Building a Geospatial Archive of Species Loss as Response to Local Caribou Extinction

Abstract This article offers a critical assessment of Storying Extinction: Responding to the Loss of North Idaho’s Mountain Caribou, a public-facing digital environmental humanities project produced by a team of University of Idaho Library researchers following the 2019 extirpation of mountain caribou from the South Selkirk Mountains of the Inland Northwest (the last caribou to inhabit the contiguous United States). The project has been conceptualized as a community response to the specific species loss, and it takes the form of a deep map, or geospatial archive, where users can inhabit and explore the region’s multispecies landscape in the aftermath of caribou extirpation through trail camera footage, nonfiction narrative, and georeferenced oral history videos of North Idaho community members narrating mountain caribou encounters. This article begins by offering a critical assessment of Storying Extinction’s methodology and formal architecture as it relates to representing human and more-than-human dimensions of species loss within a public and virtual setting. It then explores the importance of material practice for the environmental humanities and the specific contributions that performative cartographic processes can offer traditional EH scholarship. The article concludes by arguing that a multidisciplinary synthesis of GIS, digital, and narrative approaches is critical for communicating and exploring shifting spatial relations in the era of the Anthropocene and sixth mass extinction, and that Storying Extinction’s formal and methodological approaches can serve as a model for environmental humanities projects concerned with extinction geographies and environmental justice.