Environmental Communication

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Naming, Mourning, and the Work of Earthly

Coexistence

Joshua Trey Barnett

To cite this article: Joshua Trey Barnett (2019): Naming, Mourning, and the Work of Earthly
Coexistence, Environmental Communication, DOI: 10.1080/17524032.2018.1561485

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2018.1561485

Published online: 24 Jan 2019.

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ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION
https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2018.1561485

ADVANCED REVIEW

Naming, Mourning, and the Work of Earthly Coexistence

Joshua Trey Barnetta,b
a
Department of Communication, University of Minnesota Duluth, Duluth, MN, USA; bInstitute on the Environment,
University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Minneapolis, MN, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Setting out from Jacques Derrida’s assertion that every act of naming is “a Received 13 July 2018
foreshadowing of mourning” ([2008. The animal that therefore I am. (M.-L. Accepted 5 December 2018
Mallet, Ed., D. Wills, Trans.). New York, NY: Fordham University Press], p. 20),
KEYWORDS
this paper argues that the work of earthly coexistence is underwritten by Naming; mourning;
the intertwined practices of naming and mourning. The paper anthropocene; ethics;
demonstrates that names provide access to and shape our perceptions coexistence; extinction
of earthly entities; that the act of naming prepares us for the work of
mourning; that the proper names given to endlings provide poignant
points of access to species on the edge of extinction; that species
names disclose species as such and, thus, enable us to grieve not just
particular living organisms but entire ways of life; and that the name
given to the current geological epoch, the “anthropocene,”
simultaneously reflects and engenders a mode of awareness which
enables us to relinquish those ways of being human that no longer
seem sustainable and carry forth those that promise to enrich earthly
coexistence.

In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida (2008) discloses a paradox inherent in the act of nam-
ing. In one respect, he claims, to name is to appropriate, to give oneself the sovereign power to des-
ignate the other’s being with an appellation not of their choosing. Derrida’s chief example of the
appropriative work of naming is the word “animal.” “Animal,” he laments, “is a word that men
have given themselves the right to give […] in order to corral a large number of living beings within
a single concept” (p. 32). “And that is so,” Derrida continues,
in spite of the infinite space that separates the lizard from the dog, the protozoon from the dolphin, the shark
from the lamb, the parrot from the chimpanzee, the camel from the eagle, the squirrel from the tiger, the ele-
phant from the cat, the ant from the silkworm, or the hedgehog from the echidna. (p. 34)

Derrida’s nominal bestiary calls up the sheer diversity of so-called animal life. The word “animal” not
only places an array of creatures under a single banner, Derrida argues, but it also functions as the
necessary other to the word “human.” Thus, “animal” serves as a signifier for the vast abyss that Wes-
tern philosophy has found and continues to find between human beings and all other living
creatures.
Naming not only violently appropriates the other, however. Naming also opens onto complex
affective responses, many of which foment feelings of concern and close relation. In this respect,
proper names constitute a key example in Derrida’s work (Antal, 2017; Brault & Naas, 2001; Gaston,
2006). Once someone or something has been given a name, once they have received their name, how-
ever presumptuous a process that may be, they take on an identity linked to that name. Names stick

CONTACT Joshua Trey Barnett barnettj@d.umn.edu Department of Communication, University of Minnesota Duluth, 465
A.B. Anderson Hall, 1121 University Drive, Duluth, MN 55812-3027, USA
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 J. T. BARNETT

