Learning to Die

learning to die

in the anthropocene

must be done

for those who

were never invited

to the

anthropos too

– Anthropos

Preface: Speculation and Footnoted Realities

When the specter first came for us, we pretended not to see.

Fewer birds flew at dawn (Rosenberg et al., 2019).¹ Fewer insects sat on our windshields (Sánchez-Bayo et al., 2019). We hardly noticed, but our cities began to empty.² The cries of the geese were replaced by the ever-present hum of electricity.

We complained when the days seemed to jump between hot and cold, seemingly at random (Liu et al., 2026). We sent sympathy—some even sent donations—to the victims of the hurricanes and tornadoes that seemed to come eerily more frequently (Summers et al., 2022). We saw headlines on our News widgets about “resource competition” or “REM extraction” (Yaba, 2026; Vakulenko, 2025). Some read them. Most simply scrolled on.

But when the bombs fell (Beard et al., 2021), the specter had branded our eyes.

And when the dust settled, there was nothing left.

Introduction

Modernity has a strange fixation on the perceived omnipresence of existential risk. In public discourse, we worry constantly about the looming end. In political spheres, we call other states ‘existential threats’ and tout fears of extinction scenarios. In academia, existential risk is currently emerging as a distinct field of scholarship concerned with low-probability, high-impact events that could permanently curtail Humanity’s potential. Existential risk scholars theorize our end coming from rapid shifts in biogeochemical systems (Beard et al., 2021). Or from social conflicts causing unsustainable supply shocks (Klare, 2020). We construct markers of existentiality—vague “cascading failures creat[ing] the potential for […] societal collapse” (Richards et al., 2024). But extinction is nothing new. The first signs of significant anthropogenic climate change were observed as soon as the 1830s (Abram et al., 2016). Species extinctions from human overexploitation have been prevalent for centuries before that (Pliny, 1950; Parejko, 2003). Black and Indigenous communities have been made targets for elimination throughout time. At the root of the “global systems death spirals” (Richards et al., 2024) we fear so much are pervasive logics of elimination and anthropocentric domination that we forged long ago (Bonebrake, 2026; Allard-Tremblay & Coburn, 2023).

For centuries then, we have been ignoring the specter of death as we simultaneously send populations into its graveyard. It is only now, with death on our horizons, that we have found climate change and its effects harder to ignore. Much existential risk analysis in recent years has been dedicated towards survival, experimenting with hypothetical political tweaks towards Human preservation. Within that, there has been a significant focus on the context of the Anthropocene, and climate scholarship writ large. This paper, while fitting in that context, does not seek to preserve the Human. Instead, we propose a different approach to coping with extinction. Yes, we are living in the apocalypse—but our ecologies and stories are already rich with narratives beyond the grave. Countless extinct species provide narratives for exploration. Even in the present, there are several ongoing projects of elimination from which we can learn about existential drives. By communing with the dead and dying—studying the ways extinction functions throughout time—we may find new sites for connection and collective resistance against the Anthropocene. Thus, we propose a turn towards multispecies, cross-temporal relationality to better understand and cope with our position in the apocalypse. Analyzing our earliest recorded species extinctions, Ken Parejko correctly identifies, “[t]he question of how many species extinctions have gone unnoticed in human history is unanswerable” (2003). But by tracing along the periphery of the graveyard—examining the records of extinction we do have—we might begin to learn to die.

To cope with the looming specter of extinction, we must first speak with the dead.

I. Speaking with the Dead: Silphium

“Only a single stalk has been found there within our memory, which was sent to the Emperor Nero.”

– Pliny the Elder.

The oldest standing tombstone in the vast graveyard of the Anthropocene belongs to Silphium (Σίλφιον) (Pliny, 1950). Our knowledge of Silphium comes from analyzing the vague contours of its ghost. We have coins that bear the “plant’s images” (Parejko, 2003). We have poetry that brings us closer to its visage (Young, 2015). We have records of its medicinal uses and its value to the Greek and Roman people (Pliny, 1950). What we do not have is Silphium itself. We will never be able to say with certainty what Silphium looked like. We will never know what scents it held. Or what flavors laid in its juice. We have the words of historians. We have the whispers of the poets. But Silphium will never speak with us, its voice stolen by the Anthropocene.³

I wonder what you felt, Σίλφιον

—in your last moments.

