At the Chicago Field Museum, a digital counter resets at 8am each morning. It ticks up one number for every extinction projected to have happened that day. When I visited on July 12, 2024 at 11:55am, the counter read fifteen. The number alone did not frighten me; rather, I was struck by the context surrounding it: a procession of painted landscapes in which animal skeletons and lifelike models were arranged. Hallways wound through geologic eras, charting each of the five major extinction events. By the time I arrived at the counter, I had whizzed through millions of years. I had witnessed a Devonian-era fish clambering onto dry land, a pterodactyl, and a giant ground sloth. I had sniffed simulated T-Rex breath; it smelled noxious and a tad sweet, like moist carrion.

Faced with the counter, I felt a swell of dire affection knowing I could not nurture these animals back to life. The number of extinctions—the weight of them—felt heavier when paired with imagination.

***

There is only one photograph of a living Quagga from 1870 in London.

The last captive Carolina Parakeet, Incas, died in the same enclosure as Martha, the last passenger pigeon.

In a grainy memorial video from 2012, Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island tortoise, eats papaya with gusto. His movements are long and bellyful and sonorous and slow, like a tuba solo.

***

The term “eco-fabulism” can be traced back to a 2014 AWP panel. In an interview with Sonora Review, panelist Matt Bell says it broadly encompasses stories about the environment, including those written from animal perspectives or about natural catastrophes. Similar terms exist. I once favored the clunky “speculative ecopoetry,” and then “cli-fi” (a portmanteau of science fiction and climate)—yet neither of these terms feel precise enough in their intention or tonality. I now gravitate towards eco-fabulism for its inviting concision, as well as its invocation of the fable, a genre in which animals often become bearers of wisdom.

Despite its enormous promise, the term has fizzled in the decade since it was first coined. It never caught on among poets, despite notable examples like Margaret Atwood, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Jody Gladding, and Mita Mahato, among others. None of these poets use the term eco-fabulism outright to describe their work, but all of them decenter or reimagine human subjects through the experimental or the fantastical. To the extent that humans are involved, if at all, they exist as participants in a grander multispecies matrix.

There are certain risks inherent in extinction poetry, among them embracing a doom that has not yet happened. W.S. Merwin’s 1967 poem “For a Coming Extinction” rhapsodizes about “The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas,” though he primarily focuses on the gray whale, considering extinction as if it were a foregone conclusion. Addressing the whale, he writes about a time in the not-so-distant future, “When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks/ Empty of you.” In the 1960s, gray whale populations had plummeted to the brink, but they have since rebounded by the thousands. Merwin’s poem is one of premature mourning. In “Frogless,” Margaret Atwood takes a similar approach, writing:

Soon there will be a hot gauze of snow
searing the roots.
Booze in the spring runoff,
pure antifreeze;
the stream worms drunk and burning.

This prophetic mode centers our tremendous capacity for environmental harm during the sixth mass extinction—yet eco-fabulism can also be restorative, inviting us to move through the world with enhanced hopefulness, whimsy, and care, attentive to animal subjectivities and protective of life’s enduring mystery.

In another Atwood poem, “The Aliens Arrive,” she writes:

The aliens arrive.
They’re ultra-clever octopi
Who speak in blots of ink.
They want us to be kind
To one another,
worldwide.

Brighter eco-fabulist poems border on the utopian, imagining escape from dire circumstances instead of premature mourning. Richard Brautigan’s cheeky poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” conceives of a world in which technological advancements return us “to our mammal.” Brautigan’s landscape is not human-centered; rather, it is:

a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers

In these poems, robots and aliens become caretakers. Fabulous circumstances elicit shock and wonderment, asking us to reconsider our ethical obligations towards the Earth, as well as its non-human inhabitants. If an extraterrestrial octopus or a computer can improve the world, then why not us?

Other poems refuse the future tense, instead reconceptualizing losses that have already happened. In “Ivory-Billed Ghosts,” Gary Every resurrects the dead, writing that “Ivory-billed woodpeckers have learned to harvest water/ as a conduit for time travel.” The power of these poems does not rest in their realism, but in their absurdity and optimism. During an era of dwindling environmental regulations, when computers have become major pollutants and biotech companies bicker over which extinct species to bring back from the oblivion, these poems pose necessary questions. What does restoration look and feel like? How should we honor what we have lost, and what can still be salvaged?

***

Eco-fabulism does not lose sight of early eco-criticism, but converses meaningfully with catastrophes posed by its predecessors. Atwood appears to take inspiration from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring when she writes: “Oh children, will you grow up in a world without birds?” My poetic sequence “Birdwatching in the 4th Dimension” considers this exact scenario—a world in which all birds vanish. Throughout the sequence, “canaries/ phase through their cage like melted candlewax,” and members of a birding group “watch videos: a magician's doves disappearing mid-show just as he flings them from his sleeves, each dissolving in a burst of sooty light, burnt end-to-end like cigarettes until only their contours remain.” Humans are left bewildered and lovelorn, mystified and mourning, wondering how to act once the window of action has passed.

Eco-fabulism articulates an otherwise inarticulable loss: huge beyond fathoming, a grief made realer and more visceral through the surreal. As Lynn Pederson writes: “the nineteenth century did not enlist a battlefield artist for/extinctions.” We are the extinction artists of the twenty-first century, capable of capturing life that has not yet been lost—capable, even, of imagining a world where that loss might be prevented or staunched.

***

Shark populations have declined by roughly 70% since 1970. Global insect populations have plummeted by an estimated 45% in the last 40 years. Frog populations nosedive by almost 4% annually. Statistics like these are so dense with meaning, so full of feeling, that they circle back around to being feelingless. Like the extinction counter at the Chicago Field Museum, it is hard to shake the numbness from numbers. Overwhelmed by “crisis fatigue,” there comes a point when urgency and doom cease driving action, and instead leave us feeling drained.

Eco-fabulism instigates a linguistic and imaginative shift, helping us feel our way out of the sixth mass extinction towards hopefulness. This shift incorporates new poetic forms, animal voices and markings, fantastical encounters, the shock of spaceships, de-extinction, sudden disappearances, and aliens. Like a flower blossoming out of sludgy statistics, poetry can counter doom with actionable optimism. Eco-fabulism asks us this: what do we do with this perilous window of opportunity we have been given, and how best do we speak about it?

Works Cited

Armitstead, Claire. “Stories to Save the World: The New Wave of Climate Fiction.” The Guardian, 26 June 2021. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jun/26/stories-to-save-the-world-the-new-wave-of-climate-fiction.

“Matt Bell on Eco-Fabulism.” Sonora Review, 24 Mar. 2014, http://sonorareview.com/2014/03/24/matt-bell-on-eco-fabulism/.

Pacoureau, Nathan, et al. “Half a Century of Global Decline in Oceanic Sharks and Rays.” Nature, vol. 589, no. 7843, Jan. 2021, pp. 567–71. www.nature.com, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-03173-9.

Researchers Study the Global Decline of Insect Populations | Department of Entomology. https://entomology.ucr.edu/news/2023/07/13/researchers-study-global-decline-insect-populations. Accessed 2 Feb. 2025.

Why Are Amphibian Populations Declining? | U.S. Geological Survey. 31 Dec. 2016, https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/why-are-amphibian-populations-declining.

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