to us. For Derrida, this means that the act of naming is also “a foreshadowing of mourning” since
“every act of naming involves announcing a death to come in the surviving of a ghost, the longevity
of a name that survives whoever carries that name” (2008, p. 20, emphasis in original). Because
names can function in the radical absence of the being to whom they refer, that is, because names
continue working even after the death of the subject, say “Jacques Derrida,” they gesture toward mor-
tality, toward the fact that this being will someday die (Derrida, 1982). The proper name reaches
ahead to a time after death, and so works to safeguard this being from total loss by transforming
it into the sort of being whose life can be grieved.
For many scholars in the ecological humanities, the question of mourning for non-human ani-
mals and for the more-than-human world has become crucial for thinking about earthly coexistence
in the “anthropocene,” which Morton (2018) recently re-named the “age of mass extinction.”
Although there is disagreement about the current rate of species loss, “it is clear that a huge number
of species are under threat from lost habitats, climate change, and other human intrusions” (Pearce,
2015). Within this context, (the threat of) death becomes a provocation to rethink relations. “Death
makes claims upon all of us,” Deborah Bird Rose writes, “claims that invoke our ethics, our love, our
compassion, our sorrow, and our future” (2011, pp. 19–20). For Rose, the loss of non-human lives
serves as a call to accept and embrace our own mortality, an act of hubris that promises to open us
onto more loving relations with others, human and more-than-human alike. Along these lines,
Thom van Dooren advocates for telling new stories about species loss. In particular, he calls for stor-
ies that could help us learn to mourn for our more-than-human kin: “learning to mourn,” van
Dooren claims, “might offer us a way into a fuller understanding of our living planet, of what it
means and why it matters” (2014, p. 144). Although mourning is essential to our sense of belong-
ing-with-others on earth, that we will do so cannot be taken for granted. As the editors of Mourning
Nature put it, “we need a new form of mourning, a new form of ecological ethics and politics to
mourn beyond our species, beyond human bodies, to expand the boundaries of what constitutes a
mournable body” (Cunsolo & Landman, 2017, p. 22).
Alongside these and other thinkers in the ecological humanities, I wish to affirm the significance
of mourning in times of unpredictable ecological transformations. And, like so many others in the
ecological humanities concerned with mourning, I find the works of both Derrida and Judith Butler
eminently productive. Channeling Derrida, for instance, Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman con-
tend that the work of mourning “can leave us changed in ways we could not have imagined, and
hold[s] the possibility of leaving us more open to other bodies, to grief, and to our transcorporeal
connections with all bodies” (2017, p. 10). Mourning discloses entanglement: to mourn the loss of
the other is to affirm that self and other are always already interconnected. Helen Whale and Frank-
lin Ginn reiterate this point when they claim that mourning “in this Derridean sense” is a “dimin-
ishment of the prospects for becoming” (2017, p. 98). Since mourning exposes entanglement, it also
reveals the ways in which we are undone by the other’s undoing. Other scholars mobilize Butler’s
thoughts on grief to consider the consequences of public mourning for ecological politics. Bringing
Butler’s thoughts on mourning to the realm of ecology, John Charles Ryan remarks that, “mourning
can be an agent of transformation, one that resists anthropocentrism and honours the ecocultural
interdependencies between people and place” (2017, p. 139). And Jessica Barr sees in Butler’s cele-
bration of public mourning an opportunity to “demonstrate a sense of connection and community
among and across species” (2017, p. 199). Although this essay delivers these Derridean and Butlerian
notions of mourning to environmental communication scholars, it also demonstrates why we must
consider the specifically discursive conditions of mourning for our more-than-human kin.
Building on Derrida’s claim that naming is “a foreshadowing of mourning” (2008, p. 20) and But-
ler’s (2010) suggestion that naming is one of the preconditions for “grievability,” my central claim is
that the work of earthly coexistence is underwritten by the discourse of naming and the practices of
mourning that follow. In the next two sections, I demonstrate how naming prefigures grievability
and, thus, contains the seeds of care and concern which undergird compassionate, ethical relations.
From there, I turn my attention to three examples to illustrate the links between naming, mourning,
 ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION 3

and earthly coexistence. I look first at the proper names given to “endlings,” the last living members
of a species. Proper names function metonymically; they identify a singular, often charismatic organ-
ism with the whole of a species. In this way, the proper name provides a point of access to the loss of
species as such since the loss of the named creature is concurrent with the loss of the species. Then I
broaden my scope to examine the scientific names that designate species. The act of naming a species
does more than designate a pre-existing assemblage; in some significant sense, the name brings the
species into our consciousness and, therefore, gives it to us in its abstractness to be mourned. Finally,
I consider how the name “anthropocene,” which has been given to our current geological epoch, may
help us to relinquish some ways of being human that no longer seem sustainable and, at the same
time, to bear forth those legacies which stand to enrich earthly coexistence in the present and future.
In the conclusion, I suggest four ways of thinking about mourning and/as the work of earthly coex-
istence: as affirmation of our earthly entanglement, as remembrance of those who have already been
lost, as anticipation of those at stake, and as a call to safeguard the conditions that underwrite our
relations with the more-than-human world.

The work of naming

Environmental discourse is often attuned to the way that naming affects our perceptions of and
responses to non-human others and phenomena. Naming matters. As Christine Oravec and Tracylee
Clarke put it, “Environmental communication views the discourse of naming as more than a means
of persuasion. It is the study of the way we come to socially construct and know our natural world”
(2004, p. 3). Names generate knowledge; they inform what we pay attention to, what questions we
ask, what lines of research we pursue. Names reveal and conceal the world at one and the same time.
Given this power of disclosure, Emily Plec argues, environmental communication scholars “must
remain attuned to the inventional and creative possibilities of symbols to engender identification
at the same time that we maintain a vigilant critique of the rhetoric of domination and concealment”
(2007, p. 52). We must ask, again and again, what kind of world, what kinds of relations, a particular
name brings into view, into being. We must also remain open to the possibility that acts of naming
might draw us into closer connections with the more-than-human world.
The sense that names matter is deeply engrained in the rhetorical tradition. In his essay on “Ter-
ministic Screens,” for instance, Burke (1966) explored the power of naming. As the title of his essay
suggests, Burke viewed specific terms, along with their attendant terminologies, as “screens” through
which the world appears. The metaphor of the screen is important, for screens both enable and
restrict the flow of information. Window screens, by comparison, allow breezes to blow into our
homes while also preventing birds and insects from entering. Screens filter. Terministic screens
draw our attention to some things while distracting or occluding us from others. “Even if any
given terminology is a reflection of reality,” Burke wrote, “by its very nature as a terminology it
must also be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function also as a deflection of reality”
(1966, p. 45). Since all terms simultaneously reflect, select, and deflect reality, no term can be said to
transparently describe reality. Indeed, Burke’s point was that every term or name, no matter how
neutral it may seem, is invested in some orientations rather than others.
To put it differently, naming has ideological effects: it shapes not only how we see, but also how we
comprehend our place relative to others within shared worlds. In rhetorical studies, McGee’s (1980)
theory of the “ideograph” accounts for the way that abstract phrases like “equality” and “freedom of
speech” name shared yet ill-defined commitments. Widely circulated in political discourse, ideo-
graphs name values that are difficult to define yet commonly called upon to articulate an ethical pos-
ition or to align diverse contingencies. In “Critical Rhetoric,” Raymie McKerrow positions naming as
the fifth principle of his critical practice: “Naming,” he writes, “is the central symbolic act of a nomin-
alist rhetoric” (1989, p. 105). Like McGee, McKerrow argues that names exert rhetorical force. Both
domination and freedom have a relation to naming since it is through the act of naming that subjects
are born and transformed, an insight McKerrow adapts from Michel Foucault. As McKerrow notes,
4 J. T. BARNETT

