Andrew Whitehouse, University of Aberdeen: “Loss, absence, and presence: The chaos of the patchy Anthropocene for British birders"

Abstract
In this paper, I consider how the Anthropocene comes to be perceived and interpreted. In particular, I focus on the question of loss as it relates to extinction. If extinction means the slow unravelling of lifeways, does this unravelling manifest in absence or silence, as has been the dominant Anthropocenic narrative since Carson’s Silent Spring, or does it emerge more chaotically? Can absences mislead and does the odd presence or even profusion of life sometimes indicate the complex processes of extinction? Within the context of what Tsing et al (2024) have called the ‘Patchy Anthropocene’, the paper draws on research into patches, specifically the patches watched by birders in Britain. Patch birding involves regularly visiting the same area, usually close to home. It is an art of noticing that, when continued over many years, reveals changes in the presence and absence of birds. Patch birders often describe rapid and sometimes unsettling shifts in the birds they encounter. Sometimes the presence of birds at the wrong time can be just as worrying as their absence because it indicates their absence from places where they should be. As such, the patchy unravelling of lifeways in the Anthropocene are less about increasing absence than a more chaotic emergence of loss across space and time.

Bio
Andrew Whitehouse is a multispecies, environmental anthropologist and a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He has written about conservation, landscape, human-animal relations, seasonality, sound, and atmospheres, particularly in relation to birds. He has a lifelong interest in birds and goes birding as often as possible at Girdle Ness, a promontory next to Aberdeen harbour. He co-edited the book Landscapes Beyond Land (2012) and the forthcoming volume More than Human Aging (2024) and has published articles in Environmental Humanities, Conservation and Society, Social Anthropology, The Swiss Journal of Musicology, and Sociological Review. He uses his own birding as a practice through which to bring together ornithological science and anthropology.
 

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