoth DNA renders the extinct species lively in unique and
particular ways not often afforded species extinction. Thus, the social life of mammoth DNA
comes to be a lively stand in for mammoth life because it represents the potential of new
knowledge and discovery about the species. The mammoth lives vicariously through the
presence of DNA and its social life. So, where DNA is an active and unravelling tool in the
medical and social fields, in de-extinction narratives, its presence is the extension of this
liveliness. Revive & Restore and Colossal make good use of leveraging the social liveliness and
promise of DNA, and translating it to the mammoth revival project. DNA editing is further
associated with other genetic and microbiological advances in gene editing and CRISPR,
advances in biotech made possible by our understanding and knowledge about DNA in the first
place. Revive & Restore and Colossal leverage the molecular in calculated ways on their public
profiles, claiming simply because of the presence of mammoth DNA, that mammoth life is
assured. This is seen though their science pages when writing about the necessary steps to
successfully revive the mammoth. In the screenshot below, taken from Revive & Restore’s 2016
mammoth revival project page, the copy equates the presence of mammoth DNA with a
successful project. Ostensibly, because we have mammoth DNA, we have the capacity for
mammoth life.

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Figure 36 Revive & Restore use the basis for having mammoth DNA to explain how life will now be possible. (Woolly Mammoth
Revival, 2018).
Colossal’s public leveraging of DNA narratives and social life is erratic in comparison to
the projects previous incarnation at Revive & Restore. DNA for Colossal, it seems, is many
things. At first glance on the projects landing page, it is an ideology, promising grand narratives
and positive futures just from the utterance of the term. This narrative from Colossal that DNA is
“the future of Genetics,” and “a world changing discovery” equates knowledge and presence of
the molecule as a panacea to an imperiled existing state of affairs (itself nebulously referenced in
the narrative) (Solving the Colossal Problem of Extinction | Colossal, 2022). In the screenshot
below, DNA is heralded as “the new dawn of genetics” which “will save us” while
simultaneously lauded as “incomprehensible” to the untrained eye.
Figure 37 The introduction of DNA on the Colossal Biosciences landing page (Solving the Colossal Problem of Extinction |
Colossal, 2022).

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Colossal’s introduction of DNA on their landing page is reminiscent of Matthew Lear’s
argument on the stuplimity of climate precarity (2023). In a single paragraph, Colossal has
managed to cast the world in such complete peril that only a divine fix would be able to enact
change. In promising that DNA will “save us, our planet, and the species that inhabit it” the
narrative simultaneously apotheosizes DNA, undermines climate and biodiversity conservation
projects in action, and inculcates the reader into a grammar of helplessness if not for this biotech
fix. DNA, and the de-extinction tech that hinges on it, is thus cast as a sublime hero that will
achieve its goals simply through its social presence (Solving the Colossal Problem of Extinction |
Colossal, 2022).
Elsewhere on the Colossal site however, the role of DNA is treated rather differently,
hidden among recipe lists of the steps needed to successfully revive the mammoth. Here DNA is
negotiated as a material crucial to the de-extinction process, but needing to be in conversation
with developed technologies and scientific processes to achieve its lively potential. Below, two
screenshots highlight this dynamic. The right image contains the slogan “We have the DNA, the
technology, and the leading experts in the field. Next, we will have the Woolly Mammoth alive
again” (Solving the Colossal Problem of Extinction | Colossal, 2022). Here, DNA is in
relationship with the people and technology of Colossal. The second screenshot is the second
step of “Our Process: The De-extinction of the woolly mammoth” section on the project page.
Here, DNA is leveraged as the entirety of the species itself. If we are able to know and read the
full genome of the mammoth, then we know the animal in its entirety, and bringing it back is
within the realm of control.

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Figure 38, 39 Two screenshots from the Woolly mammoth revival page which promise revival through the presence of DNA. In the
top screenshot, the website reads “we have the DNA, the technology and the leading experts in the field. Next, we will have the
Woolly Mammoth alive again.” The second screenshot cites DNA and the Genome as the deciding factor of determining what
becomes a mammoth (Mammoth, 2021).
So mammoth life is placed onto a public understanding and mediated idea of DNA. As a socially
lively symbol itself, DNA shares its liveliness back with the mammoth in a mutual obfuscation of
boundaries. The mammoth vicariously lives on through its genetic and molecular traces.
Asian elephants as vicarious bodies
Lively bodies are leveraged in de-extinction spaces as sites of potential extinct life. For
mammoths specifically, mammuthus life is superimposed on Asian elephant bodies, and as
elephant bodies are alive, the potential for mammoth life takes on the qualities of elephant life.

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Thus, any elephant, with the proper scientific intervention could hypothetically yield a
“mammoth”. Hybridity has always been at the core of de-extinction sciences. One such project
that hinges on hybridity is the resurrection of the passenger pigeon which needs to pass through
“donor bodies” of the band-tailed pigeon. Ronald Goderie’s successful back-breeding of the
auroch was accomplished through breeding programs of domestic cattle breeds such as
Galloways and Longhorns (Tauros, n.d.). Since de-extinction technologies cannot create
something from nothing, they must then work with extant bodies to rebuild extinct animals.
Extant relatives of extinct animals thus become sites where we can imagine a lively extinct
creature. In this manner, they become moments of vicarious life of the extinct as they are bound
up with both the material practices of de-extinction, and the discursive narratives of extinction.
Alive species offer living bodies that people can interact with and imagine what interactions may
be like with the extinct. Perhaps more encompassing than imagining the extinct, living extant
bodies become resources to realize de-extinction. De-extinction practices rely on the genetic
editing of embryos. Thus, reproduction, which inculcates living animals, is a necessary element
of de-extinction. The living bodies of species-of-interest for de-extinction projects become
spaces where the imaginaries of de-extinction practices play out. In a photo posted on the Revive

