Deadly intersections: living and dying with non-humans in everyday life

ABSTRACT

Social and cultural geographers have long-recognized the power of death to produce spaces, affects and values. This special issue explores intersections between social and cultural geographies of death, more-than-human geographies and political ecology. In this introduction, we situate non-human death as an everyday phenomenon that is part of cultural, material, discursive, organic and economic metabolic networks that transform space and produce value. We then summarize the papers in this special issue to highlight their contributions to everyday entanglements with non-human death. We conclude by introducing two concepts developed by the authors in this special issue, spectral presences and lively/deathly knowledges, to highlight how non-human death can produce immaterial artefacts that have lingering effects on human relationships with space long after non-human bodies are buried, eaten or decomposed.

KEYWORDS:

• Plant and animal death
• metabolism
• spectral presence
• lively/deathly knowledges

Introduction

In 2020, as humans witnessed shutdowns and restrictions in response to monumental deaths and strains on health care systems due to COVID-19, fur farms worldwide had to quarantine, cull and implement heightened safety measures following the deaths of thousands of minks. The World Organisation for Animal Health has identified COVID-19 as an emerging disease for non-human animals. There have been several documented cases in captive animals in zoos (USDA, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c, 2020d, 2020e) and pets (USDA, 2020f, 2020g), but minks are the only animals with globally reported mass COVID-19 deaths.

Farmed minks represent an example of ‘soon-to-be-dead commodities’ (Gillespie, 2021) whose deaths and afterlives were hastened by COVID-19. One news source reported that fur from dead mink in Utah, USA, ‘will be processed to remove any traces of the virus and then used for coats and other garments’ (Aleccia, 2020). The banality of these mink deaths, which, thanks to the timing and circumstances (Sneegas, 2021), can still be used as commodities, represents a triumph of economic management rather than a reason for mourning, despite their usefulness to humans (Kean, 2016). When COVID-19 has made the unevenness of living and dying an everyday concern for humans (Neely & Lopez, 2020), mass mink deaths and the transmission of COVID-19 between farmed minks and humans (Government of the Netherlands, 2020) serve as a reminder of ‘how animal and human death diverge and also connect in profound ways’ (Johnston & Probyn-Rapsey, 2013, p. Xvi).

The story of farmed minks, destined for a banal and expected death, unexpectedly killed by COVID-19, highlights this special issue’s central theme: the ubiquity of non-human death in everyday life and the ways humans grapple with non-human death through its metabolization in social and cultural systems. Our focus on everyday death was decided upon well before the COVID-19 pandemic gripped the world and thrust death into the forefront of everyday consciousnesses, but it has taken on more urgent meaning for us today than when it was conceived. This is especially true since to date, much work on COVID-19 has focused on humans (e.g. Rose-Redwood et al., 2020) and human death (Maddrell, 2020). Writing that has considered more-than-human geographies during the pandemic has provided an overview of how COVID-19 has shifted human-animal relationships (Gorman, 2021; Searle et al., 2021), at times in ways that reproduce social inequalities (Isaacs & Otruba, 2021; Royle, 2020), and examined the virus itself as a ‘boundary-crossing’ organism that has transformed relationships between humans, animals and technologies (Aronsson & Holm, 2020; Blue & Rock, 2020). There has been less consideration of non-human death during the pandemic, but as Gibbs, 2021 (p. 371) points out, COVID-19 ‘has highlighted our propensity to kill and care’ in relation to non-humans. Whilst the papers in this special issue do not deal directly with the COVID-19 pandemic, they add a much-needed perspective on everyday non-human death that can be applied to broader geographies of death during COVID-19 and beyond.

