Hope and Optimism

Hawai'i's snails are far from being alone in this regard. Indeed, this is the situation in which a growing number of other animals and plants find themselves today. Around the world, many individuals and their species live out their final days under human care in strange environments like zoos and captive breeding facilities, from giant tortoises in the Galápagos Islands and white rhinos in Africa to the diverse forest birds and snails of Hawai'i. With so many species at risk of extinction , as the situation gets more dire bringing all or some of the remaining individuals into these (relatively) safe spaces becomes an appealing option. But for many of them there will be no release. Reviews of reintroduction programs generally show that the majority of them fail for a variety of reasons, including an inability to secure suitable release habitat. In these cases, maintaining captive animals becomes less an act of conservation than one of slowly drawing out an extinction. Unable to halt the ongoing destruction of our time , the Anthropocene has become a period in which both the lives and deaths of other species are increasingly being shaped, more or less wisely and consciously, by the actions of (some) humans.

   What does hope look like in times like these ? What does it mean to continue to care for species in the face of ongoing , unrelenting processes of loss? Lesley Head reminds us that hope does not require optimism. We do not need to feel or believe that something is likely to come about in order to hope for it . Rather, hope is a practice of the possible.

Thom van Dooren, A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2023), p. 189.