Deborah Bird Rose

'Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction' (University of Virginia Press) starts with the moment at which I felt called to bear witness to the great disasters that are caused by humans and are signalled by the term 'extinction'. These disasters include the suffering and deaths of animals and other living beings, the degradation and loss of their homelands, the apparent indifference of humans, and thus also the degradation of humanity as a participant species in the community of life on earth. Through all this disaster runs a deeper issue of the despoliation of death, by which I mean the breaking up of the life-death dynamic that has enabled the flourishing connectivities of life on earth. My passion for life leads me directly toward the necessity of engaging with contemporary cascades of death, and with the people who through empathy and commitment are called to try to hold back these cascades. I am now working on a book about flying-foxes, also known as giant fruit bats (Pteropus spp). The path which leads me toward research that always finds itself immersed in the deepest questions of life and death started with my doctoral research with Australian Aboriginal people. Once when I was travelling in the Northern Territory with a group of Aboriginal people we stopped to film some of the most serious erosion in our region. We looked at bare soil that was washing away down the gullies, at gullies that were taking over the land, at dead trees and scald areas. I asked one of my teachers, Daly Pulkara, what he called this country and he looked at it deeply, and said in a heavy voice: 'It's the wild. It's just the wild.' In much of my thinking and writing since then, I've been concerned with processes that cause or allow life to slip away into bare gullies. On the other hand, I've become fascinated with the philosophical ecologies through which people, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, express their commitments to flourishing life. I was educated in the USA, studying anthropology at the University of Delaware and Bryn Mawr College. In 1980 I came to Australia to do research with Aboriginal people in the hopes that, if successful, I would be able to write a thesis and earn my Ph.D. I came with questions about the meaning of life. I wanted to know how a group of Aboriginal people in outback Australia posed and answered the fundamental questions that humans everywhere ask: why are we born, why do we live, why do we die? My Ph.D. thesis later became a book dealing with these questions: 'Dingo Makes Us Human' (Cambridge University Press; this book won the 1994 Stanner Award). It is now in its third printing. I have had a life-long passion for justice, and for many years I worked on Aboriginal claims to land and in other contexts in which people were seeking turn around the history of the brutalities of colonisation. My Aboriginal teachers were particularly interested in sharing the history of colonisation with outside readers - especially with white Australians and Americans. As part of my payback to them, I wrote a history that incorporated large amounts of their own words: 'Hidden Histories' (Aboriginal Studies Press; this book won the Jessie Litchfield Award for Literature). My next book, 'Nourishing Terrains', is a wide-ranging analysis of philosophical ecologies across much of Aboriginal Australia. Although out of print, the book is available on-line, and has been translated into Japanese. After that it seemed important to explore some of these issues in the context of the relationship between a clan and their country. 'Country of the Heart' (Aboriginal Studies Press), was written collaboratively with the photographer Sharon D'Amico and a number of senior members of an Aboriginal clan whose Dreaming is the White-breasted Sea Eagle and whose country is in the coastal floodplains of North Australia. This book is visually stunning, and brings great pleasure to those who do not read'n'write as well as to those who do. It is now in its second printing. Fundamental issues of justice pose particular problems in Settler Societies such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA. How, as settlers, may we inscribe a moral presence for ourselves in countries we have occupied through violence? How can our love find forms of expression which remember the past and at the same time work toward justice? I took up these in my book 'Reports from a Wild Country' (UNSW Press, Shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Awards). At this time I am carrying out research in Australia and the USA. It is funded by the Australian Research Council and is focussed on multispecies ethnographies at the edge of extinction. Implicated as we are as humans in all the looming disasters of the Anthropocene, we are also, I believe, called to explore the profound implications of the deeply disastrous quality of our time. My current research continues this exploration of cascades of death driven by human action, both wilfully and negligently. It is a sad fact that there is no shortage of case studies to investigate - the numbers of creatures (animals and plants) now under threat of extinction is enormous, and growing. It is a hopeful fact that there are many people who refuse to be silent bystanders in the midst of all this violence. One of my favourite philosophers is Lev Shestov, and he became one of my guiding spirits in 'Wild Dog Dreaming'. Years ago he made the point that it takes a certain kind of craziness to love all that is doomed to perish. I love this kind of crazy love, and I love documenting the people who practice it and the animals who benefit. I believe that animals, too, practice their own kinds of crazy love, and my next books will address some of these aspects of love and goodness in the world of life and death.