Engaging a broad spectrum of ecological thought to articulate the ethical scale of global extinction

As global rates of plant and animal extinctions mount, anxieties about the future of the earth’s ecosystems are fueling ever more ambitious efforts at conservation, which draw on Western scientific principles to manage species and biodiversity. In Revenant Ecologies, Audra Mitchell argues that these responses not only ignore but also magnify powerful forms of structural violence like colonialism, racism, genocide, extractivism, ableism, and heteronormativity, ultimately contributing to the destruction of unique life forms and ecosystems.

Critiquing the Western discourse of global extinction and biodiversity through the lens of diverse Indigenous philosophies and other marginalized knowledge systems, Revenant Ecologies promotes new ways of articulating the ethical enormity of global extinction. Mitchell offers an ambitious framework—(bio)plurality—that focuses on nurturing unique, irreplaceable worlds, relations, and ecosystems, aiming to transform global ecological–political relations, including through processes of land return and critically confronting discourses on “human extinction.”

Highlighting the deep violence that underpins ideas of “extinction,” “conservation,” and “biodiversity,” Revenant Ecologies fuses political ecology, global ethics, and violence studies to offer concrete, practical alternatives. It also foregrounds the ways that multi-life-form worlds are actively defying the forms of violence that drive extinction—and that shape global efforts to manage it.

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Audra Mitchell is professor and Canada Research Chair in Global Political Ecology at the Balsillie School of International Affairs at Wilfrid Laurier University. Mitchell is author of International Intervention in a Secular Age: Re-enchanting Humanity? and Lost in Transformation: Violent Peace and Peaceful Conflict in Northern Ireland and is coeditor of Hybrid Forms of Peace: From the Everyday to Post-liberalism.

"Revenant Ecologies tackles the huge, widely resonating topic of extinction and blows it wide open with rigorous structural analysis from a broad base of humanities and social science traditions, engaging with Indigenous, feminist, and decolonial scholarship. Audra Mitchell challenges us to rethink how we use the concept of extinction and what ethical and justice issues we may have been missing all along."—Kyle Whyte, University of Michigan