Wanting All the Species to Be: Extinction, Environmental Visions, and Intimate Aesthetics

This article responds to the question 'What do we Want?' posed to scholars in the feminist environmental humanities, by expressing the desire for a multitude of species to continue to exist through and beyond the era of the Sixth Great Extinction. Then, it questions who the 'we' is who would express this desire, and whether that category of enunciation presumes colonising, extractive, and falsely universalising positions. Is it possible to disconnect epistemologies, politics, and practices of global environmentalisms from colonial histories, epistemologies of scientific distance, and a disembodied Man? Can feminist, queer, and indigenous environmentalisms suggest more intimate modes of ecological knowing and being that are implicated rather than transcendent, tangible rather than immaterial, and scale shifting rather than distancing?