“One can’t put too fine an edge on the power or process of naming” (p. 105), for names materially
affect those to whom they are applied. The process of naming is always an expression of power – the
power to designate and, thus, to participate in the definition of the self and others. Names, Mary
Stuckey and John Murphy contend, “are the loci of negotiations over social authority and cultural
identity” (2001, p. 75).
Names are sites of intense debate and negotiation within environmental contexts. What we
choose to call a particular place, being, or phenomenon influences the way it is treated. For instance,
deserts have historically been called “wastelands,” a name that not only reduces the complexity and
richness of arid lands but also authorizes violence against these places in the name of human “pro-
gress” (Endres, 2009). When applied to places, labels such as “nature,” “national sacrifice zone,”
“wilderness,” and “wasteland” each open onto relationships that other names would obscure;
whereas “wilderness” renders the land uncharted, mysterious, worthy of protection, for instance,
“wasteland” paints the same place as barren, inhospitable, inhumane. Place-names are especially sig-
nificant in many indigenous cultures. As Keith Basso writes in his ethnographic study of Western
Apache language practices, “place-names may be used to summon forth an enormous range of men-
tal and emotional associations” since they function as a “potent shorthand, communicating much
while saying very little” (1996, pp. 76–77). The precision of Apache place-names, which describe
not only a specific site but a particular spot from which to view it, helps to produce a sense of fam-
iliarity with the land. It matters, too, what we call phenomena: “climate change,” “global warming,”
and “climate chaos,” for instance, each draw our attention to planetary processes in different ways.
“Change” signifies urgency differently than does “chaos,” whereas “warming” may strike some ears
as a positive. Similarly, much energy has been devoted to the question of what we ought to name our
current geological epoch. “Anthropocene” (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000), “capitalocene” (Moore,
2017), and “cthulucene” (Haraway, 2016), among other proposed names, bring out different aspects
of the epoch. I will return to this and other examples in the pages to come.

The work of mourning

For now, I wish to return to, and expand upon, Derrida’s claim that naming predicts or prefigures the
work of mourning. Derrida writes that, “Whoever receives a name feels mortal or dying, precisely
because the name seeks to save him, to call him and thus assure his survival” (2008, p. 20). To receive
a name is to be saved in advance from total loss, Derrida surmises, to be safeguarded from absolute
absence by the intervention of the appellation. The proper name singularizes; it names the haecceity,
the this-ness, of just this particular, irreducible, irreplaceable being. Mourning is, as it were, a
response to the loss of just such a being. And it is clear that, for Derrida, our mourning is not limited
to human others. Writing of the very real cat with whom he shares a home, and in front of whom he
occasionally finds himself totally nude, Derrida writes that,
Nothing can ever rob me of the certainty that what we have here is an existence that refuses to be conceptu-
alized. And a mortal existence, for from the moment that it has a name, its name survives it. It signs its potential
disappearance. (p. 9)

The name becomes the trace of the living being; indeed, the name outlives death, and so also enables
the dead to live on in our memories. Our names survive us. They are ghostly, spectral traces that
signify (in) our absence. To name, then, is in some sense to set mourning into motion.
Mourning is usually figured as a response to loss, which, chronologically speaking, is said to pre-
cede the expression of grief. Governed as it is by this chronologic, mourning seems always to con-
front death after someone or something has been lost. Most acutely, mourning is a response to the
death of a beloved object. Sigmund Freud formalized this view: “Mourning is regularly the reaction
to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such
as fatherland, liberty, an ideal, and so on” (1953, p. 153). In his early essay on “Mourning and Mel-
ancholia,” Freud was keen to distinguish “the normal emotion of grief, and its expression in
 ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION 5

mourning,” from “melancholia,” a deep depression, and thus to differentiate “normal” from “patho-
logical” responses to loss (p. 152). Following a loss, Freud argued, the “work of mourning” could
begin, a kind of work which consists of “testing […] reality,” ensuring that the lost object has really
been lost so that, ultimately, “all the libido [invested in this object can] be withdrawn from its attach-
ments to this object” (p. 154). Under “normal” conditions, the Freudian concept of mourning is con-
sidered successful when it is able to liberate the conscious mind (the ego) from its attachment to that
which has been lost. Understood as a process of detachment, mourning progresses toward a recog-
nizable telos.
In claiming that naming foreshadows mourning, Derrida troubles the Freudian chronologic of
bereavement. For Derrida, mourning begins before the loss of the other, before the death of the
loved one has come to pass. As Joan Kirkby writes, Derrida’s great insight was that, “all our relation-
ships are from the beginning tinged with mourning” (2006, p. 464, emphasis mine). From the very
beginning, each relationship is marked by the possibility of loss, that is, by the possibility that one
of its constituents will die before the other, and so also that one will survive the other. In The Politics
of Friendship, Derrida claims that, “The anguished apprehension of mourning (without which the act
of friendship would not spring forth in its very energy) insinuates itself a priori and anticipates itself;
it haunts and plunges the friend, before mourning, into mourning” (1997, p. 14). To relate is already
to mourn. Or, rather, to find oneself in relationships is also to find oneself exposed to the possible
disappearance of the other, to find oneself in relation to someone or something, signified by the
name, that can be lost. Derrida clarifies the temporal inversion at stake here:
To have a friend, to look at him, to follow him with your eyes, to admire him in friendship, is to know in a more
intense way, already injured, always insistent, and more and more unforgettable, that one of the two of you will
inevitably see the other die. (2001b, p. 107)

