Humboldt's Parrot: Speaking Extinction

Recent humanities work on the Sixth Extinction crisis seldom addresses responses prior to the 1980s. Yet debates over extinction and possible anthropogenic causation emerged beginning in the late 18th century. The proposed... [ view full abstract ]

Recent humanities work on the Sixth Extinction crisis seldom addresses responses prior to the 1980s. Yet debates over extinction and possible anthropogenic causation emerged beginning in the late 18^th century. The proposed panel, arranged chronologically, suggests how nineteenth-century engagements can help us think through our current crisis. The first two papers rethink the elegiac response; the following presentations extend the materialist mode of response suggested by the first two. 

Walls, “Humboldt’s Parrot.” Alexander von Humboldt closes the second of a series of essays on his South American travels, “Concerning the Waterfalls of the Orinoco” (1808), with an eerie meditation on the extinct people of the Atures. The lone survivor is an old parrot whose words no one can understand “because he is speaking the language of the Atures people.” Humboldt responds by theorizing how, in effect, even a living language becomes extinct once its speakers can only parrot the sounds. Four points follow: first, Humboldt theorized language as a historical process analogous to the creation of geological form. Second, he treats the parrot, without embarrassment, as an animated being with independent agency. Third, his thoughts turn on the deadly literalness with which European wars of conquest de-animate New World life forms by rendering them dead—and thereby, most of Native America extinct. Finally, this literal de-animation evidences a larger ideological de-animation of all nature as “object,” “stuff,” or “resource,” externalizing it as not human, not culture. Humboldt’s writings resist this ideological de-animation lest it render the planetary world dead to the human imagination. He largely failed: though popular and influential, by mid-century he was judged too quaint to speak to modernity. The upshot of the calamitous evolution that he observed but failed to deflect is the astonishing spectacle of today’s media-saturated world greeting the onset of the Sixth Extinction not with outrage and action, but with complacency and acceptance.