Year: 2011
Type: article
Abstract: A portrait of Australian flying fox life in the Anthropocene illuminates startlingly familiar stories.These animals are participants in most of the major catastrophic events, as well as contestations about rescue, of contemporary life on Earth: warfare, man-made mass death, famine, urbanisation, emerging diseases, climate change, biosecurity, conservation and local/international NGO aid.They are endangered, and are involved in all four of the major factors causing extinctions: habitat loss, overexploitation, introduced species and extinction cascades.My account of flying foxes in Australia rests on the understanding of species articulated vigorously and eloquently by Donna Haraway (42): we and others are entangled in knots of species who are co-shaping each other in layers of reciprocating complexity.I seek to engage both the living warmblooded beings whose lives are threatened and the excruciatingly dynamic deathscape that is surrounding them/us.Positioned, like much of life on Earth today, in zones of increasing conflict and terror, the lives and deaths of flying foxes tell us that there is no way out of entanglements within multi-species communities.Rather than seeking to erect more impenetrable barriers against others, relational ethics for living and dying in the Anthropocene urge us to assume ever greater mutuality and accountability as intra-dependent members of the suffering family of life on Earth. Sociability, flying fox style ~ MegachiropteraAustralian megachiroptera scrabbled into the English imagination in June 1770 when Captain Cook anchored his ship Endeavour at the mouth of a river in Queensland for repairs.One of his men returned to camp telling of an animal he had seen: 'It was as black as the devil and had wings; indeed I took it for the devil, or I might easily have catched it for it crawled very slowly through the grass' (qtd in Ratcliffe, Flying Fox and Drifting Sand 6).We might imagine that something was wrong with the little guy, as flying foxes can't walk and wouldn't normally be crawling in the grass.One wonders if the seaman had thrown stones at it, but perhaps it is equally possible to imagine that the flying fox, never having seen a white man before, was reeling with shock.They are alert creatures, extremely aware of what is going on around them.Pamela Conder, a recent student of flying foxes, writes of her time sitting quietly inside a flying fox enclosure in a wildlife sanctuary observing their actions and interactions.
Source: Australian Humanities Review
Author: Deborah Bird Rose
Language: English
Subfield: Geography, Planning and Development
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Life on land
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2883785206