The ongoing sixth mass extinction is widely recognised today, but it is difficult to grasp due to its abstract nature. The extinction of a few celebrity species helps to raise public concern, but at the same time it overshadows the multitude of quieter extinctions. As a cultural trope, extinction is often symbolically linked to suicide, the death of languages, and nations. These symbolic associations make extinction a trendy topic of political discourse, but they tend to minimise the tragedy of endangered species themselves. Ecosemiotics sheds light on extinction as an impoverishment of ecosystems experienced by endangered species. Treating extinction as a system-level phenomenon binds species extinction and the deprivation of modern cultures together under the concept of losing “depth of meaning” in nature-cultures.
The randomness of environmental damage can create possibilities for counteraction, both in terms of adaptive creativity and Umwelt transitions of non-human species, and in terms of human creative cultural strategies. The latter can address questions such as how to make something that is, in principle, inaccessible, visible in culture or how to enrich culture with the different perspectives of non-humans. Several creative meaning-making strategies have surfaced from our project. These include contemporary art merging biosemiosis and cultural semiosis; the strategic use of metaphors in literature; umwelt cards and walks; biodiverse gardening and land use. Culture creates possibilities for working against extinction from within, as it proposes strategies for living that gain significance from relating to other species while minimizing resource usage.
Timo Maran is an Estonian semiotician and poet. Maran holds a position of Professor of Ecosemiotics and Environmental Humanities at the Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu, Estonia. His research interests are theory and applications of ecosemiotics; ecocriticism and Estonian nature writing; and semiotics of biological mimicry. His publications include the monographs Mimicry and Meaning: Structure and Semiotics of Biological Mimicry (Springer, 2017) and Ecosemiotics. The Study of Signs in Changing Ecologies (Cambridge University Press, 2020). As a poet, Maran has published six poetry collections.