How do we find new forms of coexistence in the landscapes of the Anthropocene?

“What if the Anthropocene is patchy—and more than human?” asks Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing as a guiding question for her new collaborative project entitled Feral Atlas. Her lecture reflects upon this new project that investigates how natural scientists, humanists, and artists use field-based curiosities to tell stories that carefully attend to how humans and nonhumans make worlds together at every scale. Tracing the recent spreading of the parasitic water mold Phytophthora from Germany to the Western United States, where it kills off natural woodlands, shows that even when Anthropocene phenomena are planetary in extent, they need to be understood in relation to the patchy occurrences of infrastructures from industrial nursery sheds to the floating plantations in cargo containers.