as this book argues, patches make the Anthropocene, including its planetary forms. While big data modeling has usefully brought the idea of the Anthropocene into play, learning more about it requires descriptive field studies and histories, that is, fine-grained attention to patches.

At every scale, nature is changing through its entanglements with human infrastructure. The new Nature is feral.

industrial shipments of unprocessed timber from North America to China’s Shanxi province in the 1980s. There, the beetle was able to form an association with a much more potent local variant of its symbiotic fungus, L. procerum. Working together, this potent local fungal variant and this imported beetle started killing trees in droves. They even roped the trees into bringing on their own demise; the fungus stimulated the trees to produce volatile chemicals that attracted more fungus-covered death-dealing beetles.

feral—that is, transformed by human infrastructure but not under the control of human designers.

The term “infrastructure” here refers to landscape-changing human building projects, such as the ships, roads, and warehouses that move timber around the world. The beetles become feral as they take advantage of the global timber trade.

The concept of ferality (to which we return later in this Introduction) requires thinkers to pay attention to both human arrangements and nonhuman response. Calling the beetle feral signals that, instead of dismissing trade as a necessary part of being human, we need to study the particular conditions and routes of the commodity chain. Calling the beetle feral also focuses attention on the beetle itself, as it has attracted a new fungal ally in its Shanxi tunnels.

Just how do beings transform in their responses to human infrastructures, and how do they remake the world?

the gap between “wild” and “domestic.”

Patches and corridors are central to the remaking of the earth that characterizes the Anthropocene.

Infrastructures produce feral effects because they modify land, water, and air, causing responses from all the beings that encounter these modifications.

The imperial expansion of Europe, on the one hand, and capitalist investment, on the other, radically changed the impact of the human presence on earth through massive infrastructure-building projects, which modified land, water, and atmosphere in an unprecedented manner. Feral effects follow such radical transformations.

a monstrous conception only newly recognized: a “holobiont,” an assemblage of beings that evolves and adapts together.

multispecies complexity.

a relational practice of coming to knowledge that holds the potential for cultivating deeper connections with the rhythms, relationships, and vulnerabilities of more-than-human worlds: an art of noticing that requires you to develop comparative capacities, together with an appreciation of form, color, texture, movement;

it is essential to reflect more closely on how we got to where we are. There is, of course, no one answer to this question. Likewise, there is no singular “we” or “where” with which to adequately account for what is going on—not to mention what is at stake and for whom and in what ways—as ecologies lurch and stumble across the planet.

The natural history that we advocate here recognizes nonhumans—such as red turpentine beetles—as robust historical protagonists in their own right.

to make the work of identifying ongoing histories of invasion, dispossession, and extraction central to our methods.

we explore how Anthropocene patches are created through allowing social injustice to shape environmental catastrophe.

“Piling” is a knowledge practice that embraces heterogeneous forms of Anthropocene knowledge, assembled without the imposition of preordained theory or established disciplinary hierarchies.

we constantly search for structural and out-of-scale effects. But we see these produced through the dynamics of patches, rather than as the preformed effects of planetary algorithms.

Ferality, in our definition, is the state of nonhuman beings engaged with human projects, but not in the way the makers of those projects designed.

Carbon dioxide, for us, is feral when it moves out from fossil fuel–burning industries. Here, the feral entity, carbon dioxide, is identified by its non-designed anthropogenic effects: accumulating at atmospheric concentrations that can be neither controlled nor ignored.

Ferality is important for a field guide to the patchy Anthropocene because it shows the autonomous activities of nonhumans, even those most closely affected by human infrastructures.

In the patchy Anthropocene, many nonhumans (living and nonliving) are responsive to human actions without submitting even slightly to human control. It is this set of beings that we call feral. The concept of the feral is designed to urge readers to acknowledge the relationship between human infrastructures and the beings that respond to them:

this book charts the dangers of human-induced environmental effects.

recognizing and bearing witness to the ways that more-than-human assemblages generate environmental harm is a necessary first step to understanding the social and environmental disruptions that make up the Anthropocene.

Human technologies and infrastructures, for us, are the apparatus that produce ferality.

While the world we are building was never ours alone, nonhuman histories now shape the future for us all. Learning to observe and describe the patchy Anthropocene in all its multi-sited, multi-scalar and more-than-human complexity is essential if we are to find ways to limit its world ripping force. Only through a sustained and collective effort of piling observations and insights—patch upon patch, perspective upon perspective—can we hope to identify, and so grapple with, the various protagonists, processes, and infrastructures through which the Anthropocene is being made with terrifying momentum.

Distinctive Anthropocene patches include human designed spaces such as suburbs and malls, as well as spaces stemming from human activities but not designed by humans, such as plastic gyres in the ocean. The location and extent of the gyres is created by the interaction of currents, winds, and plastic waste, rather than human design.

just because the Anthropocene is planetary does not mean that it is only planetary.

it becomes possible to consider how widespread Anthropocene phenomena, such as toxic dumps, are constituted in relation to racial inequalities.

describing the Anthropocene, in all its patches and processes, is the most exciting and challenging work of our times.

