Sadiah Qureshi, "Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction" (Penguin, 2025)

Gosh, there are so many ways.

In some ways, it was a book that began as a way of bearing witness to a lot of violence across histories of empire.

I was originally thought that I was going to write a book about the notion of endangered races and how in the 19th century, there were lots of claims that various peoples across the world were on the verge of dying out.

But as I looked into that, I suddenly realized that actually that story in the way that I wanted to tell it was inextricable from a broader story about the history of extinction.

And so I started to think far, far beyond people's to thinking about plants, animals, and about the very notion of extinction.

And as I did that, I also realized that it was an opportunity to bring in my profound love of so many different ways of being.

And so the book really transformed itself from a kind of fairly narrow academic account of histories of ideas about human extinction to something much, much broader.

Yeah, it is a very broad book that gets us into a lot of very interesting things.

So we're not going to be able to cover everything, of course, but hopefully we can give people a sense of the many things that you've explored and put together across the book.

And I think the place I'd like to start... is around the sort of what does it mean to have an idea of extinction? I mean, I think in so many cases today, we take that part for granted.

We might debate about whether which animals are going extinct at what sorts of speeds, but we don't sort of debate around the fact that like extinction is a thing that has happened.

And yet that has not always been the case.

So before we took the idea of extinction for granted, How would someone, say in the 18th century, think about the idea of a missing species?

They'd probably think it was unlikely for very many reasons, partly because if you imagine for someone who's religious, the natural world is part of God's creation.

So the idea that something would be missing from God's creation would raise all sorts of issues because it would effectively create a flaw in nature, certainly in terms of Euro-American ideas of what God's creation should be.

So they would likely to be very, very suspicious for a start.

If they did accept something was missing, such as the dodo, it would almost certainly be because they could attribute it to human actions.

So human intervention in the natural world as a kind of one-off thing.

But the idea that it might be something that happened all the time and something that was a process that was part of life on Earth would be really, really either alien or quite extremely cautiously debated or even outrightly rejected because of its theological implications.

Yeah, I think the high stakes of this is something that might be strange for us to think about today.

Do you mind if we spend just a moment talking a little bit more about kind of what exactly the theological implications were understood to be? Like, why was it so high stakes to even consider this?

It very much comes down to the idea of thinking that if the world has been created by God, it would be perfect.

And one of the ways that we can see perfection in God's creation is that every living thing that has ever existed should exist.

So this notion of plenitude.

And so the idea that there would be a process or some kind of loss that would be inherent in that creation immediately suggests a kind of imperfection.