Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene
The New Nature
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- $29.99
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
Nature has gone feral. How can we re-attune ourselves to the new nature? A field guide can help.
While the global scientific community recently made headlines by ruling the Anthropocene—an era many date to the Industrial Revolution when human action truly began to transform the planet—did not qualify for a geological epoch quite yet, understanding the nature of human transformation of the Earth is more important than ever. The effects of human activity are global in scope, but take shape within distinct social and ecological "patches," discontinuous regions within which the key actors may not be human, but the plants, animals, fungi, viruses, plastics, and chemicals creating our new world. Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene takes stock of our current planetary crisis, leading readers through a series of sites, thought experiments, and genre-stretching descriptive practices to nurture a revitalized natural history.
Field guides teach us how to notice, name, and so better appreciate more-than-human worlds. They hone our powers of observation and teach us to see the world anew. Field-based observations and place-based knowledge cultivation—getting up-close and personal with patchy dynamics—are vital to truly grapple with the ecological challenges and the historical conjunctures that are bringing us to multiple catastrophic tipping points. How has commercial agriculture runoff given rise to comb jellies in the Black Sea? What role did the Atlantic slave trade play in the worldwide spread of virus-carrying mosquitoes? How did the green revolution transform the brown planthopper into a superpredator in Philippine rice fields? Questions like these open up new ways of understanding, and ways of living through, the epoch that human activity has ushered in.
This Field Guide shifts attention away from knowledge extractive practices of globalization to encourage skilled observers of many stripes to pursue their commitments to place, social justice, and multispecies community. It is through attention to the beings, places, ecologies, and histories of the Anthropocene that we can reignite curiosity, wonder, and care for our damaged planet.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Human-caused ecological change is enumerated in this bracing survey from the cocreators of the website Feral Atlas. The authors focus on "patches," their term for species and ecosystems "transformed by human infrastructure" but "not under the control of human designers." An example is the red turpentine beetle, a harmless North American species that "hitchhiked" on shipments of timber to China, where it picked up a "potent... symbiotic fungus" and became an unstoppable force of destruction, killing more than 10 million trees. Other patches include lodgepole pines that flourish in unstable sands produced by coal mines and drug-resistant bacteria that evolve in wastewater from pharmaceutical plants. The authors' pragmatic goal is to demonstrate that the "Anthropocene" is already a lived reality for most species—that humans, who have "mov more dirt than the Ice Age glaciers," are now the dominant force for environmental change—and thus that a "new nature" has emerged, one requiring a novel perspective to study it, in which "commodity chains" are considered as important as biomes. The book's litany of cataclysms is shot through with a surprising hopefulness, as the authors propose a philosophy of collective well-being extending across species. It's an unsettling but undefeated vision of a world in volatile flux.
