Anna Tsing

In the cracks of the Anthropocene

My major project these days is the curation of Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene together with Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman, and Feifei Zhou. This digital project shows the Anthropocene emerging from the effects of imperial and industrial infrastructures.  We submit to Stanford University Press in September 2019, and we expect the project to be online in early 2020 at feralatlas.org The project includes about 60 reports and essays by natural scientists, social scientists, humanists, and artists about nonhumans empowered by human infrastructures to stop playing well with others. From CO2 and radioactivity to cane toads and salmon pathogens, the site tells stories by researchers engaged with the often terrifying effects of human-made landscapes.

Two continuing projects speak more directly to the field-based concerns of the Landscape Laboratory. In one, I travel to the island of Waigeo, off Indonesian Papua, to consider how people and birds relate to each other.  I’m interested in why local residents are such good interlocutors for international ornithologists and birdwatchers–given the gaps across their modes of understanding–and I’m also imagining birds as part of the conversation.  In the photos below, the first by Yulia Bereshpolova, Waigeo birds respond to human activities: in the first, singing starlings nest on abandoned house posts over the bay, while in the second, a white cockatoo and a householder copy each other’s vocalizations.

In another field project, Elaine Gan and I are studying the form of tree-fungi connections in a former brown coal mine in Denmark.  Mining activities left bare piles of sand; tree roots and fungi, working together, have recolonized the space for woodlands. I’m interested in this resurgence, and in the ways natural history observation can teach us a lot about how it works.  In the photographs below, by Elaine Gan, the fungus Pisolithus arhizus, a generalist which here grows with pine, shows itself as a fruiting body above ground and as a mess of yellow mycorrhiza under the sand. Without the joint action of roots and fungi, it would be difficult for plants to reestablish themselves in such human-disturbed landscapes. Form gives us clues about this multispecies history in which humans are just one player.