Ecological apologies: reckoning with grief, guilt, and multispecies justice

Focusing on British artist Marcus Coates’s Apology to the Great Auk, a short film documenting an official apology to an extinct bird, this article explores the possibility and desirability of political apologies for anthropogenic species extinction. While the apology presented in the film fails to meet key criteria, it nonetheless offers something of political value. Coates’s work constitutes an audacious and innovative attempt to leverage ecological grief and guilt to counteract dominant discourses that devalue more-than-human life; to redraw the boundaries of the moral, legal, and political community; and to imagine a future of multispecies flourishing. By interpreting Apology to the Great Auk through the lenses of environmental transitional justice, bad environmentalism, and ecological prefiguration, the article demonstrates its potential as an artistic project, and the potential of ecological apologies more generally, to help us think and work towards care, justice, and moral repair beyond the human.