Anna Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, and Feifei Zhou grouped a few years ago to investigate and represent how human and more-than-human interaction affects the Earth and its systems. Their work uses new interdisciplinary methodologies to analyse and narrate the planet’s current transformations and to understand the role of scientific and artistic disciplines in recording it. Their first attempt, the digital project Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene, is now paired with a new publication, a project that is not a follow-up but a companion, an invitation to "Take Field Guide . . . and get out there".

This conversation is part of KoozArch's issue "Terra Infirma."

VALERIO FRANZONE / KOOZ The International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) recently announced that the Anthropocene is not a geological epoch but an event¹ — we are still in the Holocene. Still, the IUGS recognised that the term “will remain an invaluable descriptor in human-environment interactions”;² in other words, the political value of the term ‘Anthropocene’ is unique in how it addresses the climate crisis as an unprecedented human-led process. How does this decision affect your research on the Anthropocene and the thesis of your new book, Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene?

FEIFEI ZHOUSpeaking from both an artist and architect’s point of view: the Anthropocene is a very commonly used word within the arts, though seldom with explanations of what it implies in the specific context. The majority focus is on the contents of the impact of human activities, rather than focusing on why it is an epoch or what the impact on geology might be, for instance. However, what we commonly agree upon is that human impact on the environment is drastically increasing. You're right on the political implication of this decision: refusing to officially recognise the Anthropocene doesn't deny the fact that we're in the midst of some severe and unprecedented ecological shifts. One thing that I picked up from the vote discussion is a disagreement on the official starting date, which echoes with Feral Atlas³ and the Field Guide.⁴ We do not want to assign an official single date to the Anthropocene; instead we propose to look at critical historical conjunctions that trigger and create these radical ecological and social changes, which are why we identified the Anthropocene Detonator Landscapes. In both projects, we investigate the Anthropocene through both scientific and empirical knowledge and artistic interpretation.

KOOZ How are Feral Atlas and the Field Guide connected?

JD The book and digital platform are very different kinds of publications. We think of Feral Atlas as a companion to Field Guide — and the other way around. We hope that readers will be inspired to go back and forth as they read into both projects. It's challenging to grasp, much less define, Feral Atlas in one go; it’s just so big, conceptually and literally. The final word and image count is three times the size of a conventional monograph. But that’s the point. Feral Atlas is not a book. It’s a digital publication made for curiosity-driven exploration. Users find their own ways through the materials, at their own pace. You might stop and watch a series of video poems, click and scroll and zoom for ages on one of the four interactive ‘Anthropocene Detonator Landscapes’, or just keep following the links until you reach the field reports that form the heart of the project. It would probably take you weeks to work through the whole thing if you tried to be systematic.

On the other hand, writing Field Guide allowed us to systematically explain and develop the ideas in Feral Atlas. It proved immensely satisfying to revisit Feral Atlas and to push its arguments much further for this book. There are analytic tools in Field Guide that enhance Feral Atlas — yet I remain especially fond of Feral Atlas precisely because it doesn’t conform to scholarly expectations. It’s a wild, intermedial experiment that juxtaposes so many different voices, media and perspectives that I hope inspires more scholarship in this direction.

KOOZ It is interesting how Feral Atlas’ nonlinearity pushes the publication format, allowing for personal ways of reading and understanding this complex crisis.

FZFeral Atlas uses such a diversity of forms of representation that it was difficult to find precedents while working on it. We use videos and flow-maps to capture the processes of infrastructures in motion — otherwise difficult to observe with their varied scales and temporalities — accompanied by literal explanations. As an ambitious experiment, we received much feedback about the site’s complexity: for some people, the nonlinearity is intriguing and educational, but for others, it can be confusing and difficult to navigate. Field Guide offered us an opportunity to clarify further, to expand these concepts and formulate them in a direct way to communicate to a broader audience. Field Guide and Feral Atlas are both companion and independent entities.

JDFeral Atlas is an experiment in creating new forms of transdisciplinary knowledge: the field reports are the project's empirical heart, but they are accompanied by explanatory analytic texts, performing a collective mode of thinking to argue that we need various kinds of research practice and description to understand the Anthropocene. In Field Guide we explain directly why the close observation of what we call ‘Anthropocene patches’ can offer a critical mode of getting closer to what’s going on. The book argues that there is an urgent need to marshall empirical diversity, different fields, and the observational techniques they enable, into new critical dialogues as a means of apprehending the predicament of each patch on its own dynamic terms. That was a massive part of the epistemic ethics of the project, across both digital and book forms.