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& Restore site, George Church, Steward Brand, and Ryan Phelan gaze happily at an Asian
elephant (named Mike). I wonder if they see an elephant at all.
Figure 40 Screenshot taken from Revive & Restores page detailing the history of their mammoth project. In the screenshot above
future Colossal founder and (then) current project head for Revive & Restore George Church pets an Asian elephant with Stuart
Brand (orange) and Ryan Phelan (green) (Woolly Mammoth Revival, 2018).
In their 2016 mammoth project website, Revive & Restore quite literally superimposes
the mammoth onto the Asian elephant. The screenshot below shows a silhouette of an Asian
elephant, highlighting the core changes that would need to happen in order for that elephant to
become, by Revive & Restore’s measures, a mammoth. Nowhere is this seen more clearly
perhaps than in the third image which superimposes the woolly mammoth’s distinctive shag over
the body of the Asian elephant. The title of the figure below is further telling of the vicarious
nature de-extinction stories have on extant bodies. The figure’s title begins “Building a

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mammoth out of an Asian elephant […],” which in turn objectifies the body of the elephant as a
source for producing mammoth life. Elephant life is thus redefined in this narrative as a resource,
creating an orientation towards thinking about elephants as a means to an end (the mammoth),
rather than as a species entangled in the complexities of the Anthropocene on its own. Earlier, I
wrote about how Ben Minteer argues that de-extinction may be technologies of distraction that
prevent people from striking a more sustainable relationship with the non-human world (Minteer,
2019: 14). The transformation of the Asian elephant from simply elephant into “mammoth
potentiate” is one such manifestation of Minteer’s worry. Revive & Restore leverages Asian
elephants to posit mammoth life, and in doing so develops a narrative wherein all elephants
bodies have the capacity to de-extinct simply through ambiently living, reproducing, and taking
up space.
Figure 41 Screenshot of Revive & Restores imaginaries of Mammoth life literally superimposed on the silhouettes of Asian
Elephant bodies. The black silhouette above is of an Asian elephant, edits have been added to the “base elephant” to make them
mammoths. From left to right, a new cardiovascular system that would allow for life in cold weather, a subcutaneous layer of fat
for insulation against cold weather, and finally a shaggy coat of hair for further insulation. (Woolly Mammoth Revival, 2016).

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Colossal opens up pathways to other species of elephants as well, they inculcate African
elephants (forest and savannah), broadening the population of animals that house the potential
for mammoth life, though they do this only nominally. A contradiction on their website
simultaneously groups African and Asian elephants together as potentials for mammoth
revivification while further on in their webpage they return to simply identifying the Asian
elephant as genetically salient. African elephants in Colossal’s narrative would be able to
incubate Asian elephant/mammoth hybrids and bring it to term, but their genetic distance from
mammoths means their DNA is not of use to the revival project.

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Figure 42, 43 Screenshots taken from Colossal’s landing page for the Woolly Mammoth Revival project. In the photograph on the
top, both the African and Asian Elephant are identified as surrogate parental choices for Woolley mammoth restoration. The
second photograph is from Colossal’s “process of De-extinction” on the project page which singles out the Asian Elephant as
still the only genetically compatible species with hybridization (Mammoth, 2021).
So, Revive & Restore and Colossal parasitically attach the narrative of mammoth
revivification to elephant bodies and social lives. Elephant bodies become material, instantiated
sites where the de-extinction narrative and the social life of the mammoth can attach to the
(living) world. This is to say, narratives of de-extinction use living elephant presence as a stand
in for mammoth presence. By simply ambiently existing, elephant bodies take on value in the
social life of the mammoth through the imaginaries created. They are vehicles in which we
imagine the potential of mammoth life. Sometimes, as seen in Revive & Restore’s imagery,
elephant bodies are quite literally dispossessed of their elephant-ness in favor of superimposing

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the mammoth silhouette. Colossal, needing to build and differentiate itself from the stagnating
project that was the Revive & Restore mammoth revivification, inculcates other species of
elephants into this narrative. The for-profit company shrewdly expands the potential for
mammoth life by expanding the population of individuals that could adopt mammoth-ness
through the inclusion of other species of elephants into the project. Thus, any elephant
conceivably offers a space for those familiar with the company’s narrative to “see” a mammoth.
On a collective level, this metamorphosis of extant species into extinct species highlights an
extractivist relationship between revival projects and the living animals they use. Extant species,
and in broad, extant environments are separated from the ecosystem to become thought of as a
resource instead of as an integrated participant in an ecosystem.
The Narrative Lives of the Mammoth at Work: De-extinction project imaginaries
The bodies of mammoths are not the only extractive relationship at play between deextinction discourse and practice, and the present conditions of life. The rhetorics of deextinction are riddled with justifications for continued scientific development, which show that
de-extinction projects are decidedly not about the disappeared species, but about how they show
up in social life, and how to leverage these lives for profit. De-extinction technologies and
scientific processes are engaged in dominant narratives about the future.81 As shown by deextinction critic Amy Lynne Fletcher, de-extinction companies’ participation in corporate biotech
and on classifying “life-on-demand” as a product of investment thrive in techno-capitalist spaces
and so have stake in maintaining corporate knowledge-making. Current trends in de-extinction
practices further maintains the logic of non-human labor foremost benefiting the human. For this
81 Ben Lamm of Colossal has repeatedly gone on record to say that one of his core entrepreneurial interests is in
“future-proofing” the world (Company, 2021), ostensibly meaning to say he invests in projects that promise
solutions to the precarities of human impact and climate change.

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reason, we see across de-extinction company’s narratives about how the de-extinct will benefit
people.
Figure 10 below is a composite of screenshots from the Revive & Restore website
justifying the myriad ways of why mammoth de-extinction should happen. All of the reasons
given emphasize the mammoth’s presence as a tool to ensure stable human futures.
Figure 44 Website copy about why bringing back the mammoth is necessary. From Revive & Restores Mammoth revival page on
the Long Now Foundation website. (Woolly Mammoth Revival, 2018).
Where Revive & Restore focuses on the three relationships highlighted above, Colossal
expands the goals of de-extinction tech to reach broader audiences and investors. As a for-profit
bioscience company, de-extinction is overtly cast as a product for consumption. The screenshot
below highlights the core goals of reviving the mammoth from Colossal’s perspective. Though
similar to Revive & Restore’s justifications (revivification for climate stability, bioscience
knowledge development, and conservation), Colossal leans in to the sublimity of revivification
science by adding a curious justification about revival for revival’s sake. The migration of the
mammoth revival project to for-profit company Colossal meant that de-extinction imaginaries
were shuttled into a forward-facing narrative space. Colossal co-founder Ben Lamm has
repeatedly self-identified as a serial entrepreneur who “builds disruptive businesses to futureproof our world” (Ben Lamm | Co-Founder / CEO - Colossal, n.d.) and is invested in selling
grand discourses about technology that redefines established tech narratives. In creating a

