Raised on the prairies and trained as a wildlife biologist, for over a decade Neil Griffin tracked the disappearing and the dead of our world, from Canada’s boreal forests to the Amazon basin, from Ethiopia’s Afar Desert to the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda. He holds an MFA from UVic, where he is an instructor in the Department of Writing.
Written with curiosity, compassion, and a surprising humour, Endings is an eye-opening journey through extinction—from the fossil record to the field biologist’s notebook, from myth to memory. In bearing witness to what we’ve lost, Griffin discovers something unexpected: that even in an age of endings, wonder and hope remain defiantly alive.
Interviewed by Cathalynn Labonté-Smith
Cathalynn Labonté-Smith (CLS): Are we the worst species that happened to Earth in this era or are species only true to their nature neither good nor evil. Are we the exception?
Neil Griffin (NG): On the subject of nature, the literary critic Raymond Williams once called it the most complicated word in English. Ecologically, I’m not sure species have a definable nature. They have tendencies, behaviours, habits, and relationships, and those things interact with and are formed by their evolutionary and environmental histories, their immediate contexts, and—depending on the species—their culture (a thing itself made up of tendencies, behaviours, habits, etc. etc.).
Which is to say, I don’t think we can call any species good or evil. That sort of ontological classification seems to me, at best, not really relevant to an understanding of ecology, and at worst actively detrimental. I think of the long American history of labelling predators like wolves as evil, and prey species as good. In places like Yellowstone, this led to wolf culls, which led to explosions in the population of deer and elk, who then over browsed vegetation, leading nearly to ecosystem collapses.
Equally, I’m leery of making sweeping judgements of humans as a species. Worst is probably a question of perspective. I’d probably single out Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite that causes malaria, as the worst species on Earth, but I’m slightly biased by being a human who’d rather not get malaria.
I think humans are certainly the single species most capable of impacting the Earth on a global scale (though there are groups of species—phytoplankton, zooplankton, trees—who also make a good claim). What makes us exceptional is—or should be—our ability to understand the consequences of our actions, and by doing that, make different choices. But this is obviously an extremely difficult thing to do—even in the average everyday life of the average every day person—and much more difficult to do at the scale of interconnected global systems.
CLS: Do you see us rushing to our own demise, or do you think we could last a million years before our species runs its course like others?
NG: The strain of environmental thinking that overlaps with traditional millenarianism, and which casts the nature writers as a kind of prognosticator, interests me, but only obliquely. I have no real desire to don a prophet’s robe. That is better left, I think, to the group which Pankaj Mishra lumps together in a mutually denigrating way: op-ed journalists and policy makers.
It seems to be that everyone’s waiting for an ending and certainly it’s just around the corner. It’s a kind of a contemporary update of all our other apocalyptic certainties: nuclear war, plague, all the way back to divine retribution. Probably when humans first developed language, the first sentence was a dirty joke, the second a piece of gossip, and the third a proclamation that the world was ending.
I think it’s quite unlikely that humans will go extinct any time soon. There are a lot of us, and we are—broadly—adaptive and clever (which is different from smart, but sometimes more useful for getting by).
But projecting odds 500,000 years into the future feels like more the provenance of a science fiction writer (and as my agent might tell you from reading my fiction manuscripts, I don’t have that much of a sense of imagination).
CLS: You’ve visited an extensive number of parks in the world as part of your work as a biologist, or as a tourist, including: “Banff, Kananaskis, Wood Buffalo, Dry Island, Writing-On-Stone, Police Outpost, Glacier, Pacific Rim, Yoho, Jasper, Fundy, Grasslands, Dinosaur, Cypress Hills, Fish Creek, Sheep River, Spray Lakes, Arches, Carlsbad Caverns, Bryce Canyon, Death Valley, Everglades, Grand Teton, Guadalupe, Joshua Tree, Redwood, White Sands, Yellowstone, Zion, Guanacaste, Cockscomb Basin, Runaway Creek, Monkey River, Laughing Bird Caye, Chiquibul, Maya Mountain, Monkey Bay, Community Baboon Sanctuary, Cusuco, Cerro Azul de Copán, Utila, Maasai Mara, Tsavo East, Tsavo West, Samburu, Amboseli, Hell’s Gate, Arusha, Kilimanjaro, Lake Manyara, Serengeti, Ngorongoro, Volcanoes, Selous,” (p. 185). Do you feel that we should continue to visit these sacred wild places or leave them be? Do they need us for tourist revenue to continue or is there another way?