We borrow the concept of metabolism as a way to draw attention to the material and discursive entanglements of everyday geographies of death in which, as COVID-19 has shown, non-human death cannot be so easily separated from human death and care. In biology and ecology, metabolism draws attention to interdependencies between life and death. As a biological concept, metabolism refers to life-promoting cellular processes that transform food into energy. Metabolism is also used to describe flows of energy in ecosystems – for instance, carbon from decaying plants and animals. In Marxist political ecology, metabolism provides a guiding metaphor for the ‘relationship between social and biophysical processes’ (Gandy, 2004, p. 373; see also, Heynen et al., 2006) that produce value from a variety of natural processes, including non-human death. As Barua et al. (2020) observe, metabolism serves as a ‘plural concept’ that makes connections between disciplines, sites and scales of analysis, and ‘nature-culture divides.’ Each paper in this special issue grapples with how material absences and presences of non-human death, and decay are metabolized and the differential values produced from this process, making important connections between social and cultural geographies of death and political ecology.

Our focus on everyday metabolizations of non-human death grows from work by feminist political ecologists that aim ‘to better understand the everyday, embodied, and emotional aspects of nature-society relations’ (Sultana, 2021, p. 157) and work in social and cultural geography on the affective geographies of human death. Beginning in social and cultural geography and related fields with the study of deathscapes (Hartig & Dunn, 1998; Kong, 1999; Maddrell & Sidaway, 2016; Rainville, 1999; Young & Light, 2016), or landscapes defined by death, this body of research has now expanded to examine a myriad of different ways that human (Colombino & Giaccaria, 2016; Tyner, 2015) and non-human (Bersaglio & Margulies, 2021; Pitas & Shcheglovitova, 2019) death can produce material and emotional space (Maddrell, 2016). The papers in this special issue explore how non-human death is metabolized through everyday labour, embodiment and encounters, adding texture to studies of death and metabolism by attending to everyday feelings, experiences and actions outside the realm of formal politics. This engagement recognizes that the production of non-human death is integral to the (re)production of capitalism while grappling with the daily psycho-social and embodied material experiences of living with non-human death. The focus of the papers in this special issue on how death is both physically and discursively metabolized illustrates Doshi’s (2017, p. 126) proposition that ‘metabolism is embodied politics not just a metaphor.’

This special issue extends work on the material and emotional geographies of death to more-than-human ‘life worlds, death worlds and rotting worlds’ (Gillespie, 2021) to contribute to a rich literature on non-human death in geography and the environmental humanities. These publications have focused on the forms of non-human death produced under capitalism, and their role in the process of value accumulation (Braverman, 2015; Wrye, 2015), the value and grievability of non-human life (Bates & Schlipalius, 2013; Gillespie, 2011; Kean, 2013; Law, 2010; Watson, 2015) and the ways that dead non-humans are enrolled in the politics of producing space (Pitas & Shcheglovitova, 2019). Research on non-human death has brought to light the transformations of non-humans from ‘lively commodities’ (Collard & Dempsey, 2013) to commodities with ‘afterlives’ (Gillespie, 2021), stressing the ways that value extraction permeates the lives and deaths of non-humans. Whilst these studies highlight the commodification and political registers of non-human death, often with a focus on caring and killing (Gibbs, 2021), research in the environmental humanities has engaged with the emotional and cultural contexts of non-human death (Johnston & Probyn-Rapsey, 2013). Writing in the environmental humanities has grappled with the ‘the ethics of living with non-human others’ (Ginn et al., 2014, p. 113), which can involve facing monumental loss (Rose, 2013; Van Dooren, 2014) and acts of killing that can be an inevitable part of ‘living with’ (Ginn et al., 2014; see also, Gibbs, 2021).

Set in diverse spaces – from city streets to farms and wildlife conservancies – the papers in this special issue explore emotional connections with non-human death, the techno-scientific webs of knowledge production that come to rely on non-human death and the broader implications of non-human death for ethics, capital and the production of space. Bersaglio and Margulies (2021) extend the concept of deathscapes to conservation landscapes produced through species’ absence-presence (Maddrell, 2013) to develop the concept of extinctionscapes. Pitas (2021) draws on popular media archives to trace the ecological stories told about pigeons and falcons to understand the ways that pigeon death contributes to narratives of environmental redemption in the city (but only ‘in the talons and beaks of falcons’; Pitas, 2021 pg. 3). Shcheglovitova (2020) explores how the embodied knowledges of artists and farmers blur boundaries between life and death to produce understandings of rot in urban space as vibrant and transformative. Sneegas (2021) describes how death can become extraordinary on a farm when its timing removes animals from cycles of commodification.

