January 24, 2023

Everyday Extinction: An Aesthetics of Biodiversity Loss

Event Series: A Bent but Beautiful World: Literature, Art, and the Environment

Showing the Everyday Extinction: An Aesthetics of Biodiversity Loss Video

We are living in a period of catastrophic declines in global biodiversity. According to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), humans will cause the extinction of approximately one million species in the coming decades. Yet for many, the pervasive and ongoing diminishment of biodiversity is extremely difficult to see or directly experience in daily life, particularly for many species at greatest risk, such as insects. In this talk, Adrienne Ghaly of the University of Virginia explored how this hidden collapse of very small fauna can be made visible through aesthetic modes and media, and she argued for the urgency of expanding popular ecological imaginaries of extinction beyond rhinos, elephants, and whales to include what the American biologist E.O. Wilson termed "the little things that run the world." Michael Scott, director of the Future of the Humanities Project, provided opening and closing remarks, and Kathryn Temple, a Future of the Humanities Project senior fellow, moderated a Q&A session following the presentation.

This event was sponsored by the Future of the Humanities Project; the Georgetown Humanities Initiative; the Georgetown Master's Program in the Engaged and Public Humanities; Campion Hall, Oxford; and the Las Casas Institute (Blackfriars Hall, Oxford). It is part of the one-year-long series A Bent but Beautiful World: Literature, Art, and the Environment.

Participants

Dr. Adrienne Ghaly

Dr. Adrienne Ghaly

Dr. Adrienne Ghaly is a humanitarian collaborative practitioner fellow at the Global Policy Center and visiting scholar in the Department of English at the University of Virginia. She is a literary scholar specializing in the modern and contemporary British and Anglophone novel and environmental humanities, archives of extinction, and the uses of fiction for public advocacy on global crises. In fall 2022 Ghaly and her collaborator created a global public humanities project entitled "Read for Action: Climate, Conflict and Humanitarian Crisis."

Kathryn Temple

Kathryn Temple

Kathryn Temple (moderator) is a professor in the Department of English at Georgetown University where she has taught since 1994. She specializes in the study of law and the humanities. Among her publications are Loving Justice: Legal Emotions in William Blackstone’s England (2019) and the co-edited Research Handbook on Law and Emotions (2021). Her humanities outreach activities include work with military veterans and the incarcerated.