Animal Visions: Rethinking the History of the Human Future

Abstract

Wild animal abundance and scarcity have been key to religious and secular visions of the American future for centuries, and changes in their meanings reflect radical shifts in understandings of nature and progress. In the colonial era, the extirpation of wildlife was a sign of the fulfillment of prophecy and the conquest of Indians. But by the late nineteenth century, fears of wildlife decline were so great as to render the Ghost Dance, an American Indian prophecy of game abundance, oddly resonant for a broad swath of Americans. More recently, secular scientific predictions of wildlife extinction inspired such writers as Paul Shepard, Rachel Carson, Peter Matthiessen, and Cormac McCarthy to contemplate (and sometimes to prophesy) global extinctions.