Gaius Plinius Secundus, commonly referred to as “Pliny the Elder,” wrote Natural History in the 1st century CE, during the early Roman Empire—later being translated by Harris Rackham (Pliny, 1950). The work is a massive 37-book encyclopedia attempting to compile all available knowledge about the natural world, including our first recorded plant extinction. In this work, we find whispers of Silphium’s existence.

“A shower of rain the colour of pitch” first descended “over 500 miles of Africa.” And when the black rain finally cleared, “in the vicinity of the Gardens of the Hesperides,” along the coast of modern Libya, “[Silphium] first sprang up” (Pliny, 1950; Parejko, 2003). Unfortunately, its bleak beginning, being brought into the Greco-Roman world after black torrential downpour, would act as a prelude to its bleak end. Pliny the Elder’s accounts detail how,⁴ following the black rain, the plant “grew widely” throughout modern Libya, “as an obstinate weed” (Pliny, 1950), being originally unwelcomed by the humans of its time. And while Silphium’s nicknames and classifications would ebb and flow throughout its lifetime, the underlying attitude towards Silphium—the demarcation of it as something to pick and remove from the ground—would remain.

Do you remember?

The names they called you

Before its disappearance, Silphium had a “a large thick root and a stalk like that of fennel and equally thick” (Pliny, 1950). According to some accounts, “the plant had a root more than 18 inches long” with an “excrescence on it protruding above the surface” which the people called “magydaris” (Pliny, 1950). People would make “incision[s]” on the excrescence, allowing a “juice resembling milk [to] flow out” (Pliny, 1950). It was this juice that first changed Human-Silphium relations. Early in Silphium’s life cycle, humans realized that its juice “[took] an important place in general use and among drugs” (Pliny, 1950) as it was used against “fevers, coughs, warts, and general aches and pains” (Parejko, 2003). But as the name-calling towards Silphium shifted from “weed” to “medicine,” the specter began to take shape overhead.

It must have felt nice,

Being medicine. Being savior.

Silphium’s classification as useful medicine became a broader part of its classification as materially valuable. Even beyond medicinal uses, Silphium brought utility in the form of consumption. Silphium was eaten, both by livestock and by humans (Pliny, 1950). It was pastured to livestock to help them “gr[ow] fat and produce meat of a marvelous […] quality” so that “tax-farmers” could extract higher profits (Pliny, 1950). And when livestock finished feeding on the leaves, people ate the boiled and roasted stalks (Pliny, 1950).

It must have felt nice,

Being praised. Being useful.

In this sense, every part of Silphium was exploited for its utility. The root was used for its medicinal properties. The stalk was used for consumption. And the leaves for grazing. In each instance, Silphium was slowly reclassified from “obstinate weed” to valuable commodity (Pliny, 1950). Thus, Silphium’s forced positioning in relation to the Human shifted from an ‘abject for elimination’ to an ‘object for domination.’ Only when it became apparent that Human value could be extracted from the plant—only when Silphium became useful to us—did it finally gain an elevation of status departing from mere ‘weed.’

Ironically though, the marking of Silphium as ‘valuable’ may have been what first heralded its absolute annihilation. As an “obstinate weed,” Silphium was loathed, but was not harvested or removed en masse (Pliny, 1950). There was perhaps a mild desire to rid the world of its burden, but there was no overpowering, proactive desire to undertake such a task. It was only when Silphium was reclassified as ‘useful’ to humanity that incentives for extraction arose. The powerful ‘profit motive’ would provide the requisite momentum for Silphium’s extinction. Sustainable cultivation methods were thrown to the wayside since farmers realized they could gain more profit by “strip[ping] [pasturage] clean” (Pliny, 1950). As Silphium became such a powerful symbol of wealth, it was mass-harvested to be stored, “1500 pounds” staying in the Roman treasury for Emperor Caesar (Pliny, 1950).

I wonder what you felt,

Being handed to the emperor.

Being stored in a vault.