Chakrabarty asks humanists to separate the “global” and the “planetary” as two divergent kinds of history. 7 The global, a kind of History 1, tells the stories of politics and trade, and of subaltern status and rebellion. In contrast, the planetary, a kind of History 2, offers stories of the geological and climatic longue durée, stories that humble the human presence and refuse our petty distinctions. The Anthropocene, he argues, requires the latter stories;

Even global warming, the most planetary effect of the Anthropocene, emerges in the distinction between carbon dioxide-producing industrial centers and carbon dioxide-absorbing forest and ocean sinks. If we turn our attention to toxins, radioactivity, extinctions, and other Anthropocene phenomena, the patchy nature of exposure is even clearer. Justice issues, and thus politics, are clearly involved in the distribution of each of these threats. It is impossible to describe the Anthropocene without regard for the fundamentally unequal relations among humans through which the environmental effects of the human presence are structured.

A new strain of mosquitoes evolved on the ships. African Aedes aegypti mosquitoes live in holes in trees, and they rarely encounter humans. But this new strain lives exclusively on human water sources, such as the fresh water carried in the slave ships. All the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in the New World are descendants of the strain that evolved on slave ships. These human-loving mosquitoes infected enslaved people as well as their captors, shaping generations of precarious life and untimely death in the New World.

Ebron’s case also shows the importance of working at multiple scales—from the humid spaces between captured bodies as blood-meal sites for breeding mosquitoes to the shipping connections between continents as channels for traveling viruses: It is only by working across these scales that it becomes possible to understand how disease environments are created. Indeed, this brings us to the globe, and even the planet. A number of scholars have argued that Atlantic slavery was central to the emergence of a global, world-making “modernity.” 9 The making of anthropogenic disease environments is a crucial feature of this planet-changing modernity, and Ebron’s research makes this explicit.

human beings have become collateral damage to elite attempts to remake the world for their own advantage.

One of the most dangerously misleading aspects of the term “Anthropocene” is that it urges us to imagine humans in charge, not just of other people but of the whole planet. But even the most powerful humans are only able to make things happen in concert with nonhumans.

the logic of European governance projects, which strip the land of people, names, and more-than-human livelihoods, replacing them with imported European versions. These projects can be compared to the terraforming of other planets discussed in science fiction—and later in this book. Empire building has changed the world by wiping out the old and inserting the new—without regard to the welfare of either humans or nonhumans. Dredging harbors for imperial shipping is as much a part of this governance project as introducing enslaved labor. 13

The first step is to take the patch as a research object. Patches cannot be determined from a top-down plan; they emerge from field observation—through the contours of the phenomena being studied. Anthropocene patches, in the landscape ecology sense, include parking lots and plastic gyres; unlike Wynter’s “plots,” these are not mainly sites of utopian possibility. Instead, they show us the Anthropocene, in all its horrors. Plantations are Anthropocene patches.

feral geographies: stimulated by human infrastructures but outside human control.

patchy Anthropocene is spatially heterogeneous, and this heterogeneity should be the object of our attention. Patches are a place to begin. Furthermore, to establish spatial heterogeneity, we can include ecological corridors—that is, lines along which organisms or nonliving things move—as a particularly linear form of the patch. 3

the Black Sea became host to a great bloom of comb jellies in the late 1980s, as studied by the lab of Turkish marine biologist Temel Oğuz and reported by lab members Bettina Fach and Baris Salihoglu. 5 By 1989, they found, there was a “regime shift” in the organisms in the Black Sea. Instead of fish, there were only jellies. The jellies ate the fish when they were still tiny; the fish could not replace themselves.

Once the Black Sea was a great fishery, but by the 1980s, the big fish had been removed through overfishing, and the fisheries concentrated only on anchovies. Meanwhile, runoff from commercial agriculture swept too many nutrients into the sea, causing eutrophication, which killed fish. With the amount of fishing as well as the deterioration of water quality, the fish were already in trouble. When comb jellies were accidentally introduced in the ballast water of incoming ships, and in the context of particular weather conditions, the jellies were able to take over—completely changing the system from dominance by fish life to dominance by jelly life. Fortuitously, a different jelly organism was accidentally introduced into the sea in the 1990s, and the new jelly began eating the original one. This allowed for at least some amount of biodiversity to return to the Black Sea.

brownfields—that is, abandoned industrial sites—

infrastructures are projects that modify the land, the water, and the air. Infrastructures have feral effects, and these compose the Anthropocene.

For this work, then, infrastructures are building projects, not networks of users.

invasive Argentine ants love people’s houses, where there is just the kind of food and water they like. 13 But in wilder settings, native California ants fight back; the dominion of Argentine ants is far from guaranteed. Argentine ants hitchhiked on ships; they are encouraged by human housing. Their engagement with ships and houses creates their feral behavior; they are nonhuman users of human infrastructures. Thus, too, these ants turn out to be less of an ecological problem than imagined; they do not spread everywhere. Only in their relations to human infrastructures do these ants form Anthropocene patches.

