Ebook: Shimmer: Flying Fox Exuberance in Worlds of Peril

Beautiful, persecuted, fragile, resilient: how flying foxes help us confront every big question facing life on earth today

‘I was called to flying-foxes. My research questions led me into multispecies ethnographic work involving wildlife carers and academically trained scientists in eastern Australia. The people I met were at the front line in the work of holding flying-foxes back from the edge of extinction. I continued to visit the north, and I revisited my notebooks from several decades of research with Aboriginal people. The research was exhilarating, and then again at times deeply disheartening. I was to encounter more passion, intimacy, cruelty, horror, complexity, generosity and wild beauty than I could ever have imagined. Living with flying-foxes, I came to understand, takes us straight to the heart of every big question facing Earth life in the 21st century.’

• Draws on etho-ethnographic fieldwork with flying fox scientists, conservationists and rehabilitation carers, as well as with Australian Aboriginal communities – a leading example of interdisciplinary, multispecies scholarship
• Paints a vivid portrayal of the art of multispecies care amidst ongoing peril
• Eloquently reflects on death and persecution in a time of extinctions
• Elaborates Aboriginal philosophies of ancestral power, brought into contact with other philosophical and scientific traditions
• Engages with decolonial ecological ethics and contributes to environmental philosophy
• The highly anticipated final book by the leading anthropologist and environmental humanities scholar Deborah Bird Rose (1946–2018)

Deborah Bird Rose explores the shimmer of life – the iridescent pulse of beauty and power, the processes of transition and transformation – that flows across and between generations. Grounded within this insight, she develops and advocates for an ethics of attention, that is in the world within everyday practices, and in this case for and with flying foxes and their worlds. A deeply personal book, her struggle with cancer is gently woven into the account she offers of flying fox life and death.

Combining her research expertise in a number of fields – multispecies studies, extinction studies, anthropology and environmental philosophy – Rose paints a vivid portrait of flying fox life and death in the Anthropocene that has important wider lessons for ecological and decolonial ontologies and ethics.

Building from sources such as Hoffmeyer’s biosemiotics, Lévy-Bruhl’s philosophical anthropology, Levinas’ post-Holocaust ethics, Shestov’s existentialism, Stengers’ cosmopolitics and the many insights of her Indigenous Australian friends and teachers, she articulates her own uniquely situated testament to the intergenerational gifts of ancestral power, ever more threatened, yet preciously shared and affirmed.