Thus, we await death: we wait in mourning for the death of the other.
Derrida does more than trouble the temporal logics of mourning, though. By framing mourning
as a constitutive feature of relationships among the living, Derrida also transforms mourning into a
modality of ethical responsibility – a means, as I argue in the conclusion, of affirming interdepen-
dency, remembering the dead, anticipating future losses, and safeguarding the conditions of our
entanglement. If mourning is not simply something we do for those who have already been lost –
indeed, if mourning is something that we are always already doing within our relationships –
then mourning emerges as a specific sort of care for others that can be fostered and cultivated in
advance of every possible loss. Especially in its anticipatory modes, mourning manifests as care for
the vulnerability of the other who could be lost. In an ecological sense, care might take the form
of conservation efforts and legal reforms that seek to safeguard the other from certain kinds of
harms. As a retrospective act, Derrida describes mourning as the ongoing work of remembrance
without assimilation, a way of letting the other exist in oneself without destroying the other’s absol-
ute otherness. In a lecture honoring his friend Louis Marin, Derrida spoke of “the law of mourning,”
which he described thus: “that it [mourning] would have to fail in order to succeed. In order to suc-
ceed, it would well have to fail, to fail well” (2001a, p. 144, emphasis in original). The point of mourn-
ing is not to divest from the other, to assimilate the other in oneself, to get over them as well as their
absence, but, on the contrary, to continue relating ethically to them after their death. For Derrida, the
ethical task of mourning consists in letting the other, the wholly other, live on in our thoughts and
our deeds.
Of course, we do not relate to every other as we relate to the friend, which might mean that we do
not mourn every other in advance of their loss. We do not mourn each loss equally, and some losses
we do not, perhaps cannot, mourn at all. Some losses, after all, do not register publicly as losses. This
does not mean, however, that these deaths pass without impacting us in some way. “I am constituted
as much by those I do grieve for,” Butler writes, “as by those whose deaths I disavow, whose nameless
and faceless deaths form the melancholic background for my social world” (2004, p. 46, emphasis
mine). Writing within the context of ongoing war and violence, Butler attunes to those lives that
6 J. T. BARNETT

do not appear in such a way that we can grieve for them. Not incidentally, Butler remarks that these
are often “nameless” deaths: deaths that both go unnamed in public and for which we lack the name
of the one lost. It is not that these lives lack names; rather, their names do not circulate publicly. To
publicly utter the name is to confer value; to refuse to say the name in public is, then, to withhold
value. This differential allocation of value means that some lives will certainly be mourned while
others “will not even qualify as grievable” (Butler, 2004, p. 32). A grievable life is a life that can
and/or will be grieved for. Thus, a grievable life is a life that will have mattered, a life whose loss
can and will be registered as a meaningful loss. Or, as Butler puts it, “grievability is a presupposition
for the life that matters” (2010, p. 14).
Following Butler’s lead, we might ask: Under what conditions can the ungrievable surge forth into
grievability? Like Derrida, Butler troubles the idea that mourning simply follows the death of the
other. With the concept of grievability, Butler suggests that our capacity to mourn the loss of the
other begins with life itself, and in particular with the apprehension of the precariousness of life –
the way that each life is “exposed to non-life from the start” (2010, p. 15). Several times throughout
Precarious Life, Butler insinuates that the act of naming might be related to our capacity to grieve for
others. What happens when the names of the ungrievable – the poor, the homeless, the mentally ill,
those who live in places that the United States has deemed unlovable, the more-than-human – are
uttered in public? For Butler and Derrida alike, the act of naming singularizes; naming mortalizes. To
name the other is to honor their singularity, and so also their mortality, their radical lose-ability.
Naming is a work of mourning. As Derrida put it, “All work in general works at mourning. In
and of itself. Even when it has the power to give birth, even and especially when it plans to bring
something to light and let it be seen” (2001a, pp. 142–143). In short, giving a name and uttering
a name are ways of giving birth to a life which can be mourned.

