Thom van Dooren is an environmental philosopher, based in Australia, who helped found the field of extinction studies. In books such as Flight Ways (2014) and The Wake of Crows (2019) he argues that extinction is not a single moment when the last animal dies but a slow unravelling of a whole way of life, woven through the lives of other species, and he asks how humans might learn to live, and mourn, alongside the beings we share the world with. Therapeutic Shamanism shares his grief and his refusal to look away, and goes further, treating each species as a living OversoulOversoul. A branch of Mother Earth representing the whole of a species: the single being all the individuals arise from. Lower-World work is always with the Oversoul, never an individual; environments are composite Oversouls, wheels within wheels. More about this in the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer to whom we owe something in return.
Who is Thom van Dooren? #
A philosopher who works where philosophy meets the natural sciences and fieldwork. Born in 1980, he is Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Sydney, where he works in the School of Humanities and the Sydney Environment Institute.1 With the anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose, the scholar Matthew Chrulew and others he founded extinction studies, a field that asks what extinction means culturally, ethically and politically, and not only how many species are lost. With Rose he was also a founding co-editor of the journal Environmental Humanities.2 His books are Vulture (2011), Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (2014), The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds (2019), A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions (2022) and, most recently, The Craft of Poisoning (2026).1
What is the “dull edge” of extinction? #
The idea that extinction happens slowly, long before anyone notices. The usual picture is of a last individual dying on a known date, as Martha, the last passenger pigeon, did in 1914.3 Van Dooren describes extinction instead as a slow unravelling of closely entangled ways of life, which begins long before the last individual dies and goes on rippling outwards after it.43 A species is not just a set of bodies. It is a way of life carried from one generation to the next: how albatrosses court and raise their chicks, which routes cranes fly, which forests crows feed in. In his words, species are “incredible ‘achievements’: intergenerational lineages stretched across millions of years of evolutionary history”.5
Flight Ways follows five birds living on that edge. Albatrosses on Midway Atoll, in the middle of the North Pacific, a group whose ancestors have flown the oceans for at least nine million years, now feed their chicks plastic picked up at sea.6 Vultures in India are dying out, and as they go the carcasses they once cleared feed other animals and spread disease. Little penguins cling on in Sydney Harbour, whooping cranes are bred in captivity in North America, and the last free-living Hawaiian crow died in 2002.5
What does he mean by living with others? #
Sharing a world with other species when the relationship is neither simple nor innocent. The Wake of Crows turns to crows that are thriving, not dying. Many crow species do well alongside humans because they are clever and adaptable, and for that very reason they are often hated as pests and scavengers. Across five places van Dooren asks how we might live well with crows, telling stories of extermination and extinction beside fragile efforts to make room for one another.7 A World in a Shell does the same for the tree snails of Hawai’i, many of them already gone.8
Care itself, he finds, is tangled. His chapter on the whooping crane is subtitled “The Violent-Care of Captive Life”: keeping one species going in a breeding programme can mean confining it and using other, less endangered cranes to incubate its eggs.910 He wants to tell lively stories about extinction, stories that draw people in and stir curiosity and accountability for disappearing ways of life.11 And he gives a place to grief. In “Mourning Crows: Grief in a Shared World”, the last chapter of his book, he asks whether telling stories about grieving crows might itself become an act of mourning extinctions.912 One of his essays with Rose on this way of writing is “Lively Ethography: Storying Animist Worlds”.13
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
At several points. Most plainly in facing the scale of what is happening. We are in the sixth mass extinction, the first ever caused by a living species, with extinction rates estimated at between one thousand and ten thousand times the natural rate because of human activity. It is usually only the big, iconic species going extinct that people notice, and the real picture is much worse, reaching insects and plants as well as birds and mammals. Most people carry on largely oblivious, and the reason they can is that we turned our backs on animism and began to treat the other Peoples as things.14 Van Dooren’s quiet, slow edge of extinction describes the same blindness from another direction.
It also connects in refusing comfort. Some spiritual people say none of this matters because the world is an illusion, or because life will always recover. Such views are the antithesis of shamanism and a symptom of our wounded relationship with Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this.15 Van Dooren’s attention to mourning is close kin to this. See What does animism teach about grief?
And it connects in obligation. Most of the Animals met in shamanic journeys belong to species in severe decline, probably including a person’s own Power AnimalPower Animal. The Oversoul of a wild species, met as a single Lower-World being and bonded with in a deep, committed, usually lifelong soul-bond of unconditional love. The practitioner’s first and foremost Guide: Panther, not “my panther”. Read the full answer.15 To ask an Oversoul like Panther or Wolf for teaching and healing, and then ignore the plight of physical panthers and wolves, makes no moral sense. Part of the shaman’s role was always to be the champion and voice of the other Peoples, which is why activism sits at the heart of this approach.16 See How does animism respond to eco-despair, and why is activism part of the path?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
In what a species is, and in where the work has to happen. Van Dooren’s species is a lineage unfolding through time in the middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer, made up of generations of individual birds. In shamanism a species is also a being in its own right: an Oversoul, a branch of Mother Earth in the Lower-World that is the whole of that species, with every individual tiger or crow a twig on that branch.17 So the loss he describes is the loss of a living way of life here and also the breaking of a relationship with a wise being whom humans can meet. See What is an Oversoul?
The other difference is the place of inner work. Political action, activism and changes of lifestyle are needed, but outer work alone will not be enough, because a healthy society cannot be made of sick people. The way we are destroying other species is “a sickness of the soul”, showing that our relationship with our own Lower-World Soul is wrong as well as our relationship with nature, and so the outer work has to go hand in hand with inner healing.18 Van Dooren’s stories ask readers to feel accountable; Therapeutic Shamanism adds a way of mending the disconnection that let us stop feeling it.
