The End of the World, The Future of the Earth: Bioplurality and the Politics of Human Extinction

Using a comparative study of two social movements working against mass extinction, this essay examines how potential human extinction rhetorically creates connections between human life and other forms of life. Looking carefully at the role of species thinking in each movement, the essay argues for an approach it calls bioplurality, a way of understanding living things that attends to both similarity and difference.