In Feral Atlas, in particular, we could leave room for the curiosity-directed inclinations of our readers because of its nonlinear structure. It was always our hope that readers would participate in the work of making connections across the site, guided by their own curiosity in their own order and at their own pace. I’m glad you describe this experience as personal. In this respect, I think that the aesthetic dimensions of sensuous encounter, surprise, and contemplative invitation that we were able to build into the digital project are powerfully important.

KOOZ Ferality is a foundational concept in your research. It expresses "nonhuman beings engaged with human projects" and "human infrastructures but outside human control."⁵ By introducing a hybrid category to a reductive duality, human actions are positioned as the main driver of environmental change at different scales and systems — living and nonliving. How does this reconcile with the idea that ecosystems are dynamic and continuously evolving, even without human influence?

Ferality also refers to the harmful impact of human infrastructures on the environment; notwithstanding simplifications, how do we understand what qualifies as either negative or positive from an environmental and non-anthropocentric perspective?

FZ Feral stands beyond the conventional ‘domestic vs. wild’ dichotomy, which is still human-centric. Generally, people understand ‘feral’ as lying within the ‘wild’ category that has nothing to do with humans, whereas ‘domestic’ is completely human-controlled. Still, what ferality engages, as you said, is about being developed beyond human control. Understanding that the feral effects are undesigned is the key. To better examine the feral, we must look critically at their engagement with human infrastructures instead of demonising or romanticising certain species. That our infrastructural systems encourage and facilitate the emergence and spread of feral ecologies — in ways humans did not intend — is crucial to comprehending why they remain uncontrollable and resistant to human intervention. Ferality does not point only to the negative or harmful impact; ferality can be good, in a subjective sense. Taking out the design-oriented, solution-driven framework helps us to jump out of a human-centred perspective.

KOOZ Let me contradict myself momentarily: since environmental processes are fluid, is there a risk that ferality introduces another category that contributes to the oversimplification of complex processes, transformations, and narratives?

JD I think that our concept of ferality helps to get closer to the kinds of material interactions, ruptures, spillages, and proliferations radically transforming ecologies across the planet — thereby giving us a new way to think about the kinds of complexities you are talking about. For us, identifying the processes by which entities become feral is how Anthropocene analyses can gain traction, without losing sight of specifically situated complexities and conjunctures. By investigating ferality in relation to stories of colonisation, industrialisation and the infrastructure-building programs that they instantiate, the concept allows us to track those entangled, more-than-human histories that have brought us to what we now recognise as terrifying ecological tipping points. So again, our categorisation of ferality isn't about a definitional containment. On the contrary, it invites an attunement to specific ecological dynamics that enable us to recognise natural, cultural, social, and ecological histories as inherently intertwined. From there, the necessary space extends for complexities of many kinds. In this way, ferality becomes a concept for disrupting modernist assumptions about what infrastructures do.

KOOZ The book studies relationships between humans and more-than-humans, living and nonliving entities, which implies cohabitation between natural and artificial systems and processes. Case studies are relevant to your research and narrative at many scales. How do you choose what to highlight?

JDWe're committed to studying what we call ‘Anthropocene patches’, as a way of moving towards planetary perspectives that hold onto the complexity inherent in situated histories and ecologies. As we explain in the book, patches come in many scales. They are always located in specific places and histories. Studying patches is not a matter of simply generating case studies; rather it is a method to build towards new insights that hold at a planetary scale. Patch-based observation can help tell us what's happening precisely because the planetary perspective misses so many details that matter: social justice concerns, for instance. In the Field Guide, we make the case for building what we call a ‘patch-to-planetary analysis’ of the Anthropocene. Patches have their own historical dynamics and studying them can help us better understand what’s going on at a planetary level, thus avoiding a homogenising view of the Anthropocene. That is the foundational analytic commitment of Field Guide, building from the materials and ideas generated by the digital project.