As in their other colonies, the French cleared space to build a beautiful modern city for white residents, while leaving the crowded remains to colonized Vietnamese residents. One of the hallmarks of the modern city was its European-style bathrooms, connected to an extensive sewage system. It was to be the pride of the colonial occupation, showcasing the wonders of civilization. Then the rats came. The modern sewers turned out to be an excellent habitat for rats, which thrived and multiplied. Crawling through the pipes, they emerged into the modern bathrooms of the French colonizers (Figure 12). The French were horrified, and they mounted campaigns in which Hanoi residents were paid to bring rat tails to colonial authorities. Imagine their surprise when tailless rats began to crawl out of the sewers! The news that rats were even more prevalent in the white city than they were in the native city, because of the former’s sewage system, was a blow to the pretensions of French colonialism. Like so many feral effects, rats in the sewers belie the utopian claims of modernization and development.

the question of how European colonial expansion created a suite of feral effects, a question considered throughout the rest of this book.

One infrastructural project that tends to have dramatic feral effects is the monocrop commercial farm, the plantation.

the legacy of the European cultivation of exotic commercial crops around the world using coerced labor—

taken-for-granted features of the modern world, such as the discipline of labor to produce profits for distant investors.

Pujo: A plantation is a giant, an inefficient and lazy giant, but still a giant. It takes up a huge amount of space. It is greedy and careless, destroying everything around. It is alien, strange, and unpredictable. It is human, but you cannot form a normal human relationship with it. It can trample you, eat you, or drain your strength then spit you out. It guards its treasure. You cannot tame it or make it go away. You have to live with it. But it is a bit stupid, so if you are clever you can steal from it. Tania: A plantation is a machine that assembles land, labor, and capital in huge quantities to produce monocrops for a world market. It is intrinsically colonial, based on the assumption that the people on the spot are incapable of efficient production. It takes life under control: space, time, flora, fauna, water, chemicals, people. It is owned by a corporation and run by managers along bureaucratic lines.

Coffee rust fungus is a devastating coffee disease that is spread by wind-borne spores. Planting coffee in the shade of other trees offers considerable protection from coffee rust fungus. In contrast, full-sun monoculture allows spores to gather, launching an attack of the disease. Furthermore, once the disease is established in a particular place, it becomes a source for infection across the whole region, creating an ever-growing patch of infection. At some point, the disease becomes so saturated in the region that it can no longer be controlled; it infects peasant polyculture farms as much as monocrop plantations. At this point, it becomes an epidemic. No trees are safe. Furthermore, just planting more shade trees no longer solves the problem. This is a “state change”: a transformation of the ecological dynamics of the region. Perfecto explains the problem through the concept of hysteresis.

this book singles out imperial and industrial infrastructures, rather than all human infrastructures, to explain the Anthropocene.

We argue that the scale of imperial and industrial infrastructure building in the last five hundred years has caused more systems ruptures—that is, state changes—than ever before in human history. The concept of state change suggests how deeply these infrastructures can affect landscapes. The whole matrix of peasant food crops and agroforestry as well as their cash crops are affected; a new patch structure is coming into being.

Because maps teach us how to move through the world, they shape what we attend to, what we avoid, and what we overlook altogether.

Even as these layered, zoomable digital maps expand the ways we access spatial information, they direct our attention and so cement a certain version of what is sensed, what is known, and what remains overlooked. Every time we use a Google Map, we participate in the ongoing making of the world as a project of modernity and by extension become complicit in the erasure of other worlds and other ways of knowing, seeing, and caring about the world.

our smartphones turn us into active mappers, consciously or otherwise. When we share a dropped pin, enable others to track our movements, or upload geolocated images to social media, we are being recruited into the reproduction and re-instantiation of the highly specific, selective, and technologically enabled worldview embedded in technologies developed and distributed by giant, data hungry, profit-seeking corporations. 6

American bullfrogs have been introduced in many places around the world, particularly in Asian and Latin American development projects that aimed to provide cheap, if not particularly desirable, meat for the poor.

environmental saturation with antibiotics has resulted in the development of resistant strains: around pharmaceutical plants in India, where antibiotics seep out with wastewater, and in the commercial pig farms of Denmark, where antibiotics are used when taking piglets from their mothers before they have developed their own immunity.

this widespread process as it is likely to make antibiotics useless in the next fifty years—not just in India and Denmark but around the world.

a multiplicity of Anthropocene temporal trajectories: a terrifying cascade of consequence set to arrive in different, overlapping, and multiple timelines, impacting some humans (to keep the frame here for a moment) more profoundly than others.

the trans-planetary effects that patches teach us to recognize. In this way, these single patches come to index the making of repetitive, characteristic patches through effects of infrastructure, such as industrial agriculture, or mining, or carbon-burning power stations. These accumulate and combine to shape the patchy assemblage that is the Anthropocene

the Quaternary period, for example, is named after Ice Age gravels that appear only in the Northern Hemisphere.