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company that profits out of redefining popular narratives of de-extinction science, Lamm leans
heavily into returning de-extinction to its sensationalist “Jurassic Park” roots that Revive &
Restore tried to detangle itself from.
Figure 45 Colossal’s core goals and justifications for mammoth revival (Mammoth, 2021).
Beginning with the first of Revive & Restore’s justifications, “an ecosystems approach to
confront climate change” is an extension from arguments of the previous section. Revive &
Restore’s rationalization for de-extinction tech development is the continuation of an
objectification project designed to transform the environment into a tool, rather than as a goal.
This is to say, the narrative above reorients thinking about the environment as a composite of
fulfilling and necessary relationships, to thinking about the environment as a potential resource.
Meeting elephants but seeing only mammoths is one such example of this process in action.
Colossal extends the narrative of putting the mammoth to work through a similar justification.
According to Colossal, mammoth de-extinction, will “increase resilience of habitats to climate
change and environmental upheaval” through the eventual re-introduction of woolly mammoths

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back into the ecosystem.82 In these imaginaries, woolly mammoths adopt the responsibility of
stabilizing ecosystems and the climate. They are saddled with the labor of fixing a world that has
not supported them for millennia.
Figures 46, 47 Screenshots from Colossal’s mammoth project page that situates the mammoth as a heroic figure (Mammoth,
2021).
In Colossal’s narratives of de-extinction the mammoth is further burdened with a pressure
and responsibility to save the world. Encumbering the imaginary mammoth with saving the
earth allows consumers of this narrative to push our climate anxieties onto imagined lively
bodies. Where Colossal and Revive & Restore equate de-extinction with climate resilience, they
achieve a circumnavigation of sitting with the consequences and working within present
conditions to achieve a more sustainable future. Donna Haraway famously calls this a need to
“stay with the trouble,” that is working and persevering in the harsh materialities of the present
to cooperatively navigate a damaged earth (2016). De-extinction companies do anything but this,
pulling on the past to imagine the future while casting aside the present as a transitive and
troubling moment in time. The mammoth in this narrative is both a hero and a scapegoat, it’s a
body where the anxieties and frustrations of failure can be associated with their absence from the
world, while narratives of hope can be placed on their reintroduction. The mammoth becomes a
site of focus to think about the overwhelming realities of climate destruction and contemporary
82 Both Colossal and Revive & Restore are affiliated with Sergey Zimov’s Pleistocene Park, a non-profit nature
preserve and rewilding project in Siberia whose goal is to return the mammoth steppe to a “prehistoric landscape”
(Pleistocene Park, n.d.).

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extinctions which circumnavigates unhappy and pessimistic thinking. It is a tight and neat
narrative, except for the conceit that the mammoth, materially, doesn’t exist.
Perhaps the core of de-extinction technology justifications, is seen in its uses for biology
and medicine. Revive & Restore puts mammoth DNA to work by presenting it as an untapped
resource. DNA and by extent the mammoth is positioned as a source of potential knowledge that
will have positive effects on biology and medicine in the modern era. The benefits of studying
Ancient DNA is not a new conversation in public life. Often these discourses revolve around the
ways we can find new cures to illnesses, or learn about the history of human diseases and
mutations. In an article on the knowledge that ancient DNA studies have yielded, researchers
have determined that studies of mutations, DNA decay, and population genetics, offer insights
into triaging medical research (Grigorenko et al, 2009). In a more contemporary article, ancient
DNA is lauded as a rich site of inquiry to study post-pandemic health trends (Kerner, Choin, &
Quintana-Murci, 2023). Ancient DNA consequently, is often positioned as a resource for
knowledge making, both about the specimen it stemmed from, but also for translation to
knowledge about the human. For instance, Grigorenko’s article cites that knowledge about DNA
decay can transcend species boundaries because it is the decay process that is being studied, and
this is not species specific (2009). Revive & Restore positions DNA and mammoth revival as a
resource for the advancement and pursuit of knowledge. In doing so they orient the public to
thinking about the stuff of the mammoth and the practices of de-extinction as a product,
ostensibly justifying tech development through what the public will gain from it in other parts of
their lives. Colossal continues these imaginaries of DNA and the promise of scientific positivism
for a better world. Two of their stated goals for mammoth revival pull from the popular
imagination of DNA and the molecular. When they write that de-extinction will result in

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“understanding adaptation” and “drive advancements in multiplex gene editing” they create
narratives of how mammoth DNA and the de-extinction process will benefit the extant. Like
denying woodpecker extinction, and keeping the grizzly present, reviving the mammoth is not
about the mammoth. Once again, the mammoth is a lively symbol that is discursively put to work
for bioscience development and not foremost a lively creature.
Which leads us to the third reason Revive & Restore presents on why mammoth deextinction is beneficial. De-extinction projects will help the conservation industry at large. This
argument is particularly interesting. The reason being, is that throughout their public profile
Revive & Restore places the mammoth as the fundamental goal of the project, organizing other
species such as the Asian elephant as a resource to revival. Yet here, the non-profit flips the
script, arguing that mammoth revival is rather, in the service of mammal conservation. The
mammoth body in this argument for de-extinction tech becomes a veneer for thinking about
current and future endangered species mitigation. Elsewhere on their project history page Revive
& Restore elucidates on the ways mammoth de-extinction is aiding large mammal conservation.
By funding and researching mammoth revival, the Revive & Restore team has stake in
maintaining the lives and health of Asian elephant populations. In a section of their page, the
website copy narrates a story about de-extinction scientists learning that virulent herpes is a
threat to Asian elephant populations (Woolly Mammoth Revival, n.d.). Successful de-extinction
science needs healthy elephants for incubation and gene editing, so it was in Revive & Restores
interests to tackle understanding and curing elephant herpes virus. The non-profit however,
discursively flips this narrative to position de-extinction as first and foremost being a
justification to learning more about conservation threats. Their discourse shifts from “we need
Asian elephants healthy to produce mammoths” to “mammoth revival allows us to learn about

