The Anthropocene is a planetary phenomenon—but not a uniform one. New kinds of ecological patches are being formed, from suburbs to plantations to plastic ocean gyres. To understand the mechanisms that produce the Anthropocene, we need to attend to what’s going on in those patches.11Anna Tsing, “More-than-human sociality: a call for critical description,” in Anthropology and Nature, ed. Kirsten Hastrup, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015): 27–42. While acknowledging the importance of planetary-scale modeling, Feral Atlas argues that zoomed-out, big-data analysis is not enough.22Anna Tsing, Nils Bubandt, and Andrew S. Mathews, “Patchy Anthropocene,” Current Anthropology, 60 (Suppl. 20) S186–S197 (2019). Close-up, field-based and historically grounded observations are more necessary now than ever.

Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene is an online work of public scholarship that takes this challenge seriously. The atlas argues that critical description of the Anthropocene, that is, theoretically informed empirical attention to the anthropogenic transformation of land, air, and water, is a central task for our time.

In so doing, Feral Atlas offers an example of what a patchy approach to environmental research can look like. It models a form of coordinated analysis in which environmental thinkers such as ourselves—respectively, three anthropologists and an architect—cultivate critical and creative collaborations with researchers and makers from diverse disciplines and backgrounds. This effort, we hope, produces novel analytic traction and insights to mobilize Anthropocene studies in new directions.

Feral Atlas offers an atlas for our times. An atlas in which sovereign and storied landscapes suffer the increasing proliferation of feral entities from cane toads to salmon lice, radioactive isotopes and underwater noise. An atlas that refuses a singular perspective or scale. An atlas attentive to more-than-human histories shaped by colonial violence, slavery, and dispossession together with the extractive, homogenizing logics of capitalism. An atlas that shows not only the mess we are in, but offers new perspectives on how we got here.

The atlas features reports, essays, artworks, code, and design from a team of more than one hundred contributors. At the heart of the atlas sit 79 field reports by scientists, humanists, artists, and activists. Each field report brings close, situated observations to bear at the scale required by the phenomenon under investigation—and in the languages and styles determined by the contributor’s own epistemic relationships with these particular places, processes and histories. These different perspectives have been curated within a custom designed digital architecture that guides users toward exploration while encouraging them to grapple with the disorientations of the Anthropocene.

By adopting this kind of generous and inclusive attention to environmental disruptions, the site invites you: come and get lost in the more-than-human Anthropocene. Spend some time looking around. Notice unexpected connections, and the larger stories they tell.

For five years our curatorial team worked to assemble texts and media for the site while creating the web architecture with the design studios School and Art Camp. At the same time we honed the atlas’ core arguments and created original artworks and essays that made these ideas materially manifest. The Anthropocene is the result of non-designed effects of imperial and industrial infrastructure projects. This is the key idea that we built the site to animate. Designed to encourage curiosity led exploration—privileging forms of slow looking and reflection—the atlas delivers an argument that is at once aesthetically charged, iterative, and layered. The online format enables non-linear explorations through which the user can discover unexpected connective threads between seemingly disparate entities and events. For those enticed into a deeper dive, a range of essays unpack and elaborate core ideas, allowing users to return to interactive, multimodal elements with a greater understanding of key concepts.

The overarching ambition of our curation has been that the use of artful methods and outlooks, which includes holding space for art and poetry alongside science and social science, can enable an account of Anthropocene processes that adds up to something more than a big pile of bad news.

Feral entities guide the way

Arriving at the landing page, users encounter a proliferation of feral entities bobbing across the screen. Pick one and it will lead you through the site, teaching you to recognize the infrastructurally mediated feral flows and blockages through which the Anthropocene takes form.

Building the project with this focus on feral dynamics led us to appreciate the intertwining of human and non-human histories in unexpected ways and places. Instead of judging ferality as inherently good or bad, Feral Atlas uses it as a descriptive characteristic of a more-than-human Anthropocene. A focus on feral dynamics guides researchers to an approach: investigate the relationships that stimulate ferality.

This requires not assuming too much in advance; the goal of the exploration is to find out what is happening and how far it extends. Questions of scale emerge from attending to the conjuncture of feral entity and the projects of landscape transformation that produce feral effects. The question of how far a particular feral effect extends cannot be known in advance; it is part of the inquiry.

This is also an approach for watching world making unfold at the scene of the action, rather than in abstract cosmologies, taxonomic lists, or political economies. What structures of social inequality and what distinctive ecologies inform the action? What local perspectives matter—even if they are suppressed? In watching the relationship between feral entities and infrastructures, such questions come into their own.

Each feral entity brings specific kinds of material processes into view, allowing us to produce a distinctive mapping of Anthropocene dynamics: an atlas of maps and field reports that refuse the mastering logics and assumptions of imperial and industrial landscape modification projects.

In this manner, Feral Atlas demonstrates what a patchy approach to Anthropocene studies can render visible. It takes a spatial approach that simultaneously acknowledges intertwining and overlapping environmental histories as constitutive of our current environmental crisis. These situated histories of particular feral effects reveal the Anthropocene as granular, that is, as the combined but not fully synchronized effect of separate processes. This approach opens attention to the indeterminacy of what’s ahead; the story is not finished.

Indigenous scholars and scholars of color have argued for the importance of taking note of the glimpses of alternative worlds that enliven even the most degraded situations.33Michael Wilcox, “Marketing conquest and the vanishing Indian: an Indigenous response to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse,” Journal of Social Archaeology, 10, (2010): 92–117. Without this, the victims of violence are all already dead.44Katherine McKittrick, “Plantation futures,” Small Axe 17, (2013): 1–15. Feral Atlas takes up this point through attention to the historical contingencies in which destructive feral effects develop. Things did not have to work out that way; they still might change. Rather than a singular logic of destruction or hope with a predetermined future, the atlas argues for attention to the many possibilities that coil within seeds of time. Contingencies are radical crossroads revealing alternatives.

Mapping the Anthropocene

This commitment to a heterogeneity of perspectives is expressed throughout the atlas in our approach to maps. As shown above, the atlas features four Anthropocene Detonator worlds—worlds in which ecologies have been radically transformed by imperial and industrial infrastructure projects. Then there are the flow maps that introduced each field report. These maps proliferate. They attest to the new flows of living and non-living materials.

No one map is like another. Varying wildly in style, scale, and media, these maps have been collected, commissioned, and curated by the Feral Atlas team in consultation with authors. And, while these maps mostly bear very little resemblance to modernist maps, to learn to see them as maps is to take up a different orientation to the world. A video of activating a geothermal well, an Aboriginal painting of cane toads threatening goanna lizards, an audio recording of seismic guns used underwater prospecting, and a video of disappearing species of bees—each is a map in Feral Atlas terms.

Viewed from the perspective of this multiplicity, the global map users would normally expect looks strange, faulty, and shockingly incomplete. Taken together, the atlas assembles a new spatial and material history of the Anthropocene: a leaky configuration of toxic flows, blockages and more-than-human infrastructural entanglements spanning 500 years.

Herein lie the grounds, we suggest, for considering the never-more urgent question: where to from here?

Explore Feral Atlas here.