A useful way to read van Dooren’s article is to focus on two closely related theoretical interventions that it makes within environmental humanities scholarship. The first concerns what can be described as an invertebrate bias in conservation knowledge and practice, and the second concerns the ethics of how extinction is narrated.
Van Dooren shows that the overwhelming prioritization of vertebrates in conservation funding, research agendas, and legal frameworks produces not merely an imbalance of attention but a form of epistemic and ethical injustice toward invertebrates. Although invertebrates constitute the vast majority of animal life, they remain marginal within dominant conservation regimes that privilege charisma, visibility, and familiarity. In the Hawaiian context, this bias has had concrete consequences for land snails. While birds and mammals were often documented, named, and incorporated into conservation planning before their decline, many snail species were never formally described before they went extinct. As a result, their disappearance occurred largely outside legal protection, public awareness, and even scientific recognition. This asymmetry reveals how conservation does not simply respond to extinction but actively shapes which lives are rendered visible, knowable, and grievable, and which are allowed to vanish without witness.
The second key contribution of the article lies in van Dooren’s proposal of lively storying, or ethnography, as an alternative to conventional scientific modes of extinction reporting. Dominant scientific narratives often emphasize quantification, causal explanation, and closure, framing extinction as a completed event that can be summarized through numbers and trends. Van Dooren challenges this approach by arguing that such modes of reporting risk flattening the ethical significance of extinction and foreclosing responsibility. Lively storying, by contrast, seeks to hold extinction open as an ongoing, relational process that exceeds what can be fully captured by data alone. By weaving together ecological research, taxonomic uncertainty, museum archives, Indigenous knowledge, and affective encounters with snail shells, ethnography resists explanatory certainty and instead foregrounds relational entanglements and unfinished obligations.
Importantly, this narrative approach does not romanticize loss. Rather than aestheticizing extinction or turning it into a sentimental object of mourning, lively storying functions as an ethical practice that refuses closure. It insists on staying with uncertainty, absence, and complicity, and acknowledges the many lives lost without names or recognition. In this sense, van Dooren’s work aligns with broader environmental humanities commitments to multispecies ethics and response-ability, using storytelling not to console, but to cultivate attentiveness and moral responsibility toward both known and unknown beings in the Anthropocene.
Source: Van Dooren, T. (2022). In search of lost snails: Storying unknown extinctions. Environmental Humanities, 14(1), 89-109.
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