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the threats facing Asian elephants”. The justification of revival for large mammal conservation
creates an extractive relationship with the extinct because of how these discourses are
repositioned. Mammoth revival, and its practices, is in service to other species. This process of
thought is continued from Revive & Restore to Colossal, where the company completely ties
elephant life to mammoth revival. In the screenshot below, mammoth life and elephant life are
inextricably tied together in Colossal’s narrative with the (potential) life of one determining the
continued life of the other.
Figure 48 Screenshot from Colossal's mammoth project page highlighting how elephant life and mammoth life are dependent on
each other (Mammoth, 2021).
Of course, the justifications from Revive & Restore and Colossal are not made in a vacuum.
Revive & Restore is a successful non-profit in a saturated industry. It’s association with the Long
Now Foundation inextricably ties it to Silicon Valley startup culture and places it in competition
with myriad other techno-optimist environmental startups. If Revive & Restores justifications for
funding is necessary, for Colossal, a for-profit company, selling the imaginary of de-extinction is
integral to its business model. It makes sense then, that when the mammoth project migrated
from Revive & Restore to Colossal it took on massive commercialization. At Colossal, woolly

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mammoth revival is a product to be sold so making it as appealing as possible to venture
capitalists and investors is key to the project’s continuation. As shown from the timeline of
“project-products” from the website (Figure 15), the de-extinction of the mammoth is only the
first step for Lamm and Church that ends in the mass commercialization of the developed
technologies.83
Figure 49 A timeline of tech commercialization stemming from the development of de-extinction practices (Science & Technology,
2021).
A popular justification of de-extinction for Colossal is the development of novel technologies.
Revive & Restore began phasing out the mammoth revival project from its core project list after
years of slow development and shifting timelines of success. In 2019, Revive & Restore broke
from the project completely and facilitated its transfer over to Colossal. Through all intents and
purposes, the mammoth revival project had been shelved in favor of more successful applications
of de-extinction technologies that yielded measurable and applicable results in material
83 The beginning of this commercialization project is already underway with Colossal’s “gestation” and release of
FormBio, a platform that uses machine learning and AI to “accelerate the discovery and development of novel
therapeutics” (Our Purpose | Form Bio, n.d.).

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realization of lively bodies. With the acquisition of the mammoth revival project, Colossal had
taken on a high profile and sensationalist project, but also a stagnated one. In technical and
expert spaces, this understanding of de-extinction as a product that will never live up to its
popular imaginary is an old narrative. Even in popular science publications, it is well
documented that the popular narrative people have of de-extinction is debunked as an imaginary
of the sciences. Narratives like Jurassic Park (1990), and Carnosaur (1984) exist solely in the
realm of science fiction. Despite the expert understanding, mammoth revival at its most
sensationalist benefits from the obfuscation of de-extinction as it is fiction compared to how it is
in practice. So, when Colossal took over the project they appropriated the narratives and
practices of de-extinction and put it to work to generate new excitement over their project. This
is seen through the sensationalist and cacophonous website which draws from the aesthetic
imaginaries of science and tech. Images of molecules, of science in action, living mammoths,
and of the media excitement about de-extinction projects are immediately displayed in quick
succession as a movie plays on the landing page. Bright colors, chrome, and futuristic typefaces
guide the visitor through exciting, but ultimately sparse and vacuous website copy. The most
developed section of the website is the Technology and Science page which introduces the
company’s entrepreneurial projects that they are piggybacking on the narrative of de-extinction.
Herein lies the conceit. Colossal leverages the sensationalism of the mammoth revival project,
and the imaginary of living mammoths for biotech development, promoting an orientation to
thinking about the extinct and imagining the lively extinct as entrepreneurial ventures.

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Figure 50 Colossal’s summary of the technologies developed from the Apollo mission. Colossal identifies its company as similar
to the Apollo mission in that, on top of de-extinction, it is also encouraging and funding the development of associated
technologies. Thus, Colossal positions itself as an interdisciplinary project, attaching the project of de-extinction, success or fail,
to the development of affiliated technologies. In doing so they create a success state of the project. Whether “mammoths” ever
return or not is immaterial as it is the technologies that exist (Science & Technology, 2021).
As a private biosciences company, Colossal has capitalized on the sensationalist nature of the
project associating it with massive interdisciplinary projects like the Apollo mission. In doing so
they reinterpreted the parameters of success and failure for the project. Success in de-extinction
is not merely the return of the mammoth to life, but also is considered successful through the
development of technologies and scientific practices affiliated with the project. In this sense
Colossal puts the mammoth narrative to work to produce new tech. They associate revivification
success with the development of new patents, research ventures, and technological applications.
Pictured above is a composite of screenshots taken from Colossal’s “Technology and Science”
page on their website where they define success primarily through entrepreneurial and
innovation, project development, and identification with the Apollo space program. The photo

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lists the myriad technologies that we benefit from that were developed as a consequence of the
1961-1972 lunar missions, ostensibly arguing that lunar success was landing on the moon, but
was also myriad other things. The mammoth project, in comparison, may be the return of
mammoth look-alikes, but is also the development of other tech. In this vicarious manner,
mammoth revival is ensured.
Conclusion
In How to Clone a Mammoth Beth Shapiro makes the argument that when something is
gone, it is gone forever (Shapiro, 2015: ix). From back-breeding, to cloning, to gene editing, deextinction is never going to bring back an extinct species. The most it will accomplish is in the
creation of a maquette, something that looks like a disappeared species, act in the world like a
disappeared species, and even contain some genetic traces of that species, but it will never be
fully the rematerialized extinct. If all the science goes well, a de-extinct animal is never going to
be the same thing as its origin.
Of the charismatic megafauna of the Miocene, no genus looms as large, literally and
figuratively, in public imagination as the mammoth. The traces that do remain of the mammoth
are a patchwork of fossils and only whispers of material remains. More accessible than the
materials of the mammoth, is its narrative and role in popular culture. Sites such as the
Rouffignac cave have long given interpretive and symbolic life to thinking about the mammoth.
Indeed, the cave has been a popular curiosity and attraction since its discovery in the 19th
century. Also known as “the cave of a hundred mammoths,” sites like Rouffignac transported the
charismatic animal to the forefront of popular and scientific imaginations about the Ice Age
(Grotte de Rouffignac, 2024). Today, the mammoth is known primarily through its social life and
its mediations across popular culture.