Both ecology and society are shifted by something as simple as the drilling of wells. The Kalahari’s Indigenous San foragers are forced by these transitions (as well as new laws) to either adopt cattle or go hungry, with the wildlife. As Julie Livingston documents, this is part of a larger transformation of Botswana through water management—for commercial cattle production, or, as Livingston puts it, for “self-devouring growth.” 3

Owens Lake became a mechanical element in a great system of water management, a system that stole water from across the region for the benefit of the city. There is nothing left of the original waterscape except sources and sinks for water managers. By the 1980s, great dust storms blew where the lake once lay. The dust seeped into residents’ houses, even when they carefully sealed windows and doors. Asthma and other respiratory illnesses resulted. A lake setting became a dust bowl: This is rupture. Dust became a feral collaborator of the water infrastructure, creating the kind of anthropogenic disease environment that has come to characterize the Anthropocene.

Systems are sets of relations that hold together, at least well enough to think with. Systems are experiments in thinking through relations. They help us understand relations among concrete entities, but the systems themselves are not concrete material beings. They are experimental holisms, helpful in understanding what’s going on.

Scholars in the environmental humanities are often suspicious of discussion of systems, because we associate it with abstract models in which often-doubtful assumptions are covered up by incessant quantification.

imperial and industrial infrastructures have the ability to multiply, that is, to inspire repetition across space as an integral feature of projects of conquest, governance, and capitalist expansion.

As long as infrastructures are understood as ways of getting important work done, they are difficult to question. Infrastructures don’t just proliferate because of their perceived benefits, of course; they respond to power dynamics built into state and corporate expansion. The standardization of infrastructure, which nullifies the particularities of local terrain, has been a common feature of imperial and industrial projects.

two meanings of infrastructure together: (1) infrastructure as material building project and (2) infrastructure as guide for visions. 18 The first definition allows us to see their effects: That’s how they create ruptures. The second definition makes it clear that infrastructures are expected to do particular kinds of work:

Consider the agro-industrial complex, taken as a set of building projects involving not only fields but also the mining and production of chemical inputs, the machines, and the labor and property relations that service those fields. These support not just any fields; this complex creates fields designed for the maximum accumulation of wealth by investors, and this tends to mean exotic monocrops planted in machine-ready rows for economies of scale.

With the green revolution, chemical inputs in rice agriculture managed to turn a once relatively innocuous pest into a superpredator: a much larger and more adaptable insect, nurtured by a high-nitrogen diet, and capable of taking down all of a field’s crops. Gan calls the transformation “world changing” and tracks how it emerged from the conjuncture of changes in plant breeding and fertilizer development. From the conjuncture, a rupture: Neither great commercial farms nor smallholders can grow rice today without the threat of this superpredator.

we used the term “Tipper” to explain the power of imperial and industrial infrastructures to attract feral partners that stimulate social and ecological ruptures.

we use Tippers to identify clusters of modern infrastructural work that instigate state changes.

The Feral Atlas Tippers are BURN, CROWD, DUMP, GRID, PIPE, TAKE, and SMOOTH/ SPEED, each intended as a verb, and each corresponding to aspirations toward a particular kind of work.

ruptures as resulting from the effects of particular infrastructure complexes,

carbon dioxide gone feral. 22 Patchy yet planetary: Burning fossil fuel is patchy; it is concentrated particularly in northern cities, where industry as well as transportation create great clots of carbon dioxide. Although it takes some time, these clots dissipate around the globe, creating a planetary condition of overheating. Hard to corral: Some parts of the earth, such as the Arctic and Antarctic zones, have been much more quickly affected by climate change than other parts, despite their distance from fossil-fuel burning centers.

Coral, unable to retain its symbionts under hotter conditions, is bleaching across vast areas.

Patchy yet planetary: The radioactivity is generated in a particular patch, but it spreads widely to create other patches, indeed encompassing the planet.

Hard to corral: The “victims” are heterogeneous across types of matter and across space. Some organisms, including many plants and fungi, take up radioactive cesium as part of their metabolism. Distribute those plants and fungi, and these effects have been spread.

The infrastructure built out of the search for industrial energy (as well as for war) creates system ruptures with catastrophic effects across the planet. By considering these examples together, it becomes possible to contemplate the vast scope and scale of systems rupture caused by industrial and imperial energy production.

the Tipper DUMP show us how waste has changed: Whereas most human wastes in the past were biodegradable, today many synthetic products can last for millions of years. Furthermore, new kinds of toxins have been introduced. In the past, toxicologists tended to assume that the poisonous quality of a substance was directly related to its dosage in the body; now whole classes of substances, such as hormone disruptors, are effective poisons at any concentration.

Plastic accumulates in the body of the cows. Much of it does not disintegrate at all, but it sheds phthalates, the plasticizers that make polymer chains supple and that are well-known hormone disruptors. Phthalates are also found on the grass cows eat around plastic. Meanwhile, they—and other toxic chemicals—are secreted in the milk of these cows, which is considered especially healthy by consumers, because it is local. Milk contains liquid essences of plastic. This is waste in the Anthropocene.

