Paper short abstract:

Indigenous, environmentalist and popular narratives surrounding the rediscovery of species once believed to have been extinct – and debates over the future management of such species - provide insights into the diverse ways that both Nature and Time are imagined in the Anthropocene.

Paper long abstract:

The rediscovery of species believed to have been extinct, along with the the discovery of species deemed 'new to science' (however well known they might have been to Indigenous peoples), reinforces many environmentalists' discursive constructions of 'nature' as simultaneously timeless yet threatened. These back-from-extinction narratives frequently position such species as emissaries of an ancient and wild Nature even as their continued survival is heavily dependent on contemporary scientific practice and technological intervention. Moreover, in Australia, attempts to manage habitat for such valued species requires making decisions around preferred 'natures' and include interventions such as fire suppression, revegetation and the control of invasive species within a rapidly changing ecological, climatic, hydrological and socio-cultural system. Such rediscoveries also highlight divergences in scientific opinion as to whether such species should indeed be accorded conservation value - they may be relictual or functionally extinct - and to the importance of timescales in conservation decision-making. At another level these rediscoveries further destabilize notions of 1788 as the benchmark for 'biotic nativeness' in Australia (Head, 2012). Furthermore, Indigenous peoples may explain such rediscoveries from a perspective that reveals very different conceptions of time and, consequently, very different attitudes towards the temporal dimensions of nature and the relationality that underpins being-in-the-world for both human and non-human actors. Finally, this paper builds on the work of Heatherington (2010) in an attempt to understand how environmentalist narratives of time and nature risk eliding a pre-European and a pre-human past in constructing an idealized version of nature as pristine and eternal.