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140 9 The Time of Living Dead Species Extinction Debt and Futurity in Madagascar Genese Marie Sodikoff Like much of the science fiction of H. G. Wells, the short story “Aepyornis Island,” set in Madagascar, plays with the mutability of time and the specter of extinction. It tells a tale of the fabled “Elephant Bird” of Madagascar, a species larger than the modern ostrich that was overhunted to extinction by humans by at least the seventeenth century. An English collector, named Butcher, travels to Madagascar to find rarities for a buyer at a museum in London. He is stranded by his Malagasy guides and forced to fend for himself. By luck he finds in a muddy swamp the bones and several eggs of an aepyornis. To his astonishment, the eggs appear to be freshly lain. Starving, he eats two, and sees that they contain developing embryos. He allows one to hatch, and an extinct species is brought back from oblivion, albeit briefly.1 “Aepynornis Island” offers an entrée into the themes of temporal dislocation, the terrible reckoning that happens when living beings are “out of time,” and distortions in the evolutionist continuum between “primitive” and “civilized” in European imaginations . The story presciently captures the emergent sense of time forged by evolutionist thought and conservation practice and invoked by the contemporary biological concept of “extinction debt,” defined as a lag time between habitat perturbation and the species deaths that inevitably result from it.2 Wells’s story reveals Europeans’ fascination with Madagascar as a biogeographical anachronism, an alternate evolutionary theater to mainland Africa.3 In this essay, I contextualize Madagascar’s historical, global identity within present-day anxieties about planetary degradation to understand how countries that are heavily indebted— both fiscally and biologically—serve as staging grounds for scientific efforts to secure The Time of Living Dead Species | 141 the future of species. Through these efforts, I argue, human societies are re-visioning the future. Since at least the eighteenth century, Madagascar has been depicted as a “land out of time,” a “world apart,” a “living Eden,” a “living laboratory of evolution,” and a “naturalist’s paradise.”4 Literary and scientific descriptions of Madagascar as a “land out of time” allude to its accelerated rate of species death, biogeographical and cultural atavisms, and extinctions and resurrections. To these, I add an allusion to figurative and supernatural “undead” creatures—ones that should not be alive—in the scientific and eschatological imaginaries of westerners and Malagasy alike. In conservation biology , the term living dead species refers to species populations that have become critically small and therefore doomed to die out. Madagascar, settled relatively late by human beings, is a “laboratory of evolution ” where scientists can refine theoretical models of species’ adaptation, migration, evolution, and extinction. The island’s biotic assemblages shed light on evolutionary processes that apparently move at faster clip in the tropics.5 Because most threatened species have small geographic ranges and because island species’ ranges are smaller than those of continental ones, Madagascar affords a time-lapsed view of “inkblot” extinctions and remediation strategies.6 My focus on how conservation science and environmental degradation forge temporal perception in Madagascar reflects my broader interest in discerning how cultural and biological extinctions, habitat loss, and interventions into these processes are shaping twenty-first-century subjectivities. Conservation biology’s “living dead” metaphor resonates with Malagasy beliefs in occult entities and more general conceptualizations of the future, including its directionality and geometrical shape, evolutionist ideas of social and biological difference, and predictions about the wellbeing of successive generations. (Will longevity mean increasing decrepitude or prolonged health, for example?) My larger aim is to scale up ethnographically to the plane of “species culture” and “species think” with respect to global change, concordant with scholarly analyses of the logics, modalities, and ethics of global capitalism, yet also transcending the limits of “mode of production” to explain the formation of historical subjectivities.7 Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that “species thinking,” which has long been associated with “the enterprise of deep history” done by geologists and paleoanthropologists, can be helpful in navigating the future. Thought experiments about a world bereft of Homo sapiens, which essentially demand us to imagine the view from nowhere, precipitate “a sense of the present that disconnects the future from the past by putting such a future beyond the grasp of historical sensibility.”8 The accelerated rate of extinction and climate change provokes us to identify ourselves not only as devastating biological agents, as...

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