THOM VAN DOOREN EMBRACES THE WILD
SUBJECT Thom van Dooren
OCCUPATION Field philosopher and storyteller
INTERVIEWER Julie Perrin
PHOTOGRAPHER Quentin Jones
LOCATION Blue Mountains, Australia
DATE July, 2019
A few years ago a friend introduced me to Thom van Dooren’s book, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinctions. I had no science background but here was a writer who could talk about our relationship to the more-than-human-world in ways that made sense to me and challenged me. I began to imagine more vividly the histories of birds on this planet that were being so immediately compromised by “seemingly immortal plastics.” His words helped me to break into the separation I had made between my way of living and the impact on the natural world that I so loved.
I recently began corresponding with Thom. When I asked him about his writing and working life, he told me he now lives in the Blue Mountains with his wife Emily, who is an environmental historian, and their dog, Rusty. “When I write I look out over the forested Valley of Waters, my view dominated by sheer sandstone cliffs.” Thom commutes to the University of Sydney a few days a week. He has taught courses in the environmental humanities—“focused on the way people value, understand and live in a more-than-human world”—and currently has a fellowship that gives him a couple of years to focus on writing. When we chatted, Thom’s voice was gentle and measured. Even though the topics we talked about are extreme, something of the peace and perspective I imagined in the scene infused his tone.
JULIE PERRIN: You’ve written and taught and thought deeply about our relationship to the more-than-human-world. What does the process of extinction mean at this point in time?
THOM VAN DOOREN: While many of the past mass extinction events took place over thousands and thousands of years, this one is being condensed into mere centuries. We are now living through the sixth mass extinction event since life emerged on this planet. Not only are we losing species in great numbers, we’re losing them at a rate that is really quite unprecedented. We have taken what ought to be a geological process, and an exceedingly rare one at that, and made it into an historical one. In the face of all this loss, what I’m trying to do in my work is explore and acknowledge what’s remarkable about our living world, about these particular ways of life that are disappearing. My writing is an effort to really delve into the particularity of specific extinctions, to ask who and what is being lost here and now, and why does this matter. This is about both the unique animals and plants that are themselves being lost, but also those other beings, including human
