Un/natural and un/usual deaths: a necro-ecological analysis of mass mortality events

Mass mortality events (MMEs) have potentially large‑scale implications in terms of both ecology and governance. Nonetheless, there remain striking disparities between the scale of animals routinely slaughtered by humans and the MMEs that catch society unawares. To engage this disconnect, I elaborate upon an eco-critical inquiry that aims to politicise and ethicise MMEs as a contemporary socio-ecological concern. Specifically, I ask how a queer politics might come to bear in mass mortality events (MMEs)? To do so, I stitch together ‘necro-ecology’, and recent theorisation on ‘blue death’ which addresses the corporeal and cross-elemental conditions of death and dying. Basing my analysis in these concepts, I critically read a corpus of scientific and journalistic publications on MMEs, arguing that MMEs become matters of concern related to the extent they become un/natural and un/usual. From this, I demonstrate how MMEs highlight the need for understanding the possibilities and limits of human exceptionalist narratives in specific contexts, addressing ways that certain forms of nonhuman death aid in politicising (or not) other forms of nonhuman death, engaging connections between bodily dispersal and place of nonhuman deaths, and attending to the alternate temporalities and ecological relations that contribute to a politics of beingness.