Meeting #9: SUN 30 Dec 2 – 5pm – Extinction Club Reading Group | 读书会 灭绝学
▻http://oumopo.com/extinctionclub/2018/12/27/meeting-9-sun-30-dec-2-5pm
“The pika is a small, rather cute mammal that looks a bit like a hamster. … Since they depend on cool, high-mountain habitats to survive, pikas have been coping with the higher temperatures caused by climate change by moving up mountain slopes at a rate that has increased eleven-fold over the last ten years. Pikas eventually arrive at the top of their mountains; at this point, they have nowhere left to go to escape global warming.”
The rare and endangered ili pika, endemic to the Tianshan mountains of northwestern China and listed by he IUCN as vulnerable to extinction, has been described as ‘an unbelievably cute mammal with a teddy-bear face’. What do seductive start-up terms like ‘de-extinction’, ‘biogenesis’ and ‘ecomodernism’ have to do with our plucky little climbing pika? How do arguments for a techno-engineered biodiversity prop up the old myth of endless growth continuing to drive our planet to the brink of disaster? In his book Extinction: A Radical History (2016), Ashley Dawson calls for an anticapitalist movement against extinction, one that rejects ‘capitalist biopiracy and imperialist enclosure of the global commons’. We’ll read a chapter from the book and share some cake.