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De-extinction is more than the material of the animal itself but also the stories we tell
about the extinct. It is the assignment of the social life of the extinct onto new and familiar
bodies that make the process real and successful. Thus, the narrative work done by de-extinction
companies is what makes the mammoth, maintaining its life. This is seen in Revive & Restore
and Colossal through the ways they leverage the social profiles and lively symbols of the extinct
for technological and scientific development. De-extinction is the manifestation of lively
symbols of the extinct in scientific process. In this manner de-extinction is an exercise in
extinction refusal. Like the California grizzly, it repurposes the stuff of the extinct to maintain
social life. The mammoth in this chapter is many things, it is a Miocene megafauna, a phenotypic
template often confused with the (also extinct) mastodon, an Asian elephant, and DNA, all based
on its narrative presence as a lively social creature. The Mammoth is also its remains, the
molecular traces it leaves behind, and the scientific and technological developments of deextinction companies.
De-extinction refuses extinction by continuing to put the disappeared to work. Animals
consistently perform palliative labor for the populations that love them. In Oil Beach,
communications scholar Christina Dunbar-Hester demonstrates that the “accumulation” of
elegant tern life in San Pedro is vital to imaginaries about the bay (Dunbar-Hester, 2023: 49).
Anthropologist Juno Salazar Parreñas’ Decolonizing Extinction complicates orangutan
conservation by troubling who orangutan life is for if it is not for orangutan wellbeing (Parreñas,
2018). Both scholars skeptically consider how notions of care labor are manifested in these
scenarios, identifying that it is the presence of orangutan and elegant tern life who perform care.
As the mammoth becomes many things in this chapter, it also becomes a tool to be used by

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publics who want to find solace from uncomfortable narratives of biodiversity loss and
extinction.
De-extinction companies promise cruel optimistic narratives that minimize feelings of
unhappiness and dread about the biodiversity loss, all the while amplifying the biodiversity crisis
to an untenable pitch. They then offer a solution, de-extinction. De-extinction projects refuse
extinction through stagnating cathartic orientations towards extinction. They create moments of
cruel optimism (Berlant) and happiness (Ahmed) in their narratives which foster fantasies of
ecological stability through ascribing to de-extinction ideologies. Companies like Revive &
Restore and Colossal work to amplify feelings of anxiety and helplessness in regards to
biodiversity loss and extinction through the narratives they tell, positioning their method of
extinction refusal as the only viable future. Their websites foster fantasies of past environmental
stability and promise future happiness in a temporal narrative that devalues the present. Thus,
they make themselves sublime, all the while pushing a scaffold of stuplimity onto their audience.
De-extinction goes beyond the visible and affective however to include the vicarious into
the material. With the inclusion of vicarious materials into thinking about extinct species comes
narratives of DNA, which has its own charismatic history in the popular zeitgeist. Though the
concept of “material remains” are broadened to include the molecular, and other species such as
the Asian elephant entirely, people’s relationship to the materials remains fundamentally
extractive in the way that people perpetuate non-human life for their symbolic needs. That is,
meaning and social life is still sieved from connections to the materials in de-extinction
narratives. DNA is promised as something lively and takes on the mantle of the living species it
indexes. Asian elephants become stand-ins for mammoth life. And because these things exist and
live, de-extinction of the mammoth is assured.

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Conclusion
On October 1st 2024, Colossal Biosciences published a press release announcing the
opening of their non-profit, The Colossal Foundation. The goals of the Colossal Foundation are
focused on recovering terminal species for preservation, as opposed to the parent company’s
focus on de-extinction for restoration. According to the Colossal Foundation’s “About Us” page,
the goal of the non-profit is to “flow learnings, new approaches and funding to those bringing
critically endangered species back from the brink of extinction into healthy, resilient ecosystems”
(About us, 2024). Press covering the Colossal Foundation hone in on “pioneer species” projects
selected for genetic rescue, the majority of which are charismatic, critically endangered species
like the vaquita, Sumatran rhinoceros, and, importantly, the ivory-bill woodpecker. In a D
Magazine84 article introducing the Foundation, the ivory-bill is listed one of the pioneer avian
projects of the group (Swanger, 2024). According to D, the Colossal Foundation references the
2004 Luneau siting of the ivory-bill as a rediscovery event and indicative of ivory-bill life, even
20 years later (Swanger, 2024).
Curiously, press coverage about the Colossal Foundation’s projects does not correlate
with the NGO’s description of itself. Although media outlets applaud the company’s decision to
rescue the ivory-bill, the woodpecker is absent from its “Projects” and “Species” pages, and the
press articles showcased by the company do not mention the bird. Even in the Colossal
Foundation, the ivory-bill remains a ghost.
84 D Magazine is a local publication, covering news and human-interest stories in Dallas, Texas.

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This incongruency of ivory-bill involvement with Colossal is ignored in enthusiast
forums. Shortly after publication, press coverage linking the ivory-bill to Colossal was shared
among Facebook ivory-bill groups who reacted to the news in interesting ways. In a conversation
on The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker- Rediscovered, commenters replying to an Economic Times
article about the NGO unanimously conflated the Colossal Foundation with Colossal
Biosciences, going on the defensive with claims that the ivory-bill was still alive and didn’t need
de-extinction. Two primary flavors of critique appeared, with some commenters simply saying
that the ivory-bill was not extinct, while the others deeply critiqued de-extinction as ultimately a
spectacle, generating headlines and money but not results. De-extinction had been tossed around
in enthusiast message boards before, with the conclusion that these scientists fundamentally
didn’t understand how ivory-bills live and this latest iteration of the conversation, it seems, was
nothing new.
****
The Colossal Foundation has only just founded, and should it proceed with the genetic
rescue of the ivory-bill woodpecker, future moments of interaction between enthusiasts, ivorybill bodies, and the Foundation are all but assured. The Colossal Foundation is capitalizing on
the public presence of charismatic species to establish itself as a new genetic rescue company. Its
choices of high profile, charismatic endangered species speak to its bid to capture the attention
and support of the widest audience possible. The ivory-bill seems to be a perfect choice, a
charismatic bird who remains stubbornly alive across databases. What the Foundation doesn’t
understand though, is the work that has gone into keeping the ivory-bill alive from the
community that loves it, as well as the ways the woodpecker is figured in social life. The ivorybill only remains listed as extant today because of the efforts and organizing undertaken by

