Conclusion emotions
Here, I have extensively gone into the various and wide-reaching emotional political ecologies as few extinction studies go into an in-depth analysis of the underlying emotions held by people when more-than-human spaces undergo the processes of loss and extinction.
The emotions expressed in archival materials and interviews evoked a wide range of relationalities with Chestnut, but also with land, differing groups of life, other Appalachians, and larger ideas of conservation and restoration.
Further, there was an abundance of data collected and there were even more emotional political ecologies within Appalachia–such as ideas of higher powers and cosmologies (Dominguez, 2017), helplessness (Moore, 1993), anger (Oliver, 2020) that could be explored within Human-Chestnut stories.
