Studies of extinction typically focus on unintended losses of biodiversity and culture. This study, however, examines an attempt to induce extinction of a parasite: human hookworm (Necator americanus and Ancylostoma duodenale). Our interdisciplinary approach integrates medical history and epidemiology using records created by the Jamaica Hookworm Commission of 1919–1936. We show that the attempt to induce the extinction of hookworms was driven by its perceived effects on labour productivity and consequent status as an ideological and economic threat. We use spatial epidemiology to describe the relationships between parasites, environments and the working conditions of plantation labourers. Using data from 330 locations across Jamaica in which 169,380 individuals were tested for hookworm infection we show that the prevalence of hookworm infection was higher in districts surrounding plantations. Prevalence decreased with the temperature of the coldest month, increased with the amount of rainfall in the driest month, and increased with vegetation quantity (normalised difference vegetation index). Worm burden (and thus pathology) varied greatly between individuals, even those living together; hookworm infection varied between environments, socioeconomic conditions and individuals. Nevertheless, the conditions of labour shaped the distribution of hookworms. Plantations both spread and problematised hookworms, driving efforts to bring it to extinction.

This perspective positions rewilding as a novel approach to ecosystem restoration, emphasising the restoration of natural processes to create self-willed ecosystems. Central to European rewilding is the de-domestication of cattle and horses to act as functional analogues of the extinct aurochs and wild horses. This de-extinction pathway shifts the focus from the loss of species to the loss of their ecological roles caused by human actions commencing millennia ago. The focus on restoring functional effects provides a strong policy rationale for large herbivore de-domestication, aligning with nature-based solutions to address environmental challenges. This alignment requires a pragmatic approach that prioritises the restoration of ecosystem functions over genetic purity and offers flexibility and scalability in rewilding efforts. I argue that creating a new category of ‘ecosystem engineer’ livestock is more effective than seeking wild status for these animals. As they are released into recovering ecosystems, de-domesticated large herbivores are recreating their ecological roles, ‘life-spheres’ and interactions. These processes open new avenues in both extinction discourse and ecological theory and encourage us to explore how de-extinct species can drive the recovery of European ecosystems.

Through compositional inclusion or exclusion, the photograph can assert and communicate what belongs in a picture, in a landscape, in an ecosystem. It can illuminate what we deem conservation-worthy, or, on a larger scale, which extinctions are attention-worthy. Photographic practice helps to illuminate the active nature of extinction, and our choices as actors and witnesses within that process. Here, researchers from the University of Leeds’ Extinction Studies Doctoral Training Programme present individual reflections on interdisciplinary practice-led research in the Scottish Small Isles. We consider how photography, as a form of praxis, can generate new forms of knowledge surrounding extinction: its meanings, representations, and legacies, particularly through visual representation. We offer seven perspectives on contemporary image-making, from disciplines including philosophy, conservation biology, literature, sociology, geology, cultural anthropology, and palaeontology. Researchers gathered experiential, ethical, even biological meanings from considering what to include or exclude in images: from the micro to the macro, the visible to the invisible, the aesthetic to the ecological. We draw conclusions around meaning-making through the process of photography itself, and the tensions encountered through framing and decision-making in a time of mass ecological decline.