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enthusiasts in the wake of the 2021 delisting proposal. For the enthusiast community, ivory-bill
extancy across databases is seen as a victory, as testament to their perseverance and expertise on
the bird. The woodpecker is only alive in these spaces today, thanks to them.
For ivory-bill enthusiasts, de-extinction involvement with the bird is a moment of
outsider intervention, unwanted and unneeded. Though the Colossal Foundation casts the ivorybill as extant but critically endangered, enthusiasts overlooked this detail in favor of “critiquing
the elites”. The Colossal Foundation is seen by enthusiasts as another moment of scientists and
experts attempting to co-opt the bird, especially as the Foundation has made no overture to
interact with them. As enthusiast groups are the only ones who see themselves qualified to make
knowledge and know the bird, Colossal Foundation involvement is perceived as a threat to their
control of ivory-bill narrative.
The moment of interaction between refusal communities above is only the beginning of
more to come. As the biodiversity crisis continues to escalate, the ways people come to know
endangered and extinct non-human species will be increasingly mediated by how they show up
in social life. Disappeared but loved species will live on through their social presence and the
stories communities tell about them. Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose echo Donna
Haraway’s call to “stay with the trouble” when they insist that narratives are artifacts of
multispecies connection during an extinction event (Haraway, 2016, Dooren & Rose, 2016). To
this end, they write that “storytelling is one of the great arts of witness,” and though they are
talking about their own ethnographic ethos, the sentiment is sound across lay multispecies
storytelling as well (2016, 91). However, extinction refusal happens when witnessing becomes
too much. Refusal is the propensity of communities to favor happy, cruelly optimistic stories
about loved species that are dead or gone.

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The types of extinction refusal I articulate across ivory-bills, bears, and mammoths flow
into one another, and come full circle with ivory-bill enthusiasts reacting to the de-extinctionist
adoption of “their bird”. Ivory-bill enthusiasts negotiate woodpecker remains and paraphernalia
of the bird’s likeness in ways that evoke how Californians have come to know the California
grizzly. Meanwhile the California grizzly bear’s extinction is so far removed from the present
day that it only exists in its social presence, minimizing rhetorics of extinction through its lively
symbolic forms peppered across public life. With taxidermy, even the material remains of the
bear are put to use in maintaining the bear primarily as a symbol. De-extinctionists go further
with putting the material remains of extinct animals to work by inculcating the molecular to the
narrative of species that are refused extinction. Much like the California grizzly, the stuff of the
woolly mammoth is not allowed disappear. Instead, it is put to work. Its genetic material is tied
to living species, and its life tied to the idealistic futures promised by de-extinction companies.
Finally, as we see with the foundation of Colossal’s non-profit, de-extinction science attempts to
capitalize on saving loved and charismatic species, not necessarily understanding that for ivorybill enthusiasts, woodpecker life is only partially about the bird.
Extinction refusal in its many forms offers an attractive “solution” to facing the abstract
threat of the consequences of environmental destruction and species loss. A foundation this
project is premised on is that the United States is starting to come to terms with living in
unprecedented times of climate precarity and biodiversity loss. The cases of the ivory-bill,
California grizzly, and mammoth de-extinction are exemplary cases of settler ideology grappling
with extinction now that it has been designated a threat to imaginaries of life and the future.
The narratives and consequences of biodiversity loss is not necessarily a new thing, but it
is new to the refusal communities I discuss. These worrisome and outright alarming narratives of

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extinction are not just local to the United States but have in fact been destabilizing communities
for a much longer time, as environmental humanities scholar Rob Nixon notes (2011). Climate
and biodiversity stability has been a privilege of affluent countries and communities that is only
now becoming acknowledged as it becomes impossible to ignore. Facing biodiversity loss and
extinction in the United States is a fairly new threat. When the California grizzly went extinct
only a century ago, its death marked one of the first mass engagements with the consequences of
Euro-American settler impact on the environment (Alagona, 2013). The 2021 USFWS proposal
to delist extinct species from the ESA in the ivory-bill chapter was one of the first and
undeniably largest proposals to acknowledge the consequences of environmental impact in
causing extinction. And, for a country whose ideological foundations are planted in both the
mythologization and control of nature, facing the consequences extractive and settler lifeways
have to loved species is often a glimpse into the darker side of American ideology for
communities who embody it (Semonin, 2000; Cronon, 1996).
Lessons across cases of extinction refusal
Localities of Extinction Refusals
Extinction refusal is deeply situated in space and place, as it crops up through the
relationships communities have to land and environment. Deborah Bird Rose and Thom van
Dooren argue that “ways of being are not formed and sustained in isolation” but rather in
connection with others (2016: 80). The social lives of non-human species are always myriad and
informed by relationships. Across this dissertation, a bear is a bear, but also becomes a state
identity, a woodpecker becomes a manifestation of the rural and rugged South, and a mammoth
becomes a Silicon Valley fantasy about science. Refusal communities’ discourses denying
extinction are produced in local contexts, including objects and places.