Koerper & Kollis note that the treasury storage of Silphium likely indicates its use as a “medium of international exchange” (1999), supported by Pliny the Elder’s statement that Silphium was “worth its weight in silver” in Roman markets (Pliny, 1950, as cited in Koerper & Kollis, 1999). It is unclear whether Pliny’s statement is a literal commentary on Silphium being used as currency, or rather a “commentary on the high cost of the import” (Koerper & Kollis, 1999), but even if these statements are intended as metaphor, this conveys a rhetorical commodification of Silphium, reducing it to a token of monetary value through language. “Silphium as metaphor for great value recurs [throughout] earlier Greek and Roman writings… Unhappy Lovers by Antiphanes, the plays of Aristophanes… those of Plautus, and possibly in the work of Pausanias” (Koerper & Kollis, 1999). Through the repetition of linguistic commodification, Silphium evidently became a symbol for material wealth, detached from its biological form.

What is it like, Σίλφιον,

to be the last of your kind?

Silphium, the plant, was alienated from Silphium, the commodity. Once transformed into an object of exchange, its value became measured by its extraction rather than its existence. Regardless of whether Silphium was literally used as currency, it now remains as an image printed on the coins of the ancient world (Parejko, 2003). Silphium’s visage thus only exists as a lasting reminder of its commodification as “mainstay of the Cyrenian economy” (Parejko, 2003).

What is it like,

to die?

II. Settler Complications in Multi-Species Extinction Narratives

Tracing the contours of Silphium’s extinction allows us to draw cross-temporal connections through the pervasive continuities of the Plantationocene (Haraway, 2015; Davis et al., 2019). The logics of plantation—extractive optimization, commodification of life, and the violent sorting of beings into categories of value/disvalue—have been dispersed throughout time, not being limited to plant lives, but situating several, interconnected groups between object/abject.

Similar to the positioning of Silphium, Indigenous peoples, throughout recent history and in the modern day, are denigrated for settlers to “access Indigenous lands for extraction and jobs” (Pasternak, 2025). “Indigenous extinction” is thus made necessary under capitalism to expand production and its requisite extraction (Allard-Tremblay & Coburn, 2023). The denigrating logic of forced extinction in the name of capitalist value accumulation is eerily reminiscent of the Plantationocenic extraction of Silphium. In both cases, the value of a population is cleaved apart from the population itself through a process of abstraction. Silphium was rendered an abstract symbol of value, being reproduced on coins and made into a commodity export rather than a living being (Pliny, 1950; Parejko, 2003). Indigenous peoples were similarly cleaved from the capitalist value they brought (e.g. their land), justifying Western expansionism (Allard-Tremblay & Coburn, 2023; Davis et al., 2019). In both cases, the abstraction of assigned value justified the extinction of each by allowing for simultaneous objectification and abjectification.

The structuring force of these Plantationocene logics becomes more evident when analyzing how each of these extinction narratives have been elided in the broader discussion of existential risk. When existential risk scholars (Beard, 2021; Richards, 2024) discuss the looming threat of climate change, they emphasize the “novelty of environmental destruction,” erasing “Indigenous peoples' experiences of and resistance to settler colonialism” and its ecologically destructive byproducts (Davis et al., 2019). Throughout ecological histories, we have already been dealing with extinction. But the obfuscation of these extinction narratives is demonstrative of a kind of temporal violence that seeks to eliminate its victims from the timeline of Modernity entirely. As quoted in the introduction to this paper, “[t]he question of how many species extinctions have gone unnoticed in human history is unanswerable” (Parejko, 2003). However, this ‘unnoticing’ is not just a few neutral exclusions from physical record keeping, but a targeted forgetting of the species we drive to extinction (Parejko, 2003).

Through the active process of forgetting, the Plantationocene perfects extinction so that it need not eliminate every member of a population from biological existence—it can simply cleave out the entire population from Modernity in one fell swoop. Following Tuck & Yang (2012), Modernity subjects Indigenous peoples to an “a(s)t(e)risking” process that situates them between object and abject. On one hand, Modernity selectively pathologizes indigeneity as an ‘object’ “on the verge of extinction,” justifying paternalistic “federal mandates” and “English-only schools” that intrude on Indigenous sovereignty. Paradoxically, it also elides indigeneity as a statistically insignificant “asterisk”—an ‘abject’ “outlier” subsumed under homogenized illustrations of oppression to justify underfunding indigenous groups in minority support programs (Tuck & Yang, 2012). Together, these forces simultaneously spotlight and invisibilize Indigenous peoples, symbolically removing indigeneity by replacing it with the asterisk itself.