Endlings: naming the last of a species

What, then, should we name the last living individual of a species on the brink of extinction? In 1996,
this question spurred a minor debate in the “Correspondence” section of Nature. It was there that
Robert Webster and Bruce Erickson of the Christian City Convalescent Center in Union City, Geor-
gia, argued that a formal name ought to be established for “the last person, animal or other species in
his/her/its lineage.” “We do not have one word,” they noted, “to describe the last person surviving or
deceased in a family line, or the last survivor of a species” (1996, p. 386). Names such as “lastoline,”
“endler,” and “endmost” had occurred to them, but Webster and Erickson found these lacking. Not-
ing that “end- has several meanings, including ‘extinction’ and ‘finish, concluding part’ and that
“-ling is a suffix added to denote ‘connected with the primary noun’ but also includes line and line-
age,” they proposed that “endling” be adopted (p. 386).
In subsequent issues of Nature, others weighed in on what to call the last living member of a
species. Elaine Andrews worried that endling “has a somewhat pathetic feel to it,” suggesting instead
“‘terminarch’ to designate the last of lineage” since it has “a stronger and more positive ring” (1996,
p. 272). Another reader charged that we already have a name, “relict,” for the last in a lineage. “There
is no need,” Mark Smith wrote, “to invent a new one” (1996, p. 272). A month later, Jane Lewis and
Paul Barlow charged that relict “evokes more of past greatness than present catastrophe” and risks
being “more suggestive of persistence than extinction.” Troublingly, they advocated “the shamelessly
romantic term ‘mohican’” (1996, p. 729). Despite, or perhaps because of, this flurry of alternatives,
the name “endling” stuck. While it has not yet been added to any dictionaries, the word “endling” has
circulated across a range of media and contexts for more than twenty years. As Jørgensen (2017)
notes, “endling” has inspired an array of historical, artistic, and political practices, from museum
exhibits to musical compositions to literary projects. The word’s poignancy, Jørgensen argues, hinges
on its capacity to “make the narrative [of extinction] personal while retaining the universality of
extinction – when this individual is gone, the whole species is no more” (p. 134).
 ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION 7

Some of the beings designated as endlings have come to occupy a special place in our environ-
mental imaginary as “ambassadors not only of their own species but of all species whose numbers
we deplete to the edge of existence and beyond” (Shanahan, 2013). Many endlings receive proper
names: Martha, the last surviving passenger pigeon, who died on 1 September 1914, at the Cincinnati
Zoo; Incas, the last Carolina Parakeet, whose life came to an end on 21 February 1918, in the same
aviary as Martha; and Benjamin, the last Tasmanian tiger, who passed away in captivity in Hobart on
7 September 1936. As these examples demonstrate, the name “endling” refers not only to a species on
the edge of extinction, but specifically to the individual believed to be the sole remaining member of a
species. “Endling” metonymically substitutes the part for the whole precisely when the part (individ-
ual) and the whole (species) can no longer be clearly distinguished. “Endling,” then, is the name we
give in those cases where the distance between the whole and the part vanishes completely.
When there is only one left, or when we can identify the last one, we invoke the name “endling” to
describe an individual member of a species on the edge of extinction. This act of naming is itself
poignant. To call an individual an endling is to own up to the fact of species loss. It is to admit
that there is only one left, or that the last one has died, and, thus, to acknowledge the totalizing
effects of extinction. To bestow the name “endling” on a particular being – Lonesome George, the
last living Pinta Island tortoise, for instance, who died in captivity on 24 June 2012 – is to take
seriously the mortality not just of a given creature, which we can usually grasp, but also the absolute
lose-ability of species as such. As Shanahan (2013) argues, endlings “make real our impacts on
nature. They remind us that nothing is forever.” The name “endling” itself has a sense of finality
to it. “Endling” entails reckoning with finitude, accounting for the irrevocability of loss. Writing
in the Earth Island Journal, Freedman (2011) put it this way:
I have trouble wrapping my mind around the mega-threats and the huge numbers of species on the brink. The
figures are simply too large. They make the situation seem inevitable, uncontrollable, and impersonal. There is
none of the stark clarity of zero – the reminder that extinction is forever.

When we use the name “endling” to describe an individual, we confront the one whose death fore-
shadows the “stark clarity of zero,” and so also prepare ourselves for mourning.
We prepare for mourning, too, by providing endlings with proper names like Martha, Incas, Ben-
jamin, and Lonesome George. The proper name, as Derrida teaches us, “weeps death before death”
(1997, p. 14). The proper name prefigures death by calling attention to the singularity of just this
being. “Perhaps it’s foolish to name individual members of nearly-gone species,” writes Freedman.
“Sentimentality won’t save them. But the naming serves a purpose: It is a way for many of us to ident-
ify with the crisis of extinction” (2011). Because the endling’s proper name points at one and the
same time to a specific being and the whole species, the “crisis of extinction” can be localized at a
more familiar scale: the scale of the singular, mortal creature. Since we struggle to identify with
species as such, proper names generate a point of connection, a personality of sorts, an individual,
in whom we can identify, empathize, and for whom we can grieve.
However helpful these acts of naming may be, there remains a risk in focusing on endlings: “the
immensity and significance of extinction cannot be captured within these singular events,” writes van
Dooren (2014, p. 11). Even as we grieve for endlings, he argues, “the deaths of these last individuals
must be understood as singular losses in the midst of the tangled and ongoing patterns of loss that an
extinction is” (p. 12). In other words, we must not let the poignancy of the singular endling blind us
to the larger losses entailed by extinction.