These papers show how non-human death is metabolized through acts of memorialization, storytelling and material practices that circulate as websites, news stories and the products of artisans and farmers to create certain landscapes and knowledges of death. They also point to the fragility of the processes of metabolizing non-human death and the reliance on death adhering to specific spaces and temporalities to produce prescribed social and cultural understandings of the deaths and afterlives of animals (Bersaglio & Margulies, 2021; Pitas, 2021; Sneegas, 2021) and plants (Shcheglovitova, 2020).

Case studies in everyday death

Brock Bersaglio and Jared Margulies’ paper Extinctionscapes: Spatializing the commodification of animal lives and afterlives in conservation landscapes critically examines environmental discourses surrounding death. Set on a wildlife conservancy in Laikipia, Kenya, this paper explores how charismatic non-humans – in this case, rhinos – can become commodified and exploited even after their death. Bersaglio and Margulies leverage the concept of absence-presence, in which the distinct lack of rhinos from the landscape stands as itself a broader indictment of past (colonial) conservation practices and a grim reminder that the future of conservation depends on avoiding the mistakes of the past. Building on work in social and cultural geography on deathscapes (Hartig & Dunn, 1998; Kong, 1999; Maddrell & Sidaway, 2016; Rainville, 1999; Young & Light, 2016) and work in the environmental humanities on mass extinctions (Rose, 2013; Van Dooren, 2014), they coin the term extinctionscapes, ‘spaces where the memorialization of non-human life generates affective and commodifiable experiences with species loss through practices of absence-presence in physical landscapes’ (p. 3), as a reference to the distinct and transcendent power that extinction can have as a spatialized form of extra-permanent death.

John-Henry Pitas’ paper Deathly storytelling in the ecological city: how pigeons became falcon food in Baltimore, Maryland explores the ways that the spectacle of pigeon death is produced through popular media narratives. Pitas uses Collard and Dempsey’s (2017) typology of non-human ‘orientations’ towards capitalist value to explain how pigeon deaths can only be oriented towards value when they are killed by peregrine falcons, a charismatic species brought back from the brink of extinction. Pitas expands on Collard and Dempsey’s work by developing ecological storytelling as an additional mechanism through which non-humans are oriented towards value. In this case, ecological stories reposition pigeons from the category of pests to ‘important members of the urban ecosystem’ (p. 14) who die to feed peregrine falcons.

Also set in Baltimore, MD, USA, Mariya Shcheglovitova’s paper Dawn of the lively dead: Living queerly with rot in the sustainable city probes the ways people work, through and alongside death in their everyday artistic and farming practices, ultimately illustrating how death becomes integral to the (re)production of human/non-human relationships. Shcheglovitova draws on interviews and participant observation to recount unlikely encounters with death in everyday life. At the heart of this paper is a tension between the liveliness, care and expertise of those working with death and the inability to scale these relationships up to the level of the city, which ultimately reveals that ‘the sustainable city both relies on and (re)produces the binaries of life and death’ (p. 1).

Perhaps no contribution to this special issue tackles the theme of everyday death more head-on than Gretchen Sneegas’ paper Producing (extra)ordinary death on the farm: unruly encounters and contaminated calves, which explores what happens when the difference between an ordinary and extraordinary death on a farm in rural Pennsylvania, USA, becomes unclear. Sneegas’ paper maps out how death on the farm is spatially and temporally ordered. This ordering of life and death ‘produces the illusion of an uninterrupted commodity chain through which bovine bodies progress seamlessly from birth to packaged cuts’ (p. 13) and renders cow death as inevitable, normal and even desirable. In this way, death becomes an ordinary part of food production. But what happens when death occurs outside of this spatial and temporal framework? This dilemma forms the core of Sneegas’s paper and ultimately helps reveal that the metabolization of death on the farm relies almost entirely on how it is produced as either ordinary or extraordinary. This framing of death has very real material consequences for both the farmers and the farmed, illustrating how critical normalization, boundaries and ordering are in how non-human death is understood and valued in everyday life.