Feral Atlas, meanwhile, took shape through a back-and-forth movement between the empirical foundations of the field reports and where we found that could lead us — analytically and methodologically — in contributing to the study of the Anthropocene. There are potentially countless Feral Atlas entries out there, and no shortage of case studies. Only a relatively small number (79) are featured in the digital project — but in many ways, the fact that others have already told us of what could have been their own Feral Atlas entry is the point. We set out to model an approach to Anthropocene studies that we hoped would inspire others to observe Anthropocene patches from their own critical-creative perspectives, at scales that fit the dynamics under investigation. We don't see these as further case studies to support our own analysis. On the contrary, such reports generate the material insights from which ever-more nuanced and critically enriched understandings of Anthropocene processes can emerge.

FZBoth the planetary and patchy perspectives are essential in Anthropocene studies. The impacts of the Anthropocene extend beyond ecological concerns to encompass significant social and political dimensions. Understanding these effects requires empirical approaches that consider global systems alongside the specific — often unequal — ways in which different communities and regions experience and respond to these challenges. For instance, if we look at flooding: instead of framing a planetary phenomenon through that which people understand as ‘climate change’, we need to look closely at these Anthropocene patches, the particular natural and built histories behind them. Jakarta and New York are both vulnerable to flooding, for instance, but for very different reasons.

The patches take place on various scales, modes and temporalities, and examining them requires close attention to field-based and vernacular knowledge, which cannot be achieved through distant research and data analysis alone. A relevant editorial discussion was about the relationship between climate issues and the Anthropocene: it's essential to avoid framing 'climate change' as a universal response for all environmental issues for both its environmental and political implications. Floods, droughts, or wildfires are all climate-related phenomena; however, they are uneven, unpredictable, and heterogeneous events with particular social and ecological dynamics. So, paying attention to patches is a crucial step in understanding the planetary.

KOOZ The concepts of "patchy Anthropocene" and ferality speak to the phenomena’s transscalarity. How do these ideas contribute to or challenge existing environmental science and humanities frameworks?

FZ Maps in Feral Atlas tend to challenge norms in contemporary cartographic studies; rather than GIS maps and satellite imagery, our maps also include paintings, photographs, videos, songs, and poems chosen to track and represent spatial shifts. It’s important to recognise the challenges of interdisciplinary collaborations, when different epistemologies intersect and coexist, which is why ‘productive friction’ is so valuable. The broadened concept of ‘mapping’ in our projects, for instance, would not come into being without the efforts of team members in seeking out common ground across our disciplinary and personal differences. Feral Atlas and Field Guide constantly challenge ways of observing, perceiving, representing, and studying the world around us by bringing together different knowledge systems and approaches. Our project aims to broaden these currently narrow, paradigm-driven approaches and bring diverse perspectives, stakes and concerns that were previously overlooked and erased to light.

JD One precious thing about Feral Atlas is the way that images, art and poetry were woven into the analysis. I think of Feral Atlas as an intermedial analytic performance, and for me that’s a great strength. An intermedial approach to knowledge creation curates and orchestrates different forms of empirical description and expression, without forcing them into a homogenous narrative or form. In Field Guide we describe the method that we're modelling as ‘patchy epistemics’. This term emphasises our embrace of diverse and not necessarily commensurable knowledge systems, as a response to our commitment to the value and insights offered by field-based observations of many different kinds. We describe this approach as a renewed natural history, one that is diverse, inclusive, situated, committed to particular places and constellations of social and historical actors, human and nonhuman.

From a personal point of view, I find there is great value in such methods; particularly in terms of a question that is never far from my mind these days, namely ‘How are we to live’? Before we started Feral Atlas, the terror of ecological danger often overwhelmed me to the point of intellectual and social paralysis. As a result of working on this project, alongside so many others who are similarly terrified, I find myself better able to get on with life, mobilised by being part of a broader creative, critical and transdisciplinary engaged community of open-eyed concern.

KOOZ The environmental crisis is a consequence of structurally problematic systems, and so is profoundly political. It affects humans according to class, race, and gender and expresses a failure of modernity meant as progress. Does your research also draw from models like feminist studies, queer theories and indigenous knowledges? Does your work have a reparative purpose?