The symbolic removal of indigeneity thus comes with a material removal of indigenous sovereignty. Dispossessed from their land and offered incredibly limited material support from the settler state, indigenous people are forced into coercive relationships of reliance on the settler state for survival. The material support they are provided with is evidently not enough to buy back sovereignty. It is only barely enough for basic continuation, if that at all. Indigeneity as a living, sovereign identity is thus cleaved from Modernity and driven toward extinction, while Indigenous individuals are forced to integrate into settler-capitalism to survive. Because settler economies are built upon the ongoing, forced dispossession of Indigenous land, it becomes “impossib[le]” for Indigenous people to exist “without participating in [the] colonial economy” (Pasternak, 2025). They are violently subsumed into an economy of commodification and capitalist value assignment.

It is this forced inclusion in the bidirectional pull of object/abject that truly complicates multi-species relationality in the Plantationocene. Despite many populations sharing similarities in their extinction narratives, kinship is made incredibly complicated by forced integration into Plantationocenic capitalism, whose plantation logics put restrictions on relationality itself. Indigenous people are forced to participate in settler labor to earn the money necessary to survive in settler society (Pasternak, 2025). Plants are forced to do the same to maintain their assignment of value and remain productive in settler economies (Davis et al., 2019). Enslaved life undergoes an abstraction similar to that of the plants, while simultaneously having to enact violence against plant kin on the site of the plantation itself (Davis et al., 2019). Wage labor similarly participates in extraction. Every participant in a market economy is forced to be complicit, in some level, in the commodification of more-than-human life through the purchasing of food. At every level, life on Earth is rendered fungible, and the extraction of value from those lives is rendered necessary for survival. Subjects and objects of settler-capitalism are thus positioned against each other, and often against themselves, in fierce competition—complicating kinship substantially.

III. Communing with the Dying: Sago

Considering how pervasive settler-capitalism is, much attention must be paid to the ongoing resistances against it—and against its tools of extinction. In the rural Merauke district of West Papua, the indigenous Marind people are currently resisting—enduring the relentless expansion of oil palm plantations that threaten to displace and eliminate the Sago palm which largely shapes their lives (Chao, 2022). According to Sophie Chao, an environmental anthropologist who has worked closely with the Marind people to document the conflicts between Oil palm and Sago, the Sago palm is the material anchor of Marind life (2022). It provides the starch that forms their staple diet (p. 128), fronds that serve as building material (p. 90, 131), and cool wetness amidst the humid tropics (p. 124). To describe Sago purely in material terms, though, is to misread it through a colonial lens: to reduce it to material value. The people of Merauke do not merely materially depend on Sago, they relate to it.

The Marind understand Sago as sentient beings who share “common descent with Marind clans from dema, or ancestral creator spirits” (Chao, 2019, p. 3). Like all other forest beings, they are “anchored in principles of exchange and care” (Chao, 2019, p. 4). Sago grows to feed its human kin; in return, humans perform rituals of acknowledgment as they encounter Sago, “recalling its stories” and honoring its presence (Chao, 2019, p. 4). These “reciprocal acts of care,” Chao writes, “enable humans and sago to sustain each other’s growth as inter-agentive members of a shared community of life” (Chao, 2019, p. 4).

As Oktavius, a middle-aged man from Khalaoyam village, described: “The grove is full of life because sago knows how to share space with others. The sawfish rests in the rivers between its roots. The birds nest at the tip of its trunk. Insects sing with the wind in its fronds. Anim (humans) feed off its pith” (Chao, 2019, p. 4). Sago is an interconnected organism within a web of relationality. Wild pigs are drawn to the grove (Chao, 2022, p. 60); tree kangaroos and sugar gliders move through the canopy (Chao, 2022, p. 130); spotted possums nest between the fronds (Chao, 2022, p. 131); ferns, mushrooms, termites, and bees fill the undergrowth (Chao, 2022, p. 131). Sago is a tree of many lives (Chao, 2019). Even in death, Sago sustains this community: its rotting pith feeding microbial and fungal life in a “vegetal afterlife” (Chao, 2019).