NG: Parks in recent years have taken a lot of knocks from environmentalists—a group that, one would think, might be their biggest supports. I think this is perhaps a misjudged approach. The legacy of national parks is a mixed and murky one: their creation, particularly in the 1800s and early 1900s, often involved the forced displacement of Indigenous peoples. Also true is that if they didn’t exist all of that land would probably just be owned by a [Insert Local Forestry Company Here], and people would’ve been displaced for that purpose instead. I don’t think that excuses the ways in which parks have been created or maintained, but I also think perhaps the anti-park advocates should be a little more realistic about the arc of history and who is bending it.
Almost no national park is a wild place, if by wilderness we mean something untouched, untrammeled. Parks are managed. People clear trails; stock toilets. They are, in many ways, just one of the most recent iterations of humanity’s penchant for managing and modifying our environments. In this case, they are managed for tourist revenue, aesthetic appeal, national pride, or a value placed on some kind of ecological unity or wholeness.
Sacredness is a value instilled by people, and it’s a value whose definition changes over time, and based on which people are doing the defining. Big game hunting will seem grotesque to many contemporary environmentally-minded people, but hunting–even trophy hunting–has a long sacred history, and hunters love the non-human world with a ferocity often equal to people who might consider hunters their natural enemy.
I’m encouraged by the growth in Canada of Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs), and in parts of Africa of models of mixed-land use, where conservation sits alongside human settlement. These are less dependent on tourists for revenue, which is probably more sustainable, as tourist revenue is extremely susceptible to global economic swings.
Anyway, I’m not going to tell people not to go visit national parks. I think you should know their history before you go and make a decision for yourself.
CLS: Where are your favourite wild places? Not parks, but wild spaces, perhaps spaces not yet documented and do they hold hope for endangered species and humans alike?
NG: I think wild is a fairly complicated word, in a similar vein to nature. But if we take it to mean “a place where the handiwork of contemporary humanity is not very obvious,” I love the deserts of Namibia. I’m a great lover of deserts, anyway. They feel both plain and mystical, austere and rich in a way that rewards close attention and patience. I didn’t have much opportunity to write in praise of the world’s deserts in this book but hope to in the next one.
CLS: If we concentrated our efforts on saving one species from extinction, as was done with the Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary for jaguar preservation in Belize, which species would you choose? Why?
NG: If I wanted to pluck one species from the Darwin’s tangled bank—and also inject a little more Canadian Content into these answers—I’d chose caribou. This is somewhat of a cheat answer, since I’m including all of the various subspecies and subpopulations under the single label of caribou.
Like jaguars, they are ecologically wide-ranging, meaning that their protection would also ensure the protection of large areas that other species make us of. Also, like jaguars, caribou are a culturally important species to people, which I think is a key component of conservation. We need to recognize our enmeshment with the world around us, and it would be helpful if we all thought a little more about caribou.
Also, it would be easier than jaguars! Caribou live in places with very low human populations and, in North America, almost entirely within Canada.
CLS: Have you seen David Attenborough’s Netflix documentary, A Gorilla Story, where he returns to the lush Rwanda gorilla reserve to observe Pablo’s descendants? Pablo was the infant gorilla who interacted with him where he first visited the gorillas in 1978—playfully rolling on Attenborough’s tummy. If so, do you feel this population of gorillas is misrepresented, that they are “semi-captive, closed populations, guarded around the clock,” that it’s an illusion that these gorillas Attenborough and eco tourists interact with are living their authentic, wild lives?
NG: I think it would take quite a naive tourist to imagine that the Rwandan gorillas are leading, as you say, an authentic, wild life. The process of visiting gorillas involves winning a lottery for a ticket, gathering in essentially a converted shed in a large parking lot near the village of Kinigi with the other 199 ticketholders for the day, being divided into groups, bundled into vans, and then shuffled very carefully through farmer’s fields and into small fragments of rainforest to spend an hour watching your allocated gorilla group. I assume BBC had greater access and perhaps access to some of the groups that are “off-rotation” — essentially on vacation from tourists — but the process is much more of a theme park than it is, say, a serendipitous (if frightening) encounter with a black bear on a trail in Kananaskis.
But does a gorilla care? Do gorillas have intergenerational memories and stories of a past where they roamed from Rwanda to the DRC? I don’t know. You’d have to ask a gorilla. If they did have intergenerational memories, likely the most recent ones would be stories of brutal violence and exploitation foisted on them by human hunters.
