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"Communicating Endangered Species: Extinction, News, and Public Policy is a multidisciplinary environmental communication book that takes a distinctive approach by connecting how media and culture depict and explain endangered species with how policymakers and natural resource managers can or do respond to these challenges in practical terms. Extinction isn't new. However, the pace of extinction is accelerating globally. The International Union for Conservation of Nature classifies more than 26,000 species as threatened. The causes are many, including climate change, overdevelopment, human exploitation, disease, overhunting, habitat destruction, and predators. The willingness and the ability of ordinary people, governments, scientists, nongovernmental organizations, and businesses to slow this deeply disturbing acceleration is uncertain. Meanwhile researchers around the world are laboring to better understand and communicate the possibility and implications of extinctions and to discover effective tools and public policies to combat the threats to species survival. This book presents a history of news coverage of endangered species around the world, examining how and why journalists and other communicators wrote what they did, how attitudes have changed, and why they have changed. It draws on the latest research by chapter authors who are a mix of social scientists, communication experts, and natural scientists. Each chapter includes a mass media and/or cultural aspect. This book will be essential reading for students, natural resource managers, government officials, environmental activists, and academics interested in conservation and biodiversity, environmental communication and journalism, and public policy"--

This article places two Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films, Avengers: Infinity War () and Avengers: Endgame (), in dialogue with the Marvel comic books on which they are based. As this article demonstrates, in their depiction of Thanos and the partial species extinction event, the films deviate substantially from their source material to reflect a contemporary cultural interest and growing anxiety over the real-world threat of species extinction. However, as this article argues, Avengers: Infinity War's and Avengers: Endgame's ecocritical potential are limited, owing partly to the villain's role in superhero films and comic books more broadly. Limits also owe to the anthropocentric viewpoint that underwrites much of superhero fiction. Superheroes may serve a conservative function as an upholder of the social order, but, as this article shows, in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, as well as films and television series in the MCU set thereafter, this function often comes at the detriment of the conservation of nature and species-other-than-human.

The sunken carcasses of great whales (i.e., whale falls) provide an important deep-sea habitat for more than 100 species that may be considered whale-fall specialists. Commercial whaling has reduced the abundance and size of whales, and thus whale-fall habitats, as great whales were
hunted and removed from the oceans, often to near extinction. In this article, we use a metapopulation modeling approach to explore the consequences of whaling to the abundance and persistence of whale-fall habitats in the deep sea and to the potential for extinction of whale-fall specialists.
Our modeling indicates that the persistence of metapopulations of whale-fall specialists is linearly related to the abundance of whales, and extremely sensitive (to the fourth power) to the mean size of whales. Thus, whaling-induced declines in the mean size of whales are likely to have been
as important as declines in whale abundance to extinction pressure on whale-fall specialists. Our modeling also indicates that commercial whaling, even under proposed sustainable yield scenarios, has the potential to yield substantial extinction of whale-fall specialists. The loss of whale-fall
habitat is likely to have had the greatest impact on the diversity of whale-fall specialists in areas where whales have been hunted for centuries, allowing extinctions to proceed to completion. The North Atlantic experienced dramatic declines, and even extirpation, of many whale species before
the 20th century; thus, extinctions of whale-fall specialists are likely to have already occurred in this region. Whale depletions have occurred more recently in the Southern Hemisphere and across most of the North Pacific; thus, these regions may still have substantial "extinction debts,"
and many extant whale-fall specialists may be destined for extinction if whale populations do not recover in abundance and mean size over the next few decades. Prior to the resumption of commercial whaling, or the loosening of protections to reduce incidental take, the impacts of hunting on
deep-sea whale-fall ecosystems, as well as differential protection of the largest whales within and across species, should be carefully considered.

This paper examines how the Endangered Species Act's measures to protect endangered species have resulted in increased rates of extinction. The author summarizes the concept of endangered keystone species and explains the processes and operations of the environmental legislation enacted to protect the species. The paper discusses the harmful consequences that certain laws have had on both species and humans, such as misappropriating resources to species that are not as endangered as others, and abusing regulations in manners that punish people for conservation efforts. By examining opposing arguments that favor increased regulation, this paper explains through data from leading academic sources how withdrawing certain conservation legislation has potential to lower the rate of species extinction.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: From the End of Nature to the Beginning of the Anthropocene -- 1. Lost Dogs, Last Birds, and Listed Species: Elegy and Comedy in Conservation Stories -- 2. From Arks to ARKive.org: Database, Epic, and Biodiversity -- 3. The Legal Lives of Endangered Species: Biodiversity Laws and Culture -- 4. Mass Extinction and Mass Slaughter: Biodiversity, Violence, and the Dangers of Domestication -- 5. Biodiversity, Environmental Justice, and Multispecies Communities -- 6. Multispecies Fictions for the Anthropocene -- Coda: The Hug of the Polar Bear -- Works Cited -- Index