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Deborah Bird Rose’s theorization of love and species life becomes complicated when
dealing with extinct and disappeared species because they cannot be saved in the practical sense
through environmental protections or species conservation (Rose, 2013). Rather loved species
must be saved discursively through the communities who have stake in their liveliness. Refusal
communities also have to grapple with the material, or in some cases the lack of the material.
With disappeared and extinct species, the notion of the body offers a complicated and
contradictory space, offering proof of existence simultaneously with proof of death.
Communities who face the extinction of a loved species must navigate a situation where living
bodies do not exist, and how they chose to interact with the traces of extinction is depended on
the material records they do have. Thus, bodies become discursive sites where social liveliness is
inscribed upon them, and in doing so become discursive sites of inquiry that show as much about
the communities that love them and keep them alive as they do their species (Huhtamo &
Parikka, 2011). In this way, access to extinct bodies, imagery of the disappeared species, and the
types of existent paraphernalia is also a situational element of refusing extinction.
Affect can affect Extinction Refusal
How a community loves a species is also a roadblock to confronting extinction. Facing
the existential threat extinction poses is deeply overwhelming and unhappy thing. Extinction
refusal becomes an attractive orientation that allows for the continued participation in goodfeeling, a “cruel optimism” (Berlant, 2011). Happiness and optimism though, as Ahmed and
Berlant argue, are stagnating affective orientations to the world. They perpetuate the status quo to
the effect of dissuading change, never achieving catharsis. Extinction refusal is this continued
dependence on good-feeling because to think otherwise would be to invalidate generations of
identity-building and dominant ideologies. There is a lot at stake with extinction refusal, chiefly

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the protection of current life-ways and the maintenance of a willful imagination of nature as
stable, healthy, and resilient. Refusing extinction, either through denial, symbolic transposition,
or de-extinction, is engaged in this affective affirmation promoting environmental stability.
Why does this matter to Communication?
A key trend in environmental and climate communication lately has been on how to
approach difficult topics. We live in the “Sixth Mass Extinction” and the “Anthropocene,”
among so many other condemning names for the present (Kolbert, 2014; Haraway, 2016). A
growing body of work in multispecies communications has been to interrogate the role of the
non-human in media or as media with scholars such as Jody Berland (2019), or Melody Jue
(2020) demonstrating the lengths to which the non-human world is integrated into
communication. To an extent, non-human actors in these spaces mediate social meanings that
communities inscribe on them (Berland, 2019, Jue, 2020), however retain some material agency
of their own (Barad, 2003). To this end, I offer the following insights into the situatedness and
specificity of communication when dealing with topics of extinction and biodiversity loss.
Understanding how species show up and the symbolic work that they do in communities
is integral to working with local groups in developing sustainable relationships with
environments and biota. The USFWS’s alienation of ivory-bill enthusiasts was a consequence of
a communication failure. The enthusiast community’s further isolation, hostility, and
appropriation of overtly conservative rhetorics was primed by how they had derived meaning
from the ivory-bill. The California grizzly is an example of how extinction can be minimized to
such an extent that prominent species are simply believed to be alive. Alarmingly, de-extinction
rhetorics and narratives pull from ideologies rooted in modern eugenics and capitalist economics
(Gebru & Torres, 2024). These companies push a rhetoric of cruel optimism, minimizing

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extinction through promising a convenient techno-fix. A major oversight in the sciences and the
environmental sciences has historically been the minimization of the role of social life in
affecting change.
It is also a trend in extinction studies specifically to look at how communities and
cultures negotiate impending species death and the role of communities in causing eroding
conditions of life in order to shed light on more sustainable ways of living in a changing world
(Rose, van Dooren, & Chrulew, 2017; De Vos, 2019). This project is an extension of these ways
of thinking, turning from the study of critically endangered species to extinct and disappeared
species to examine how communities navigate the unhappy aftermath of contemporary
extinction. I found out through the cases presented, that in many situations, they simply don’t.
Instead, social groups who have found use and love for disappeared species refuse the outcomes
of their unsustainable and extractive multispecies entanglements choosing instead to build lively
maquettes to take the place of the extinct. The reasons for extinction refusal vary based on the
history and locality of the species in question, offering insight into how disappeared species bear
meaning and value past death.
Making knowledge about the Ivory-bill: how extinction is influenced by narrative
Extinction is refused by those in control of the narrative. Knowledge making of the ivorybill during the 20th century was ambivalent at best. Because the bird was either incredibly rare or
already absent from southern environments, institutionalized knowledge creation about the bird
stagnated, relying on local information to determine bird existence. Meanwhile, ivory-bill life
became inextricable from Southern rural identity, private property, and ideologies of wilderness
as distinctly American. When the US Fish and Wildlife Service moved to delist the ivory-bill
from the ESA in 2020 they inadvertently moved to restructure roughly a century worth of

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knowledge creation about the bird. Because the presence of the ivory-bill was determined by
local knowledge for so long, the bird had a robust social and symbolic life. Knowledge of bird
presence relied on the communities entangled with the ivory-bill these communities through
necessity made the ivory-bill a social symbol. So, for ivory-bill enthusiasts, the bird could not be
extinct for because if it were, it would violate a core pillar of their identity. Thus, an outside bid
to delist the bird was also conflated as an attack on the enthusiast communities entangled with
the bird.
Enthusiast communities associated the ivory-bill with its social life that they created
around it. The bird’s continued existence on federal and international biodiversity lists was also a
sign of trust between local communities who were familiar with the ecosystem, and
governmental and institutional knowledge makers. Consequently, when the USFWS proposed
delisting the ivory-bill “on basis of extinction”, they broke decades of deferring to local
communities for knowledge creation. It was this breach of trust that catapulted extinction refusal
of the ivory-bill as the bird’s life became a matter of who has the right to create knowledge.
Governmental and institutionalized knowledge makers were narrativized as wanting ivory-bill
extinction, meanwhile local and enthusiast communities discursively appropriated ivory-bill life
as local knowledge creation. This binary was further exacerbated to encompass more than ivorybill extancy, including binaries of rural and urban, amateur and expert, masculine and
emasculated, patriot and anti-American, amongst others.
The stuff of extinct bodies: how proof of death becomes further opportunities for life
Even the remains of extinct animals are not distinct from a species social life. Where the
ivory-bill case demonstrates how the social life of a species may be built up as a consequence of
the species absence, the California grizzly is an example of a species whose presence became an