It seems likely that without the efforts of Dian Fossey and her companions, Attenborough, and lately the Rwandan government, that mountain gorillas would be extinct. I’m glad they’re not, but also the nature of their continued existence makes me uncomfortable, and uncertain about humanity’s adopted role as basically the planet’s gardeners: deciding which species to cultivate and which species to cull based on our particular whims.
CLS: Should we attempt to bring back species that have become extinct, either because of human overkill, climate change, or other factors, if it’s possible to do so, such as mammoths from preserved DNA? Why or why not? If so, what species, is a recently extinct species a better candidate, for example?
NG: I think de-extinction is mostly a PR campaign for bioengineering companies. I’m not particularly against it—there are probably more significantly evil things bioengineering companies could be doing, so it’s great if they get distracted fiddling with dodo DNA instead.
But I just don’t think it’s possible. Maybe, at significant cost, a team of researchers will implant a hybrid mammoth embryo in an elephant, and the elephant will give birth to an elephant that contains 25% mammoth DNA. Maybe we call that a mammoth. Okay, so what? Is that de-extinction, at an ecological level? Not really. It’s a handful of individuals, probably living in zoos. There is no conceivable future in which three million mammoths roam the Russian steppe between Irkutsk and St. Petersburg. The money lavished on de-extinction schemes would be much better spent on the traditional conservation schemes that we know work, to protect the species that we know exist.
I’m more interested in why de-extinction schemes are so captivating. To me, they feel like efforts to turn the world back to some imagined, primordial state of human innocence, and a refusal to grapple with consequence. It’s maybe not a surprise that Jurassic Park is a seminal millennial text: the great contribution of my generation to culture has been a general refusal to grow up and face the realities of the world.
We have to accept what is gone—to accept, in some cases, our culpability in it—and not expect miracle cures.
CLS: You say, “We must live differently. There is no other answer. To say such a thing provokes inevitable, unconvincing replies. What good is achieved by my recycling if China is building more concrete plants, if Nigeria is pumping oil from the Niger Delta, if Canadian mining companies are pillaging Bolivia for lithium? What is the worth of my tiny efforts weighed against that? And unspoken, implied, the follow-up: I may as well do nothing at all.” (p. 241.) You say we should go out and “touch grass” and get away from our online lives. What else do you want readers to take away your book?
NG: As both a poet and a naturalist I find myself recoiling instinctively from the reductiveness implied by take-away points. My interest is in attention and the attuned practice of experiencing something–a poem, a book, birdsong, a sunset–wholly and without half-an-eye towards an outcome.
I hope readers enjoy the time they spend with Endings. I hope the experience of reading the book stays with them in some capacity, definable or otherwise. I wanted to write a book that was difficult to summarize—which turns out not to be a great idea from a marketing perspective!—and I feel it would be a betrayal of that intention to do it now.
If my arm was twisted, I would say that I want readers to take away that even in a diminished state, our world is still very much alive with grace, beauty, curiosity and wonder. (And also, throw out your phone! Throw it away! Throw it away! Throw it away!)
CLS: You say that “There is no off grid living.” (p. 242.) How do you explain that to those who think they’re living off-grid with no electricity, being self-sufficient in a cabin in the wild, or a solar-powered van or sailboat?
NG: I just ask them where they bought their solar panels. If I am being particular, pedantic, and aggravating—which I do try not to be!—I would ask who made those panels, where their materials were mined, and how did that mining affect the lives of the community in, say, rural China, who share a water source with the company doing the mining?
We live in a world that is fundamentally interconnected, entangled, and impossibly complex. Believing you can retreat from that is delusional, and also I think irresponsible. When I say, “there is no off-grid living,” what I’m talking about is extending the idea of the grid from mere physical infrastructure to a larger metaphor for the entangled, complex realities of being a person. You know, particularly in a country like Canada—and even more so in a province like British Columbia, where so much land was just expropriated from Indigenous peoples—the belief that you can live anywhere, in any way, that is separate from history, from context, from culture is just not realistic. It is, in its own way, a reinvention of the same kind of frontier logic which fueled settler colonialism to begin with.
And most homesteaders or grid-adjacent dwellers that I know understand this and know that they are reorienting their lives in a way that is, at best, heavily mediated. My quibbling is mostly with the contemporary fad that seems fueled by people who read an AI summary of Walden and then cashed in their job as a coder for Lockheed Martin, swapping it for a van and an IG account.
CLS: Is there anything that I didn’t ask you that you wish I had?
NG: Probably, but the baby is teething these days and I’m not getting that much sleep!