Scientific names: grasping and grieving life ways

If dinosaurs are any indication, scientific names may well be a precondition of our capacity to mourn
for extinct species. Dinosaur names like Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops prorsus and Stegosaurus
stenops live on in popular culture, in films like Jurassic Park and The Land Before Time series, in
children’s books, in popular scientific reportage, and in artwork of various kinds. The resurrected
8 J. T. BARNETT

skeletons of dinosaurs find new homes in natural history museums, leading W. J. T. Mitchell to ima-
gine that future alien visitors to earth “might imagine that the giant figures were animal deities
erected for public worship” (1998, p. 2). Or public mourning. Although dinosaurs are believed to
have gone extinct some sixty-six million years ago, probably as the result of a massive asteroid col-
liding with earth, they nonetheless remain on our minds and in our collective understanding of an
earth history of which we will only ever experience a tiny fraction. Their scientific names, bestowed
by humans long after their collective deaths, make dinosaurs thinkable today. “As though they were
secret incantations,” writes biologist Michael Ohl, “these names grant access to the world of those
extinct behemoths” (2018, p. viii). Such names lessen the distance between us and the extinct,
between those who have been lost and those who survive. Scientific names gather together what
we call species and, in doing so, enable us to gather around and to take care of species.
The current system for naming species dates to the mid-eighteenth century when, in 1758, the
Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus published the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae. In previous edi-
tions, Linnaeus had adopted what was then standard practice for naming species – a polynomial sys-
tem that often resulted in unwieldy names that distinguished each species through detailed
description. In the tenth, decisive version of the Systema Naturae, however, Linnaeus (1758) advised
that each organism receive a name consisting of two parts: a generic name to designate its genus, and
a specific name to identify its species. The term “species name” can refer either to the full binomial or
to the specific name only. Linnaeus’ binomial system continues to be used today. It has been formal-
ized and is now regulated by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, which
maintains the “Code,” a regulatory document which guides and governs the naming of new species.
In some significant sense, a species comes into being only once it has been named. As Ohl writes,
“A species first takes on the form of existence after its name is published and it is introduced to
human perception, albeit usually in the form of scientific attention” (2018, p. 70). Of course, organ-
isms belonging to any given species physically exist whether they are named or not. Ohl’s point is
that only once those organisms have been named do they appear to us as a species, as an abstract
unity. Naming, thus, gives birth to species as such. The act of naming delivers “species,” which
strictly speaking cannot be observed, over to us as something we can consciously consider, think
about, write on, and care for. “It is through its name,” Ohl continues, “that the [species] is bestowed
with meaning, and it is through its naming that it becomes part of our perception of nature” (2018,
p. vii). Species names enable us to relate to something that is otherwise intangible.
The fact that a species has been named is an indication of the time, labor, energy, financial
resources, and care that have been invested in it. No species is named without such investitures.
Although it may be easy to come up with a unique name, the process of seeing a name through
to formal acceptance is a time-consuming, rigorous undertaking. Not only must one discover a
new species, one must also clearly distinguish it from other species, some of which may be very simi-
lar. Only once this has been done can the new species be named. Naming is, as Ohl contends, “the
crowning moment in the process of species description” (2018, p. 56), in part because species’ names
exert enduring force: they outlive the last survivor of any species. As such, species names make all
discussions of, debates about, questions concerning, stories regarding, and feelings toward a species
possible. Scientific names are, then, also the condition of possibility for the (continuing) care of a
species. If we cannot name a species, if we cannot utter its name in public, we also cannot mourn
it. We can neither mourn its loss in advance, as Derrida says we must, nor can we grieve its
death. And so, the investiture that generates a species’ name yields long term returns by instituting
relationships to a concept that is also an assemblage of real beings who are thriving or vanished or on
the edge of extinction.
Unlike proper names given to endlings, which function metonymically as the part (organism) and
the whole (species) converge, scientific names disclose the species to us as such. When scientific
names such as Panthera tigris jacksoni, Diceros bicornis, Thunus spp, and Pongo pygmaeus – each
of which appears on the World Wildlife Foundation’s list of endangered species – emerge in public
discourses, they point to groups of creatures with specific modes of existence, the whole of which can
 ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION 9

be lost. Latin names appear not only in lists of endangered species, but in a wide range of texts. For
instance, each chapter of Kolbert’s (2014) Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sixth Extinction begins with
the Latin binomial of a different species: each one points to what could be lost. While such names
are abstractions, they enable us to relate concretely to populations as opposed to specific organisms.
Scientific names gesture not to a charismatic individual who can or must be protected, but toward an
entire way of life that is shared. What scientific names name are precisely these ways of life: ways of
coming into and leaving the world, ways of mating and reproducing, ways of moving in and across
ecosystems, ways of relating to and with others. By gathering these ways of life together, scientific
names make it possible to grasp and to grieve species, to understand and to mourn the fact that
when a species disappears so, too, does a life way.

Naming the “anthropocene”