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integral part of its social life. California Grizzlies were charismatic species while their
populations were still robust. In fact, it was due to their large population that the bear became a
state icon. Large bear populations in California, its imposing figure, and its relatively docile
nature meant that these animals became prime targets for hunters looking to display impressive
hunting trophies. Thus, grizzly bear taxidermy in California took off as a social symbol,
something that continued throughout the bear’s decline and disappearance. Meanwhile, during
the final decades of the California grizzly, the bear’s decline was ironically mirrored by a
growing social life, made all the more prevalent by the bear’s presence across civic symbology,
most notably the state seal. Additionally, a growing awareness of contemporary extinctions and
the role of environmental impacts in changing environments was starting to circulate among the
American public. The California grizzly was one of the first charismatic species whose
extinction became a social spectacle.
As the grizzly disappeared from Californian wilderness, its symbolic presence only grew
in Californian civic life. Effectively the California grizzly was refused extinction because bear
life was swapped with social life, made all the easier by the fact that the stuff of grizzlies was
already peppered around the state. Through symbolic transposition and revivification afforded by
the post-extinction taxidermy of California grizzlies, the bear was refused extinction, continuing
the symbolic work it was already doing pre-disappearance.
De-extinction and Revival: circumnavigating extinction through vicarious life
Symbolic life only goes so far as some charismatic (and extinct) species do not validate
identity to the extent shown by the grizzly or woodpecker. De-extinction offers a type of
extinction refusal that promises a reversal of extinction altogether. In doing so the subjects of deextinction become lively symbols of future states of the world. Their image conjures future

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imaginaries of environmental stability and hope, thus adopting a symbolic life manufactured by
de-extinction companies such as Revive & Restore and Colossal whose goals are to sell a vision
of the future to investors and the public. De-extinction companies peddle narratives of literal
revivification imaginaries on top of the symbolic lives of the charismatic extinct. In this way,
these companies show a dissatisfaction with the wholly symbolic lives of the extinct, pushing
instead for a return to material life. In the absence of a revived mammoth, de-extinction
companies discursively tie the extinct to alternative lively materials. The mammoth becomes
molecular, abstracted down into DNA and proteins, vicariously taking on life. It also becomes an
Asian elephant, with its image and narrative imposed over living Proboscidea. Discursively
throughout these companies’ web presence, they promise living mammoths as a result of their
scientific processes; mammoth life becomes the process of de-extinction science and biotech
innovation.
It is also through their promotional material and website copy that the topic of deextinction is broached which inculcates not only the symbolic and material lives of the extinct,
but inserts the idea of future-life to extinction refusal narratives. Companies such as Colossal and
Revive & Restore know that the imaginaries they peddle about de-extinction are foremost
ideational, populating their websites with anxious statistics and alarming stakes while offering
their solution as a viable return to the “good life” of environmental stability. As it exists now,
mammoth de-extinction is a narrative scaffold where promises of freedom from guilt concerning
environmental destruction is given as an easy solution: “You do not need to feel bad about
causing extinction because our science will be able to fix it.” Species in de-extinction narratives
are not afforded the ability to be mourned or remembered as an acknowledgment of the
consequences of contemporary life. The death of the passenger pigeon was a tragic and

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perceptible loss in charismatic extinctions of the 20th century. However, for extinction
companies, it is no use mourning over the bird as it will be revived. Instead, they refuse
extinction through providing an alternative to loss, belief in their process.
Concluding thoughts: Limitations and implications
For the broader claims I make about extinction refusal, I only demonstrate a variety of
ways it shows up in American settler culture. International applications non-withstanding, this
would be a very different dissertation had I integrated Indigenous relationships to the species in
question. Both the ivory-bill and the California grizzly bear incredible and incalculable value to
Indigenous groups that would have been a dissertation project in its own right. The Woolly
Mammoth was not only found in North America but also in roaming populations across Europe
and Eurasia, its ties to American Ideology only encompasses a sliver of its cultural and
paleontological value. These shortcomings notwithstanding what I impress in these discussions
of the extinct in the United States is the specificity of species meaning and species love on the
local level.
Further, the vignette introducing this conclusion was added in the eleventh hour of
research as the Colossal Foundation was only just established on October 1st, 2024. In August of
2024, only a few months ago, the restoration of Monarch the Grizzly concluded and he was once
more put on display. Monarch’s restoration notably consisted of hair fills from a cow, and a dye
job and fur treatment that darkened his pelt to a color he was not known for having in life. Which
is to say, refusal communities continue to act out new and unfolding moments of refusal that
adds new and exciting dimensions on the cases presented across these chapters. Perhaps
ironically, for extinct wildlife, the stories of the ivory-bill, California grizzly, and mammoth are
far from complete.

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Despite these limitations, I have demonstrated that the social lives of species, and
charismatic, loved species particularly are deeply entangled in how a community relates
culturally, historically, and socially to the non-human. As extinction worries become more
pronounced, an understanding and acknowledgement of the nuance of the social dimensions of
species disappearance needs to be addressed alongside its use as a designating label. It is not a
groundbreaking or original claim to argue that extinction is fundamentally a social label, bound
as it is in how the natural world is sieved through institutions of knowledge. Extinction studies is
a growing field that explore how extinction is foremost an erosion of relationships. Therefore, it
holds merit to explore the aftermath these broken connections have on those left to mourn (or not
mourn).
As such, extinction refusal is an affective orientation to disappeared species that sheds
light into the extractive core of multispecies relationships from the perspective of the
communities that love them. It also highlights the existential threat that the disappearance of this
species causes to the communities that identify with them and the lengths people go to maintain
stasis and stability in their lifeways against a precarious and uncertain future. Extinction becomes
an unacceptable outcome for many species because mourning them would be acknowledging that
life cannot go on in the ways it currently does and something, uncomfortably, needs to change.

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Biodiversity loss is a mounting anxiety in the present day, with environmental advocates warning that we are in a mass extinction event commensurable with past die-offs. But extinction is not the end for some charismatic species. Liminal species are both extinct and lively, absent and present, containing contradictory narratives in their form. I refer to these cases as instances of extinction refusal, wherein the narrative of a group may reject the incongruent reality of the world around them. The aims of this dissertation are to explore the myriad ways of how and why extinction becomes and unacceptable outcome for many- why extinction is refused. To this end I ask, what is extinction refusal? And what is the significance of the ways in which it crops up in social life?

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Creator Perrimon, Pamela Camille (author)

Core Title Liminal species: extinction refusal and the social lives of the dead and disappeared

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Degree Conferral Date 2025-05

Publication Date 02/06/2025

Defense Date 12/10/2024

Publisher Los Angeles, California (original), University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag california grizzly,cultural histories,Environment,extinction,extinction refusal,ivorybill woodpecker,material semiotics,multispecies studies,woolly mammoth

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