By contrast, the plantation logics that govern Oil palm operate by isolating Oil palm from its relational context—stripping it of co-inhabitants through monoculture—and rendering it a lone unit of extractable value. Oil palm monocultures, as Chao documents, are characterized by “low canopies, sparse undergrowth, […] and a toxic mélange of chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides” (Chao, 2019). These monocultural populations are inherently antithetical to relationality. They replace the “lively multispecies sensorium of the grove” with the “sounds of death—roaring bulldozers, gnawing chainsaws, the crackle of illegal burning” (Chao, 2019, p. 5). Plantation irrigation diverts waters from ancestral rivers (Chao, 2019, p. 5). Deforestation and burning turns the soil “dry, flaky, and wizened” (Chao, 2019, p. 4). Sago groves are forced to compete with the newcomer. And after being “robbed of their nutrients and symbiotes,” Sago palms, and the ecological web they inhabit, collapse.

What is lost in that collapse exceeds materiality. “Each death obliterates the stories, places, and organisms inscribed in sago’s bodily matter” (Chao, 2019, p. 6). The stories held in the morphology of a grove—in the fronds and the pith’s textures—cannot be recovered once the palm is gone. The Marind have a word for these stories inscribed in plants: cerita (Chao, 2019, p. 5). Cerita is read from within the plant, discovered through attentive, physical contact (Chao, 2019, p. 5). Palms are “identified” by their “broad fronds” or “spines” or “textures” (Chao, 2019, p. 5). Here, I call attention to the term “identified,” as it is demonstrative of the animating effects of this multispecies storying. By daring to trace the “morphology of individual sago plants,” the Marind identify Sago plants in a traditional sense, whilst simultaneously giving identity to each Sago plant. Each individual plant is recognized with a unique story. “Thicker spines” on some leaflets tell stories of Sago plants “defend[ing] themselves from parasitic insects, or ravaging forest fires” (Chao, 2019, p. 5). “[W]et, soft, and dense” pith tells the stories of the “birds, insects, and mammals who collectively sustained […] the palm” (Chao, 2019, p. 5). The “curly bole sheaths” of one Sago palm earned it the name “dog sago” since its sheaths “resemble[d] a dog’s floppy ears” (Chao, 2019, p. 5). The “cassowary sago” is named for the rounded palm cabbage that mirrors a cassowary’s casque (Chao, 2019, p. 5). Others are named after Marind children whose birth occurred concurrently with their own sprouting (Chao, 2019, p. 5). The palms are thus recognized for their unique stories and unique identities, intertwined with those of their kin. As Mariana, a young mother from Bayau village, put it: “sago and Marind can follow each other’s lives” (Chao, 2019, p. 6). The cerita exists as an ongoing story co-authored by the Marind and Sago as their lives unfold together. Thus, when Oil palm monoculture eviscerates Sago populations, the destruction of the groves constitutes the ontological silencing of these living stories.

The Plantationocene logics at work in the elimination of Sago structurally parallel, while not directly mirroring, the logics that extinguished Silphium. While Silphium was made an economic centerpiece, Sago is structured in the periphery of extraction. As Gerardus Gebze, an Indigenous Marind elder, sings: sago is “not valuable like agarwood,” not “expensive like red meranti,” not “elegant like the frangipani” or “majestic like the banyan” (as trans. in Chao, 2019). In the language of commodity capitalism, sago fails every test of market value—it’s worth is not directly legible to the logics of extraction. The direct target of extraction in this case is Oil palm. However, due to the industrialization of ecological extraction, Oil palm’s extraction is significantly different from Silphium’s. Extraction has become a much less localized phenomenon, with effects cascading much further throughout ecosystems. While Silphium was destroyed due to its association with apparent material value, Sago’s destruction is made palatable by its lack of association with apparent material value.

And yet it is precisely this illegibility to capitalist logics of extraction that opens a different kind of possibility. Silphium’s story ended when it became fully reducible to commodity form. There were no Silphium-kin to sing its cerita, no community to sustain its lifeworlds. The Marind, by contrast, story against Sago’s extinction. In the face of Sago’s elimination, Gerardus Gebze, a Marind elder, composed and performed his song in honor of the Sago at a grove “targeted for monocrop oil palm” (Chao, 2019, p. 3)—sung in the face of the extinction it mourned. This is a crucial distinction. The Marind songs are not elegies mourning after the fact, as Pliny’s accounts of Silphium were. They are acts of political mourning inside the elimination itself: a community announcing its own dissolution and insisting, through song, that their severed relations still persist. Songs that “once celebrated the multispecies relations of sago now describe the threat posed by oil palm to sago, humans, and other organisms, who are displaced or uprooted from their land and kin” (Chao, 2019, p. 5). The songs have transformed. But they have not stopped. And in not stopping, they refuse the Plantationocene’s drive to make those relations unspeakable.