Thought to be composters landfills are actually vast mummifiers of waste and waste’s companions

If we want to better understand how the Anthropocene has been so effective at disrupting social and ecological systems, we would do well to think more about proliferating, repetitive complexes of infrastructure building.

Anthropocene hotspots, that is, zones in which previous social and ecological relations no longer hold.

general problem with systems ruptures: They change relations enough that they are hard to undo. These are dangerous zones for many kinds of life.

Flagstaff is nestled in the world’s largest Ponderosa pine forest, a fire-mediated ecology.

The designation of climate change as a “cause” of localized environmental shifts, while useful for politics and policy, talks at cross-purposes with the careful language of probabilities, likelihoods, and correlations that have defined scientific debates about climate.

situated experiences of changing climate are easily dismissed as anecdotal: interesting illustrations, but subjective and untrustworthy.

“the global” is socially constructed, and constructed in ways that benefit particular groups to the detriment of others. 5 This approach positions social analysis of climate change within larger histories of social and economic inequality and contributes to the growing advocacy for critical climate justice.

a third way of looking at climate: one that sees climate change as constituted through its local effects. The emergence of climate change—as an assemblage of material and ideas—is about more than just local responses to external forces. It is also about how those forces interact with things-already-in-place (consider: organisms, ecological relationships, livelihood practices, institutions of power, and social meanings).

the material manifestations of climate change are unevenly distributed, and differently realized, across landscapes; and this uneven distribution is not merely a challenge to be overcome by synthetic analysis, but rather a constitutive characteristic. 7 One might think of the materiality of climate change not just as part of a planetary whole, but also as a variegated fabric with different patternings in different places.

the agentive forces of nonhuman actors are the subject of most of this book,

the notion that climate is a direct driver of migration is overly simplistic. Rather, localized crop failures make families more vulnerable, spurring them to migrate in order to secure income, and in turn requiring them to take loans to cover the costs of transport to the United States or elsewhere. Often, this financing comes from usurious lenders, putting them in debt, financially and socially, to actors in the illicit economy.

shifting climatic conditions exacerbate vulnerability, layering onto other forms of precarity.

The pests and diseases potentiated by climate change had the groundwork laid by longer processes of agricultural modernization.

If, as this book argues, imperial and industrial infrastructures have been particularly implicated in producing Anthropocene hotspots—that is, sites of systems rupture—then it seems appropriate to ask just how all those infrastructures came into being. What kinds of building programs were responsible for them?

four kinds of infrastructure-building programs that have gained planet-changing importance through their systems-changing patches.

First, beginning at the end of the fifteenth century, programs of multispecies invasion have marked European expansion into new territories. Multispecies invasion killed and displaced native communities and ecologies, allowing the formation of the programs that today we call settler colonialism.

earlier human residents were brutally murdered, sickened, dispossessed, and disinherited, as the invaders set up their own projects for settlement.

Whole suites of flora and fauna were introduced, along with their microbiomes, and these introduced species carried out much of the work of invasion for the settlers.

Second, from the very beginning of the seventeenth century, programs of European imperial expansion have introduced infrastructures tied to missions of governance and trade for the metropole. We might call these terraforming governance programs,

Third, the political economy we call industrial capitalism took off from such arrangements in the late eighteenth century, as the windfall profits of New World plantations supported the invention of industrial technologies. At this same time, “free” labor became available to work in the metropole’s factories through the displacement of people from the countryside.

Capitalism “makes nature cheap,” in the words of sociologist Jason Moore. 6 Moore argues that the success of capitalism has been made possible by allowing corporations to externalize environmental costs.

Industrial capitalism has become a vast infrastructure-building program. Capitalism makes investments equivalently liquid, whatever their social and ecological effects. Thus, investors are encouraged to terraform distant lands for their projects, entirely disregarding the effects of these projects on local people and ecologies.

the “Great Acceleration.” The acceleration marked by most of those who use this term refers to a quantitative uptick in earth systems disturbances as well as human populations and activities. 7 These numbers come into being through a political economy and ecology, and these are key to infrastructure building in this period.

the period of decolonization, in which nation-states began to cover the earth. As national elites took control, under the shadow of the great powers, they learned to sponsor all the infrastructure-building programs inherited from their colonial pasts. Thus, multispecies invasion, terraforming governance, and industrial capitalism became democratized in the sense that national governments all over the world could use them to expand their territories, govern or squash unwilling people, and destroy their ecologies for capitalist investors.

a particular mode of temporality in which historical events, while occurring in a chronology, create system ruptures, which operate beyond chronologies because they form new modes of relationality.