Spectral presences and lively/deathly knowledges

As these case studies illustrate, the metabolization of non-human death makes messy connections and disconnections between human and non-human bodies and landscapes and temporal rhythms of living and dying. These spaces and moments are marked by tensions between the felt presence of non-human death and human attempts to know and/or extract value from non-human death. We highlight these (dis)connections through two concepts developed by the authors in this special issue spectral presences and lively/deathly knowledges.

Bersaglio and Margulies (2021) draw on recent work concerning spectral geographies (McCorristine & Adams, 2020) to address the absence-presence (or spectral presence) of rhinos whose deaths are enrolled in the production of ‘commodified tourist encounters in affective landscapes’ (p. 11), what they describe as extinctionscapes. Bersaglio and Margulies’ analysis reveals that ‘the labour carried out by animals during their lives and afterlives’ is made visible ‘through practices of absence-presence’ (p. 13). This more-than-human labour is brought to light through everyday encounters with symbols, artefacts, etc., whose meanings are haunted by death to crystallize into compelling narratives about conservation. Spectral presences are also evoked by Pitas (2021), who writes about the reliance of the production of value from pigeon deaths in cities on them being killed by falcons. In the ecological stories Pitas describes, pigeons become valued as absent-presences whose deaths lend meaning to the redemption story of peregrine falcons.

Ecological storytelling is a form of producing lively/deathly knowledge, as described by Sneegas (2021), who proposes that ways of knowing life and death on commercial farms construct appropriate spaces and times of death, wherein ‘premature death’ (Tyner, 2015) can lead to knowledge controversies. Sneegas contrasts the everyday knowledges of farmers who understand premature calf death following exposure to a hydraulic fracturing wastewater leak as extraordinary with attempts to normalize these deaths by the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture. Shcheglovitova (2020) also writes about lively/deathly knowledges formed through everyday practices. Shcheglovitova describes the practices of urban farmers who harness tree death and decomposition to form soils and wood artists that incorporate decomposition into their work to enhance its aesthetic value. Shcheglovitova works through translations of lively/deathly knowledges to consider how tree death is metabolized on a larger scale in urban planning practices, which can conflate the presence of non-human life with health, and thus conversely considers a lack of vegetation a deathly sign.

The papers in this special issue show how the metabolization of non-human death can involve regurgitations that transform and haunt understandings of everyday life. Lively/deathly knowledges and spectral presences highlight the interplay between social and cultural understandings of non-human death through narratives, stories and practices and the materiality of non-human death whose presence and absence can be commodified, sensed and contested. Whilst the papers in this special issue contribute to extending work on social and cultural geographies of death to non-humans, they also indicate opportunities for future research directions. One notable gap is the limited organismal focus in this special issue. Future research can build on insights on the ecologies of non-human death (e.g. predator prey relationships (Pitas, 2021); and decomposition (Shcheglovitova, 2020)) that are enrolled in the human production of value and knowledge to investigate how death is materialized and understood for a breadth of non-humans and their relations. By drawing on concepts from social and cultural geography and political ecology, the papers in this special issue respond to Srinivasan’s (2016) call to further political work within animal geographies. However, the conflicts, contradictions and contestations represented in these papers are limited to discussions of the everyday politics of knowledge production and representation. As Stevenson et al. (2016) observe in their call to enliven and politicize (human) geographies of death and dying, a ‘politics of hope’ can be embedded in geographies of death. By attending to hope, future research on everyday metabolizations of non-human death may offer insights for living with, through and beyond intractable and traumatic moments of human and non-human death.

Acknowledgments

We would like to extend our gratitude to Oliver Human, whose vision helped shape early versions of this special issue proposal and the contributors to this special issue for their timely submissions and patience during the editorial process. We would also like to thank the editors at Social & Cultural Geography, especially Avril Maddrell and David Bissell, for working with us to make this special issue a reality and providing feedback that greatly improved this introduction.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).