To sing to Sago while it disappears is to simultaneously insist that the relation persists through physical destruction, and to refuse the linear temporalities of preservation perpetuated in the Plantationocene. Instead of boundlessly seeking Sago's material continuation, the Marind story against extinction. The Sago groves may be bulldozed. The cerita inscribed in the palms may be materially silenced. But the songs of the Marind carry those cerita forward, sustaining a space of relation in the face of efforts to destroy those relations. This is what it means to commune with the dying: not to rescue the dying from death, but to refuse the Plantationocene's insistence that death is the end of the story. Chao's account of Marind temporality characterizes this resistance. In the face of the Indonesian state’s dreams for the future—a future of highways, economic productivity, and national progress (Chao, 2022, p. 167)—the Marind, watching from the shade of the palms, respond not with counter-dreams but with the declaration that “time has come to a stop” (Chao, 2022, p. 169). Gerardus, a member of the Marind, put it plainly: “There are no dreams to be had if time has come to a stop. Oil palm has eaten up time” (Chao, 2022, p. 169). Chao describes this refusal as a “form of creative sabotage”—an embrace of being “stuck in history” as a means of refusing settler-capitalist temporalities which perpetually promise futures that are never for Marind to determine (Chao, 2022, p. 179).

The Marind have been “forced to hope” (Chao, 2022, p. 180). “By the government. By oil palm companies. By NGOs.” (Chao, 2022, p. 180). They are promised that by working within settler-capitalist frameworks, they will be able to “secure their land and livelihoods” (Chao, 2022, p. 180), but this, of course, is illusory. Even if the Marind were recognized as sovereign, their land has already been surrendered to oil palm companies—sold at an average of “just under 5 USD per hectare (Chao, 2022, p. 18). To buy this back, the Marind would be forced to participate in commodification of their land to regain their material connection to it. And if land ownership rights were given to the Marind, it would necessarily require rigid land borders that Marind land relations are ontologically incommensurable with. For the Marind, land boundaries “are like bamboo stalks,” they move alongside the flora and fauna (Chao, 2022, p. 45). Any maps drawn in straight-lines for their legal recognition would already constitute a partial surrender of the lifeworlds they seek to protect. As Beny put it: “Straight lines exist only on the road, in the army, in oil palm plantations. Nothing grows in straight lines” (Chao, 2022, p. 57).

In this context, the Marind arrest of time is an assertion of temporal sovereignty—a politics of detachment from the chrononormative futures that would otherwise subsume Marind more-than-human kin into the linear developmental calculus of the Plantationocene. Marind songs, performed inside the dying grove, are efforts to make this detachment audible. They do not demand a future. Instead, they refuse to let the present be foreclosed.

In this radical politics of hope, the Marind dare to imagine a pluriverse of new ontologies as the threads of relationality that constitute them are actively being severed. Kristofera, a middle-aged woman from Bayau village, offered her daring: “[M]aybe one day, oil palm will come to understand us and we will come to understand oil palm. Then, there may be hope. Then, there may be new stories” (Chao, 2019). Kosmas, a Marind man working as a plantation laborer agreed, directly attempting to “spend [time] with oil palm” (Chao, 2022, p. 152). In his experience on the plantation, Kosmas grew to realize, “Oil palm is also a victim.” This radical act of empathy, understanding and sympathizing with Oil palm’s “exploitation at the hands of humans, institutions, and machines” is thus an example of the generative politics of Marind refusal (Chao, 2022, p. 152). Kristofera and Kosmas do not fantasize about the return of the grove as it was. Nor do they extend forgiveness to industrial plantation capitalism. Instead, they imagine a future in which Oil palm itself—this foreign, destructive being—might eventually become storied kin, one whose existence could be woven into the relational fabric of the grove. This imaginative extension is, in its own way, a continuation of cerita, a radical attempt to read stories in the morphology of Oil palm through attentive, physical contact and reciprocal care. Kristofera and Kosmas’s gestures extend that attentiveness, holding open the possibility that oil palm may carry a kin, a home, and a story that has not yet been told in Merauke.