These very problems of containment make wildfires a force to be reckoned with. The metaphor suggests how imperial and industrial infrastructures and their feral effects proliferate. Like a fire, they race along corridors, sparing occasional stands while obliterating others, and leaping to new places just when the whole program seems dead. Just because they cannot be contained by a conventional timeline or map does not mean these projects are insubstantial: They are material, insistent, and hard to keep down, rather like a wildfire.

what historian William Cronon calls “second nature,” the nature made by capitalism. 10 But there is also a “third nature” here, the feral effects of capitalist infrastructure.

Europeans traveled with a portfolio of plants, animals, and disease organisms, and human invasions could not have succeeded without this multispecies gang.

Settlers benefited from the mix of designed disturbances of Native life, of unexpected disturbances to use to their advantage, and of merely not caring when the organisms they brought with them destroyed Native people and ecologies.

in Australia, settlers were also busy introducing new species. In 1935, they brought the Central and South American cane toad as a potential predator for the beetles that infested settler-planted sugar cane. 16 The cane toads never got close to the beetles; instead, the toads spread across northern Australia, eating a huge variety of insects along with frogs, small mammals, human waste, and petfood.

the toads, which carry on the violence and displacements of settler invasion all by themselves.

the region the villagers abandoned has been put to new settler purposes. Oil shale extraction occupies the region. A dam has flooded the lands once used for Mandan villagers’ farms. The dam endangers native fish, such as pallid sturgeon, which were important to Mandan communities. Settler diseases killed and displaced Mandan villagers; now settler projects replace their landscape.

multispecies invasions have become accepted as an ordinary, normalized part of the human condition.

The introduction of cattle and pasture grass in Latin America has had a strong impact on the size and health of forests, which in turn has affected the carbon dioxide composition of the planet’s atmosphere. Pasture grasses cannot metabolize carbon dioxide to the extent of the forests they replace. The loss of Latin American forests continues to be driven primarily by conversion to pastureland.

Taungnya was developed as a colonial mimicry of local agroforestry practices in Burma’s hills, in which multiple crops, from annuals to trees, were planted together, allowing layering and harvests over time. In the British colonial version, local communities were allowed to plant subsistence crops (in the image, cassava) in exchange for taking care of the young trees. This provided labor for the colonial commodity. In contrast to local forms, however, the goal was to produce a monocrop teak plantation by the time the trees matured. Subsistence crops were allowed only when the trees were young—and needing human care. In the early twentieth century, the system broke down, in part because monocrop plantations nurture pests, here the teak beehole borer. But meanwhile taungnya was exported to other places, including India, Kenya, Nigeria, Indonesia, and Thailand. 29 British experiments in Burma created a terraforming system that could be exported with standard features: an agroecological machine.

Javanese peasants worked irrigated fields, growing rice for their subsistence. Dutch colonial authorities, working through local elites, took advantage of the irrigation system to demand that these peasants alternate rice with their favored colonial crop, sugarcane. Since they were not compensated for growing sugarcane, this system put considerable pressure on already struggling peasant families, who responded by having more children to increase their labor power, which put further pressure on the system. 31 The result benefited the metropole, however, bringing the Netherlands from the brink of bankruptcy into a growth economy. Here was another way to bring labor into the production of colonial commodities without cost to the metropole.

The most infamous system for bringing labor to colonial crop production was the kidnapping and enslavement of people from Africa to serve as laborers on New World plantations. Again, local systems of hierarchy and exchange were tapped—and distorted—as the Atlantic slave trade gathered laborers through warfare. If you turn back to Figure 29, the full version of Zhou’s Empire landscape, you can see Ghana’s coastal slave fort, a military delivery structure for enslaved people, next to the ocean on the far right. Such fortifications suggest the violent distortion of local African hierarchies that occurred as Europeans incited the kidnapping and export of more and more people.

Harbors were dredged for the convenience of imperial shipping. Swamps were drained with canals, which could also be used to transport goods. Dams collected water for the irrigation of commercial crops (Figure 32). In building these water management infrastructures, colonial engineers borrowed heavily from indigenous state projects in the Global South, especially in South and Southeast Asia, where water management had been a state project for centuries.

Given the extensive range of imperial terraforming projects, it is not surprising that feral effects abound. Plantations developed new kinds of weeds, pests, and parasites—such as witchweed, encouraged by the quick and dirty practices of international land grabs in Mozambique, and inherited by peasants who farm the land the grabbers have abandoned.

the invasive lantana, escaped from colonial botanical gardens in India to take root in teak plantations,

Feral Atlas’s four Anthropocene Detonators: invasion, empire, capital, and acceleration.

These infrastructure-building programs, we argue, respectively detonate the Anthropocene.

feral biologies offer a privileged view of nonhuman beings as protagonists of more-than-human histories. Feral biologies show us nonhuman history within the events and timelines of human history.

Until quite recently, however, nonhumans have not been considered this kind of historical actor, that is, an actor capable of changing in relation to challenges.

As the genetic heritage of each species became easier to describe, it became clear that organisms are evolving all the time, at least at the level of small genetic changes, many of them in response to changing environments—that is, historically. 1

species turn out to have relations with other species that far exceed the prey–predator binary.