The name “anthropocene,” coined by Crutzen and Stoermer (2000) to describe the current geological
epoch, foreshadows a kind of mourning of its own. The name is meant to mark the moment when
natural and human history blurred into one another, when humankind began to express itself as a
planetary force. The exact moment humankind assumed its planetary power is up for debate. The
agricultural revolution which took place some 12,500 years ago, the industrial revolution of the eight-
eenth century, and the detonation of the first nuclear weapon in 1945 have each been proffered as
potential starting points. How we choose to date this geological epoch matters, of course, because
each start date necessarily implicates (and places blame on) different human actors in different
ways. Many indigenous scholars have argued, for instance, that not all peoples are equally respon-
sible for altering Earth Systems. How can we date the anthropocene, Davis and Todd (2017) ask, in a
way that accounts for colonialist violence so intimately linked with ecological destruction? The ques-
tion of origins is, thus, both technical and political – and it is as yet unresolved. Over and against the
question of how to date the beginning of this epoch, the name “anthropocene” itself has been widely
contested. Alternatives such as “capitalocene” (Moore, 2017) and “cthulucene” (Haraway, 2016)
have been suggested. Setting aside the critiques these alternatives represent, I wish to stick with
the name “anthropocene” in order to speculate briefly on the sorts of mourning it might set into
motion.
When we speak of the “anthropocene,” we are speaking about two movements of consciousness,
both of which initiate mourning. On the one hand, the name reflects a growing awareness of harms
done to the earth by Homo sapiens through, among other activities, the incessant burning of fossil
fuels. The choice to name this awareness is the choice to recognize it, to realize it by way of official
designation, and so to own up to the charges it levels, charges which are handed down not to any
particular human, nor to a group of people, but to Homo sapiens. We are increasingly aware that
some of the practices that have supported the flourishing of certain historically situated humans,
indeed, those practices which have enabled humans – particularly those of us in the West, the
First World, the Global North – to thrive both intellectually and technologically for centuries,
now threaten our existence. To name the epoch in which this mutation occurred is to grant legiti-
macy to the planetary awareness that has grown up in its shadow. To acknowledge those harms
through the act of naming is also to allow ourselves to feel the full weight of what “we” have
done, which is to say, to feel culpable not only for what we ourselves have done but for what has
been done in our species’ name. The name “anthropocene” thus calls us to mourn “not only what
we have lost, but also what we have destroyed” (Menning, 2017, p. 40) in the making and remaking
of the human condition.
On the other hand, the name “anthropocene” not only reflects awareness of the planetary harms
caused by human action, but it generates this awareness as well. It brings us into consciousness of
how Homo sapiens have impacted the planet. This coming-into-consciousness is itself of supreme
importance for the work of mourning, since one cannot mourn what one is not even or not yet
aware of. The naming of the anthropocene, and the awareness it anticipates, is coterminous with
10 J. T. BARNETT

a decisive loss now being consciously registered. What we have lost is a sense of self separate from
others, human and more-than-human alike, as well as the good conscience that bubbles up every
time we are led to believe that we are not individually responsible for the crises the planet now
faces. Ethically, this loss of identity is significant, for it shifts the way we conceptualize who and
what “we” are. The name “anthropocene” interpellates all humans into a “we.” As Roy Scranton
characteristically notes, “The enemy isn’t out there somewhere – the enemy is ourselves. Not as indi-
viduals, but as a collective” (2015, p. 85). We lose our sense of individuality and the fantasies of
autonomy that follow from it. The name “anthropocene” discloses this loss to us, and so also brings
us into conscious awareness of our unwitting participation in those all-too-human acts that left us
with a damaged planet. Since what the “anthropocene” says, at least in part, is that “I” cannot extri-
cate myself from the “we,” it follows that “I” also can no longer understand “my” actions as discon-
nected from the actions of this larger “we.” Pronouns are no longer innocent.
The sort of mourning set into motion by the name “anthropocene” is distinct from that which the
proper names given to endlings and the scientific names given to species incite. The name “anthro-
pocene” registers the loss of a way of being human that is no longer sustainable. An energy- and
resource-intensive way of life increasingly seems untenable if we wish to live well into the future;
if that is what we desire, it seems that we will have to relearn our place on the earth. We will
have to relearn how to make do with less, to listen to our more-than-human kin, to find meaning
in something other than narratives of progress, to respect the land on which we dwell, to understand
ourselves as part of a community that exceeds the human. We will have to relearn, finally, how to
reconcile our excessive power with the humbling yet necessary work of earthly coexistence, of con-
sciously choosing to exercise restraint in a world that celebrates debauchery. The name “anthropo-
cene” is an invitation to begin this work.
As we relearn to coexist with others on a damaged planet, however, we need not forget those who
have come before us, for they are not only responsible for the calamities we now confront. Our fore-
bears are responsible, too, for laying the groundwork, in fields ranging from philosophy to ecology,
for our current planetary conscience. We recall that, for Derrida, ethical mourning means not letting
the other be totally lost. What the name “anthropocene” calls for is not wholesale detachment from
everything that humans have done. Even if we can no longer support, naively, a view of humanity as
apart from nature, as somehow in charge of the non-human world, we may yet find resources for
coexistence in some of the same traditions that once enabled us to maintain such beliefs. Mourning
is a way of encountering (and, crucially, of not simply detaching from) what has come before us –
even, or especially, when those legacies are complicated. We need not disavow the idea that doubting
and thinking are essential to what it means to be human, for instance, in order to displace Descartes’
disastrous mind–body dualism. Nor must we discard the ideal of a better tomorrow in order to call
into question where we are and how we got here. What is more, we need not abandon our faith in
humanity in order to claim that we must do better by our more-than-human kin and the earth itself.

Mourning and/as the work of earthly coexistence

As we collectively learn to live into the anthropocene, the question of coexistence – of how we will
relate with the beings with whom we share the earth – forcefully imposes itself. As Joshua Trey Bar-
nett explains, “everyday life hinges on this question of coexistence,” yet how “to live and die well with
others […] is not always (or even usually) immediately transparent” (2017, p. 217). Discourses of
various kinds shape not only the senses in which we receive this important question, but the sorts
of responses we might supply as well. The planetary changes currently underway, especially global
warming and its consequences, demand that we approach the work of earthly coexistence in the full
light of the losses that these transformations entail – losses of life, to be sure, but also of ways of life.
The discourses of naming identified and explored above suggest one possible response to the ques-
tion of coexistence in this time: mourning those beings and ways of being that have already been or
 ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION 11