This is not reconciliation with the Plantationocene. It is an insistence that animacy and relationality does not terminate with the arrival of settler-capitalism, even in the face of extinction. It is a recognition that existential drives affect Oil palm too. Just as Silphium was valued and eventually driven to extinction, Oil palm is similarly cultured in unsustainable monoculture and overextracted (Chao, 2022). Even a plant weaponized by extraction is also a target in the Plantationocene. And it too, somewhere in its native soils, may carry a storied existence of its own. To extend this recognition to a plant one has every reason to despise is a radical act of multispecies imagination, one that refuses the binary of kin/enemy that structures Plantationocene logic from the ground up. Kristofera does not ask us to love oil palm. She asks us to wonder about it. In this sense, Rudge’s reading of Chao rings true: the Marind emerge not as helpless victims of global capital, but as what she calls “ontologists of their own changing worlds” (2024, p. 244), insisting on the relevance of their relational knowledge precisely where it is most violently denied. It is in this wonder—in the refusal to stop storying—that an opening appears.

Even in the graveyards of the Anthropocene, new forms of relation might, against all odds, begin to take root.

IV. The Graveyard as Plot: Learning to Die

The cross-temporal extinction narratives traced above reveal a continuity of Plantationocene logics that extend throughout extractivist Human societies. Though this continuity can be lamented as an inevitable specter culling relationality, it can also be a site for connection. Sago is already “a tree of many lives” (Chao, 2019, p. 4)—a living grove that hosts pigs and possums alongside fungi and ferns. When its groves are eliminated, these many lives disappear together, folded into the Plantationocene’s mass erasures. It is precisely this interconnection—the uncanny kinship within extinguishment—that opens the possibility of relation in the vegetal afterlife. Thus, we propose a turn toward the graveyard itself: as plot.

The word “plot” holds a productive double meaning here, theorized first by Sylvia Wynter. For Wynter (1971), the plantation operated as a superstructure which masked the “secretive histories” of enslaved peoples’ self-making—the plot being a spatial practice through which Black histories were kept alive. Drawing on Wynter and McKittrick, Davis et al. elaborate that the plot was a space within the plantation where enslaved peoples cultivated their own “foodways,” “relational modes,” and futures—carved out of and against the dominant order of extraction (2019, p. 8). Growing “black‐eyed peas, okra, tamarind, sorghum, millet, watermelon, rice, banana, and yam” helped nurture a counter-hegemonic “oppositional mode of Black life” that sustained Black cultures and stories, just as “food crops cultivated by Indigenous peoples” throughout the Plantationocene have done the same (Davis et al., 2019, pp. 8-9). To plot is simultaneously to narrate: to generate counter-hegemonic stories.

The Plantationocene insists that relationality is already dead and dying. It attempts to “diminish […] Black struggle […] cultivating worlds that support multispecies well‐being” (Davis et al., 2019, p. 5). Embracing the graveyard as plot thus refuses the Plantationocene’s allure to cling to survival through assimilation and instead insists on radical flourishing within death. The dead cannot be rendered productive. The extinguished cannot be optimized. The graveyard, we argue, is a territory within the Plantationocene where the logic of commodity value collapses. This radical carved-out territory also constitutes temporal resistance. Wynter’s plot named a secretive practice that refused the plantation’s linear time by cultivating different histories within the present (Wynter, 1977; Davis et al., 2019). Theorizing the graveyard as plot extends across the threshold of death. Plotting in the graveyard radically attempts to connect with those already dead—insisting that the Plantationocene’s logic of extinction, the absolute severing of relation, can still yet be refused.

When calling out to Silphium, we do not recover the plant biologically. But we refuse the Plantationocene’s insistence that Silphium’s extinction is definitive. Our speculative address—asking a dead plant what it feels to die; requesting stories of its life in Cyrene; listening to its experiences being ripped out of the ground and handed to Emperor Nero—is a practice of plotting in the graveyard. Through our storying, we reach across 2,000 years of silence to insist that something remains there. The question “What is it like to die?” may not produce an answer, but the act of asking constitutes the relation.

This radical praxis of insisting on the persistence of relationality throughout time disarms the Plantationocene of its weapons of temporal violence. The graveyard as plot refuses Silphium’s eternal disvalue. We reject mere coinage being the only lasting visages of Silphium. Instead, we conjure new ones. We conjure irreducible particularities of those who were eliminated, and insist on their intrinsic value and ongoing capacity to be mourned.