Species are no longer considered autonomous units of evolution; instead, “holobionts”—that is, congeries of species living with one another—are units of evolution. For multispecies organisms, the holobiont includes the microbiome; with humans, for example, this involves the bacteria in our gut and on our skin. Interspecies encounters shape beings.

the worry that attention to nonhumans might usurp the gains of the humanities lingers, a murmuring in hallways.

nonhuman organisms are active historical agents.

a kind of historical storytelling in which landscape becomes a nexus for multiple historical ontologies—that is, ways of doing history, human and nonhuman.

horror stories showing what human infrastructures are doing in the creation of dangerous feral biologies.

Europe and the People Without History remains a towering work in the humanistic social sciences because it opened the door to subaltern and Indigenous histories in the making of the capitalist world.

Nonhuman living beings gain new “agilities” (that is, historically developed abilities) through their relations with the infrastructures of capitalism; in the process they become Anthropocene historical protagonists.

neither domestic nor wild, neither dependent upon us nor outside our world. Their histories are all mixed up with ours, but they are out of our control. They remake themselves in the conjunctures of our histories, and they change the possibilities for humans, and other creatures, to proceed.

pests and weeds: organisms whose historicity is evident precisely because they are never fully integrated into capitalist designs. Haunting capitalism, they change its history, even as capitalist history changes them. They are not anti-capitalist heroes; they thrive with the infrastructure of capitalist modernity, even as they use that infrastructure to do unexpected things.

As long as the river is running strong, water hyacinth is unobtrusive. But engineers made a world of calm water, encouraging its increase.

Given a calm water surface and warm enough temperatures, this is a plant that knows how to fill the available space, becoming—and with astonishing speed—an unbroken single-species mat across the water.

Engineers made a new world of water; and water hyacinth responded by learning how to expand into it.

After the building of the Aswan High Dam, which slowed down the Nile River, the plant spread rapidly throughout the Nile Delta.

by 1982, 650 tons of water hyacinth were removed every year from the Panama Canal to prevent the waterway from clogging. 20

water hyacinth flourishes with the provision of excess nutrients into the water. The runoff of fertilizers, sewage, or nutrient-rich factory waste supercharges water hyacinth, allowing it to outcompete other water plants. As one commentator wrote, “Irrigation, fertilizers, and flood control are essential parts of the green revolution, but the more successful these techniques are, the worse the weed problem becomes.”

Green revolution scientists, who treated all living things as if they were industrial resources, first hoped that water hyacinth could be defeated by importing its homeland predators.

Simone de Beauvoir’s aphorism about women can be transposed to weeds: One is not born, but rather becomes, a weed. Weeds are formed in relations, and, through relations, they make interspecies history. As will be explained in Chapter 8, the water hyacinth that follows the train of water engineers has lost its discrimination in mating partners. But there is more: Water hyacinth in diaspora often doesn’t mate at all. It just extends itself clonally. Diasporic spread has selected for vegetative growth rather than sexual reproduction. Water hyacinth plants around the world are closely related genetically. 22 There is a reason they have not needed the fine-tuning to local environments that sexual reproduction allows. The environment is homogeneous. Water engineers have made it so. The worldwide clone of water hyacinth follows the worldwide clone of water engineering projects.

An initial set of articulations spread water hyacinth around the world, as botanical gardens coveted its showy flowers.

Plants selected for vegetative growth and self-pollination proliferated against the will of the engineers, who made reservoirs and canals as if for those plants. Wind and water in anthropogenic waterways tapped the plant’s free-floating habit to move it around. Water hyacinth took off, and botanical gardens became irrelevant. Water hyacinth reminds us that plants—molded in the conjunctures of history—develop their own trajectories and logics.

Capitalism as a system depends on stabilizing things as economic resources. First, if things are commodities, they must stay intact and under control at least for the period of their transactions. Second, to become wealth, things must stay put long enough to be collected, and later transacted again.

property requires a host of chaperones; it is not an exclusive relation between a person and a thing.

As capitalism continues to eliminate vulnerable species and landscapes, we are forced to live more and more in a land of weeds, aggressive species that both love our disturbances and thumb their noses, so to speak, at our conceits.

Property spook: It doesn’t eliminate property, but it haunts it. Consider now an organism that had more decisive effects.

as long as cotton is grown in small patches and mixed with other plants, the boll weevil is just one of many annoying pests. It took the plantation to bring it to full epidemic status.

Concentrate all the cotton in one place, and the weevils will eventually drop into it.

The golden apple snail was first brought from Argentina to Taiwan as part of the kind of sure-to-fail development project do-gooders have so often helped to promote. 54 The snail was supposed to be a protein source for rural people. Not surprisingly, no one would eat it. The snail, however, liked very much to eat. A creature of water, it found itself quite at home in paddy fields, where it proceeded to consume the rice seedlings—and everything else it could find. In the village my colleagues are studying, it was deliberately introduced to eat water hyacinth; instead, it eats rice.