JD Many feminist scholars and feminist social theory scientists have, in particular, identified and critiqued the modernist tropes of mastery through which progress has been imagined and pursued. Chiming with the approach of Donna Haraway, Feral Atlas and the Field Guide draw inspiration from that ethos of commitment to the particularity of places, histories and situated knowledge, as spaces for the investigation and nuanced bringing together of many diverse points of view. We are likewise grateful for the Indigenous artists and activists whose work appears in Feral Atlas and Field Guide for the ways that they describe Anthropocene processes from their points of view.

For instance, Australian Aboriginal artist Russell Ngadiyali Ashley narrated how the introduction of cane toads had a tremendous and undesigned ecological impact on the north of Australia and therefore, cultural repercussions for his clan and extended Yolŋu family. His map is both an act of witnessing and lamentation. It's a moment in which a complex temporality is created, starting from the title Before, goannas were here forever⁷. This piece shows the ontological rupture that the cane toad introduced; before that, there was a certainty about the goanna as an always-present companion or kin species. Ngadiyali Ashley connected the arrival of the cane toad with other experiences of invasion and colonisation. We are grateful for the ways his images, songs and story deepen and extend the overall project.

I've never thought of our work as reparative. Still, maybe it is reparative in terms of promoting insight and curiosity, modelling a form of intellectual commoning. Perhaps the explicit invitation of both projects to others — encouraging them to bring their own powers of observation to the patchy Anthropocene — might be thought of as reparative. The work of remaining present with the unfolding environmental horrors and grief of our times, as I’ve said, can reignite a sense of connection and shared purpose that can be useful, perhaps even reparative in itself. I’m thinking here of the remarkable acts of witnessing, care and co-presence that Chris Jordan⁸ cultivates through his camera, as he photographs the carcasses of albatross chicks who have choked to death on plastic waste in the Pacific.

KOOZ A similar issue has troubled me since the summer of 2023, when Canada’s forests suffered the most severe wildfires ever recorded, and New York air was unbreathable. The news pointed largely to the air quality in New York rather than the wildfires in Canada. I often wonder how we can strengthen such a weak public narrative and raise the general public and policymakers’ awareness of the environment.

JD It can be hard to make sense of what we’ve dubbed ‘the new nature’ — and scary too. That forest smoke carries a complex story of cause and connection that needs to be better appreciated. Providing analytic tools to help identify such causal dynamics is precisely the aim of both the projects we’ve discussed. Our work has been to position events like the one you describe within broader, multi-sited, and multi-scalar histories. So in Feral Atlas you will find a story about Canadian wildfire¹¹ alongside descriptions of the infrastructural projects that have led to its proliferation. Because the choking smoke in New York wants to tell us a much bigger story than simply reminding us of its source on a Canadian firefront. Through that smoke we are inhaling¹² the unfolding of Anthropocene histories. We need to learn to breathe them in — the histories, that is. These more-than-human stories of connection and causality need not only to be conveyed but also absorbed and acted upon somehow, if we are to have any chance of arresting the terrifying momentum of ecological rupture characterising our times.

Bios

Jennifer Deger is Professor of Digital Humanities at Charles Darwin University. Her work finds form in the intertidal zones of anthropology, art, and environmental humanities. Her thinking is increasingly intermedial, moving across and between film, experimental ethnographic writing, and curation. Jennifer is author of Feral Atlas: the More-than-human Anthropocene and Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene with Anna Tsing, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou. She is also a member of Miyarrka Media, a Yolŋu-led creative research collective based in northeast Arnhem Land, Australia.

Feifei Zhou is a Chinese-born spatial and visual designer. Her work explores spatial, cultural, and ecological impacts of the industrialised built and natural environment. Using narrative-based spatial analysis, she collaborates intensively with social and natural scientists to translate empirical observations and scientific research into visual representations that aim to both clarify intricate more-than-human relations and open new questions. She currently teaches at Columbia GSAPP, and previously taught at Cornell AAP and Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

Valerio Franzone is Managing Editor at KoozArch. He is a Ph.D. architect (IUAV Venezia) and the director of the architectural design and research studio OCHAP | Office for Cohabitation Processes. OCHAP focuses on the built environment and the relationships between natural and artificial systems, investigating architecture’s role, limits, and potential to explore possible cohabitation typologies and strategies at multiple scales. He has been a founding partner of 2A+P and 2A+P Architettura. His projects have been awarded in international competitions and shown in several exhibitions, such as the International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. His projects and texts appear in magazines like Domus, Abitare, Volume, and AD Architectural Design.