This unrelenting refusal of integration into settler-capitalist logics of value is precisely what makes the graveyard-as-plot such a useful site for relationality in the Plantationocene. Silphium was only marked for extinction when utility was carved into it (Pliny, 1950; Parejko, 2003). Indigenous people were only marked for extinction with the settler desire for their land, and later, for their labor (Pasternak, 2025). Oil palm is being unsustainably hyperextracted now due to its perceived economic value and Sago is bearing the consequences of that unsustainable practice because of its lack of perceived economic value. There is no way to seek inclusion or recognition within settler-capitalism without enforcing unsustainable market logics that drive towards elimination. There is no way to foster relationality in an economy built on commodification. Thus, a complete rejection of commodification, and an unrelenting pursuit of relation, even beyond death, is a liberating practice that builds alternate lifeworlds beyond the Plantationocene’s logics. Learning to die is not romanticizing extinction. Nor is it surrender to collapse. It is storying against the Anthropocene at the end of time.

As the Marind sing to disappearing Sago palms, they story against time. As we address Silphium across 2,000 years of absence, we story beyond time. We insist on speaking with the dead; communing with the dying. We refuse the notion that Plantationocenic elimination holds final authority over relationality.

V. Conclusion: Mourning & Storying Beyond Time

In the treasury,

buried under piles of gold,

did you dream, Σίλφιον?

In the dark of the vault,

packed in silver,

could you still picture the black rain?

I imagine Silphium, in its final moments, understood that its life would soon end. The last stalk must have watched as its kin slowly dwindled in numbers. It must have mourned its extinction. It must have dreamed beyond it.

Σίλφιον, can you remember? the last season

before the final harvest.

can you remember the feeling of

soaking in the rain?

Of course, we will never know what Silphium felt. We will never know what it experienced. But that’s what storying is. To story is not to know yet reach anyway. Cerita is not precise recitation of historical documentation, but a practice of attentive contact—of pressing your hands against bark and connecting your lived experiences with those of the plants. The palms do not answer in words. They do not provide dates or timelines. They answer in textured patterns in their pith. They answer in the curl of a bole sheath. Storying requires the willingness to receive that answer, to let it mean something, and to carry it onwards—throughout time.

This is the wager of this paper. We have tried to story Silphium across two thousand years of silence. We have tried to carry forwards the stories of Sago told through the songs of the Marind. We have pressed our hands against the cold surface of ancient coin and tried to read cerita there.

In a few decades, we may learn the specter has come for Humans as well. The Anthropocene has already thinned our birdsongs (Rosenberg et al., 2019). It has already decimated our crops (Ray et al., 2019). It has already made our waters dry up (Satoh, 2025). We are perhaps already entering the graveyard. But rather than running from this, desperately trying to retain our value and preservation under the settler-capitalist economics which have driven us to this point in the first place, we might instead be better off organizing our resistance in the multispecies afterlife.

Learning to die is learning this: our extinctions are part of a long unraveling—connecting Silphium’s last stalk—to the last Sago grove in Merauke—to the vanishing insects—to the birdsongs—to ourselves—and beyond. We are all connected, targeted by the same structures driving our eliminations. But the thread that connects us is not merely constituted by biological continuation. It is a thread is made of stories. It does not break when a plant dies. It does not break when a grove falls. It breaks only when we stop storying.

So we do not stop. We story relentlessly against time. We mourn and we sing relentlessly into the dawn. We sit in the graveyard and dare to proclaim the horizon as ours.

And there I see it. On the

hill, where the Earth meets the Sky.

Beyond the glow of the bomb’s heat,

I see

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Appendix A. AI Use Statement

In writing this paper, I used Claude (Anthropic), an AI large language model, for two minor editorial tasks. First, I submitted a completed draft of the paper and asked Claude to ensure all in-text citations conformed to APA 7th edition style. Claude suggested several corrections which I manually applied throughout. Second, I asked Claude to proofread the paper and flag any errors without making any direct modifications. Claude identified a few grammatical errors (e.g. subject-verb disagreements, missing articles, a missing modal verb), spelling errors (“bare” for “bear,” “Planatationocene,” “remeble”), a duplicate word (“into to”), punctuation inconsistencies, and a missing closing quotation mark. I then reviewed these suggestions and manually implemented changes at my own discretion.

All writing, argument, research, and analysis in this paper is my own. AI assistance was limited to citation formatting and proofreading as described above.