Flying Fox

Kin, Keystone, Kontaminant

Bibliographic Data

ID8070980
AuthorsDeborah Bird Rose (corresponding author)
Year2011
Volume50
Publication date2011-05-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAustralian Humanities Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1325-8338 • E-ISSN: 1835-8063
PublisherANU Press (PUBLISHER • AU)
DOI10.22459/ahr.50.2011.07
OpenAlexW2883785206
LanguageEN
Citations received24
References cited2

A portrait of Australian flying fox life in the Anthropocene illuminates startlingly familiar stories. These animals are participants in most of the major catastrophic events, as well as contestations about rescue, of contemporary life on Earth: warfare, man-made mass death, famine, urbanisation, emerging diseases, climate change, biosecurity, conservation and local/international NGO aid. They are endangered, and are involved in all four of the major factors causing extinctions: habitat loss, overexploitation, introduced species and extinction cascades. My account of flying foxes in Australia rests on the understanding of species articulated vigorously and eloquently by Donna Haraway (42): we and others are entangled in knots of species who are co-shaping each other in layers of reciprocating complexity. I seek to engage both the living warmblooded beings whose lives are threatened and the excruciatingly dynamic deathscape that is surrounding them/us. Positioned, like much of life on Earth today, in zones of increasing conflict and terror, the lives and deaths of flying foxes tell us that there is no way out of entanglements within multi-species communities. Rather than seeking to erect more impenetrable barriers against others, relational ethics for living and dying in the Anthropocene urge us to assume ever greater mutuality and accountability as intra-dependent members of the suffering family of life on Earth

Biology · Geography · Keystone species · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Environmental, Ecological, and Cultural Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Ecology

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