could someday be lost. In closing, I wish to sketch four modes of mourning, each of which might
guide our work of earthly coexistence.
Mourning is, first of all, an affirmation of our interconnectedness with the earth and our cohabi-
tants on earth. “Grief,” writes Donna Haraway, “is a path to understanding entangled shared living
and dying” (2016, p. 39). Entanglement is what is avowed in grief, and so the act of mourning is
always a tacit acknowledgement of the fact that we are bound to one another in ways that we cannot
always explain, that we are undone by the other’s undoing, and that the loss of the other leaves an
indelible mark on survivors. “In mourning,” Cunsolo and Landman write, “we not only lose some-
thing that was loved, but we also lose our former selves, the way we used to be before the loss” (2017,
p. 10). When we destroyed the passenger pigeon, for instance, we also destroyed a set of relationships
and experiences. To live without Ectopistes migratorius is to live in a world where our possibilities for
becoming are diminished. Just as mourning transforms our sense of self, so too might it alter the
ways we opt to coexist with others. Mourning means living in affirmation of our interdependency
and vulnerability. Our continued capacity to live and die well on earth depends on just such an
affirmation.
Earthly coexistence depends on but also exceeds the affirmation that we are living entangled lives.
For Derrida, mourning is intimately linked to remembrance: ethical mourning means, in part, letting
lost others live on through our speech and deeds. Many ecological activists and artists are already
engaged in such work. Inaugurated in 2011 by activists in the U.K., Remembrance Day for Lost
Species (RDLS) annually recalls those species that have already been lost and reckons with those
that are on the edge of extinction. On the last day of November each year, participants stage com-
memorative acts – ranging from public performances to art projects to consciousness-raising events
– that remind participants and bystanders of the lives and ways of life that human actions endanger
and sometimes destroy. In 2014, on the hundredth anniversary of the extinction of the passenger
pigeon, artists and activists staged events to commemorate the disappearance of the once-pervasive
bird. Among the tributes was a massive site-specific artwork by Emily Laurens, a “flock” of oversized
pigeons etched with rakes into the sand at Llangrannog Beach in Wales that washed away with the
tide. From the rocky cliffs above the beach, the etchings looked like shadows cast by pigeons flying
overhead (see “Martha’s Flock”, n.d.). It is worth noting that the name for the various projects orga-
nized for the 2014 RDLS, “Martha’s Flock,” referenced the last passenger pigeon. The work of
remembrance took its point of departure from the singular being named “Martha,” but it did not
stop there. To recall Martha is to conjure the billions of others for whom she tragically, metonymi-
cally came to stand.
While activists often engage the work of mourning in passionate, public displays of devastation
and grief, mourning is not limited to these contexts. For both Derrida and Butler, mourning works
not only retrospectively but proleptically as well. Mourning is anticipatory. As Derrida once put it,
“death begins its work before death” (2001a, p. 164). We await loss because loss awaits us. A kind of
“anticipatory grieving,” as Cunsolo (2017, p. 172) and others call it, sets in. Throughout this essay I
have argued, following Derrida, that the act of naming endlings, species, and geological epochs
indeed sets mourning into motion. So, too, do certain institutional and sometimes bureaucratic pro-
jects function as works of mourning, though in disguise. One consequence of the U.S. Endangered
Species Act of 1973, for instance, has been a careful and systematic reckoning of precarious species of
plants and animals, the results of which are lists containing the Latin names of every known threa-
tened or endangered species in the country. These lists, and the names they contain, are mobilized by
political actors of various stripes to justify scientific studies, conservation efforts, and legal reforms.
Another undertaking, the Encyclopedia of Life’s online database containing information on more
than 1.3 million species (eol.org), is similarly organized around species names. Each species’ entry
in the database includes an “extinction status,” subtly reminding viewers that “extant” species
could one day become “threatened” or even “extinct.” Of course, some of the species listed in the
Encyclopedia are already extinct. Most, however, are not; most are still with us. These are bureau-
cratic lists and institutional archives, certainly, but they are also works of mourning: the impulse
12 J. T. BARNETT

to name and to archive, after all, cannot be disentangled from the desire to recognize and to hold (as
well as, often, the urge to control). In naming who and what might become extinct, they anticipate,
and help us to anticipate, what we could lose, and so also what is at stake.
But, of course, it is not only lively beings or ways of life that are at stake. Names, too, can finally be
lost. Names vanish when we stop safeguarding them through use. The more detached we are from
our earthly cohabitants and our ecological surroundings, the less likely we are to know and to utter
the names of the non-humans with whom we share our home. Conversely, our capacity to address
the animate earth and our cohabitants by name may bring us into closer connections with these
others. “As we further deplete our ability to name, describe, and figure particular aspects of our
places,” Robert Macfarlane argues, “our competence for understanding and imagining possible
relationships with non-human nature is correspondingly depleted” (2016, p. 24). Our failure to
address non-human nature by name is symptomatic of our disconnection, but it also helps to pro-
duce our sense of detachment. To know and to utter the other’s name is, as Derrida and Butler teach
us, to render the life or way of life it refers to grievable. It is, in other words, to begin to safeguard the
other from total loss. Only when we are able to address non-human others by name can we expect to
feel and to know the full weight of our earthly responsibility. If naming indeed sets mourning into
motion, and if mourning exposes our inextricable interconnectedness with others, and if this sense of
entanglement is at the heart of our ecological responsibility with and to more-than-human others
and the earth itself, then we must keep watching over, keep creating, and keep saying their names.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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