A Broken Task for a Broken World: Reimagining Extinction with Thoreau's Mystical Empiricism

DeWitt, “A Broken Task.” As the sixth extinction unfolds, we race to name and count what exactly it is we are losing. In this moment of dwindling biodiversity, we struggle to articulate what about this pervasive loss so... [ view full abstract ]

DeWitt, “A Broken Task.” As the sixth extinction unfolds, we race to name and count what exactly it is we are losing. In this moment of dwindling biodiversity, we struggle to articulate what about this pervasive loss so troubles us, and race to name the organisms as they perish. This paper looks to Thoreau to locate an alternative mode for imagining the stakes of mass extinction. Recent critical attention paid to Thoreau’s later naturalist writings makes clear how disinterested Thoreau was in nature as a metaphor for spiritual transcendence. Rather, Thoreau perceived nature as a queer, messy, and ever-unfolding process that challenges the stasis and heteronormativity presumed by both antebellum and present-day ecology. Throughout his oeuvre, Thoreau approaches natural observation as an ecstatic, obsessive, and often sexual endeavor, which enables him to reimagine death, not as exhaustion, but as fecundity. In his accounts of the onset of spring in Walden and the Journal, Thoreau’s “mystical empiricism” reimagines ecological science as an essentially embodied endeavor. Thoreau teaches us to transform our empirical gaze into a method for mingling with, rather than distancing ourselves from, the world around us. Thoreau’s nascent theory of biodiversity thus offers us a way of seeing ourselves as minute participants within the earth’s large-scale geologic changes—an alternative to elegies of extinction which persistently focus on an increasingly lonely human protagonist.