Agroindustrial policy in Taiwan, shaped since the 1950s by the U.S.-led green revolution, has promoted molluscicides. The problem is that a poison that can kill snails—and especially numerous large snails scattered throughout the waterways—will also kill you and me. Furthermore, farmers have noticed that a snail hit by poison uses its remaining time on earth to lay as many eggs as possible, thus assuring an abundant next generation. The poison kills us—and increases the number of snails.

Whenever capitalists attempt to capture value from processes outside capitalist control, such as photosynthesis or digestion, they encounter the dynamics of articulation.

Articulation allows us to tell stories in which nonhuman social dynamics form better or worse accommodations with capitalist infrastructures.

The kinds of feral beings described here are “camp followers” of capitalist modernization. 60 Like the washerwomen, suppliers, and service workers that once followed armies, they tag along with capitalist developments. But they are not trained to obey orders. They are an unruly rabble, and it is never clear when they will get in the way of generals’ plans.

landscapes can be studied as ontological coordinations and miscoordinations in which both humans and nonhumans take part. This is a version of articulation theory in which varied elements of landscapes coordinate to create effects.

When one considers these feral biologies, imagining that new imperial engineering will solve the crisis of existing engineering makes no sense.

The story water hyacinth tells through its proliferation is a story of anthropogenic landscapes made through colonial water engineering.

“landscape” here refers to the sedimentation of human and nonhuman activity, which, taken together, creates places. Landscape is a busy intersection of contemporary action entangled with the traces of previous action. Because it offers signs of the past, landscape is amenable to archival practices. Landscape is not just an archive, but one can do archival readings on a landscape.

Water hyacinth constructs a niche, a form of ecological engineering in which slowed water, low oxygen, nutrient uptake, and underwater shade benefit some water-living practices and not others.

The standardization that modern landscape projects build into the world called forth a plant standardization that could match and outdo engineers’ desires.

Only clonal reproduction can overwhelm the speed and effectiveness of human removal projects.

Those nonhumans capable of thriving with imperial and industrial infrastructure have taken the reins of history. The world we are building hardly belongs to us anymore; it belongs to them. 1

Matsutake are mycorrhizal fungi, that is, fungi with symbiotic relations with plants. In these troubling times, mycorrhizal fungi open attention to the importance of interspecies ecologies in the resilience of life on earth. Through their generous metabolisms, which bring nutrients to beings other than themselves, mycorrhizal fungi nurture forests.

Fungi, more than any other kingdom, reveal the structural roots of the biological catastrophe we call Anthropocene.

By saturating land and water with fungicides, Anthropocene agriculture has made a world for fungicide-resistant pathogens.

Consider corn, where breeding practices created plants so genetically similar that their height and time of ripening is standardized, facilitating mechanical harvesting.

The simplified ecologies of commercial agriculture and livestock rearing gather fungal pathogens and create opportunities for the rapid evolution of new ones.

we haven’t addressed the thorny problem of how to handle the powerful modern spirit beliefs of Europeans and the European diaspora. Anti-science cosmologies from this population have gained new traction through the U.S. culture wars and other populist media phenomena.

The concept of the feral offers startling insights only within a particular cultural history and political economy.

Infrastructure overruns and replaces wild ecologies, creating feral effects. The Anthropocene springs up from such interventions—rather than from the human condition as a whole.

diverse processes, stakes, and concerns might become evident when different knowledge systems are brought together on their own terms, within and across patches?

a deliberately juxtaposed and often discordant approach to building knowledge

To pile is to heap one thing on top of another without an a priori order: to create a structure with no foundations.

Piling is a curatorial method: a knowledge practice of gathering up and holding onto varying perspectives; a gentle and generous mode of making sense guided by the materials and insights thus brought together. Piling enacts a not-so-organized assembling of materials; it is a way of seeking out and collating with selective purpose and critical intent that resists the urge to tidy everything into neat and homogenizing bundles. It is a careful but loose sorting.

juxtaposition activates the gap between things. It creates a side-by-side relational tension in which objects or ideas are positioned as both together and apart. It is an art of surprise and disconcertment—a technique of meaning making that invites its audience to participate in the backwards and forwards dynamics it creates, as they contemplate across sameness and difference. New and often unexpected connections become evident while distinctive differences remain in view. Importantly, too, juxtaposition does not suggest a fixed or inevitable relationship. Its power is in staging telling conjunctures between things not necessarily—or, at least, not previously—recognized as related.

More than one kind of knowledge practice, we argue, is necessary to best describe the Anthropocene. If we care about patches, we need kinds of knowledge suited to learn about them.

a patchy Anthropocene needs a patchy epistemics. 11

Feral Qualities are modes of attunement through which nonhumans make human infrastructures affordances for their own activities.

Consider the Feral Quality “Industrial Stowaways,” which groups feral entities that ride in industrial shipments.

Satellite technology introduced modern humans to an entirely different way of viewing the planet: an elevated and distanced point of view that requires no personal observation. Modern cosmopolitans have come to believe that this is the only accurate map; all other mapping technologies, we think, are archaic.