The End of our Study on Endling

Thank you to last night's book club Zoom!

I love book club night. I know the time doesn’t work for everyone, but if you’re ever able to make it, I encourage it — such sharp thinkers! I always leave invigorated — and inspired. A friend of mine in the English department recently said she’s the worst book club member because she hates when the discussion devolves into wine and kids and gossip — this is not that book club.

Here are two questions I put in the chat as just-in-case fall backs, and while we discussed all of these elements in their own ways, we didn’t even need them! These women are my faves, is all I’m saying.

Extinction as Metaphor and Reality

An "endling" is the last known member of a species before extinction, and the novel asks whether "Ukraine, like Lefty the snail, might be an endling.” How does Reva use the parallel between endangered snails and endangered cultures? What does Yeva's scientific work with species preservation reveal about cultural survival and the value we assign to different forms of life?

Women's Labor and Economic Survival

Yeva funds her research through Ukraine's "romance tour" industry, while the sisters work in the same industry for their own complex reasons. How does the novel examine women's survival strategies within exploitative economic systems? What does it suggest about agency when survival requires participating in your own commodification?

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On the heels of this book, I saw a CNN story yesterday:

See the first new dire wolf cubs born in over 12,000 years

“Colossal Biosciences, a Dallas-based biotech company, has claimed to have resurrected the dire wolf, to create the “world’s first successfully de-extincted animal.” Scientists created three dire wolf pups by using gene-editing technology to alter the genes of the dire wolf’s closest living relative, the gray wolf. The result is essentially a hybrid species similar in appearance to its extinct forerunner.”

In trying to put my finger on the significance of this timely confluence of events, I realized that there's significance to the ending not being infinite anymore. Instead, extinction isn't forever. Why does this bother me so much? When so much of Endling and so much of our own lives are about preventing the endling?

There’s something fundamental about the meaning-making structure of existence itself. If extinction used to be final, it carried the full moral weight of gone forever. That finality is what gives urgency to conservation, what forces us to wrestle with irreversible consequences. It’s what makes loss so tragic — there’s a real poignancy in that lack. This idea isn’t new of course— it’s every clove-smoking undergrad’s wet dream—but now it’s now, and that…unsettling.

Because if extinction isn't permanent anymore—if we can just gene-edit our way back to dire wolves - then we've broken the basic moral physics of cause and effect (which is a stretch I know, as if morality ever made any sense at all, which is why we study and refuse to learn from ethics). We've created a world where nothing has to be final, which paradoxically makes everything meaningless?

It's the ultimate capitalist fantasy (amongst other systems): infinite do-overs. Destroy the ecosystem, then buy it back. Extinct the species, then resurrect it. The market can solve what the market destroyed, forever and ever and ever.

This breaks something essential about accountability. If extinction isn't forever, then destroying things doesn't really matter. If we can always bring back the dire wolves, why protect the wolves we have? If we can engineer our way out of consequences, why change the systems creating those consequences?

The "endling" loses its power as a concept - it's no longer the last of something precious, it's just the last of the original version. We've turned extinction from a moral reckoning into a product development cycle.

Have we technologized our way out of having to face the true weight of our actions? Have we made finitude optional, which in turn makes responsibility optional too?

Have we finally killed death itself, which feels like killing meaning?

Or am I just Mary Shelley-ing my way into an existential Camus frenzy.