In the introductory remarks to her The Book of Vanishing Species, Beatrice Forshall writes: ‘In the eighteen months it has taken me to research this book, 107 species have been declared extinct…. We are depriving ourselves of the raw material of poetry’ (2022: 13). Charlotte McConaghy opens her novel Migrations with the statement: ‘The animals are dying. Soon we will be alone here’ (2020: 3). James Bradley's Clade depicts a slow, incremental loss of species, as the earth itself implodes.

Forshall mourns the passing of species, a passing that is irreversible and the species irretrievable. McConaghy suggests that when the nonhumans disappear, humanity will be left all alone. The excerpts are rooted in a history of vanishing species, which is then projected as the imminent future in the characteristic catachronism of the contemporary climate crisis novel, but with the exception that in this future, mankind is likely to disappear too, a literary theme Greg Garrard terms ‘disanthropy’ (2012).

The death of entire species, including the human, has been the subject of considerable literary interest in the era of climate crisis. Although Mary Shelley postulated an earth without humans in The Last Man (1826) and the planetary apocalypse that wipes out humanity is the subject of a novel as early as On the Beach (Nevil Shute 2010 [1957]), the concern with vanishing species has amplified. This decline narrative is everywhere: in different forms of literatur non-fictional works such as Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction (2014); studies of individual species vanishings such as Joel Greenberg's A Feathered River Across the Sky (2014) on the passenger pigeon; collections on vanished species such as Christopher Cokinos’ Hope Is the Thing with Feathers (2000); thought experiments like Alan Weisman's The World Without Us (2007); graphic texts like Brian Vaughan and Pia Guerra's Y: The Last Man (2002–2008); and the IUCN's Red List of endangered species arranged in a rising scale of risk and vulnerability, among others. Artwork on endangered species and extinction has also flourished as seen in Isabella Kirkland and the Extinction Art Project.