Anthropocene refers to a proposed geologic epoch in which human disturbance to the geophysical earth exceeds even that of the glaciers.

The term is far from perfect—but it alerts us to the massive environmental problems of our times, including the wave of extinctions caused by human disturbance, anthropogenic climate change, and the spread of life-threatening pollution and radiation, among many other issues. The livability of the earth is in danger from human disturbance, and we are going to have to decide if we will do anything about it.

To explain the seriousness of our environmental problems, it may be useful to comment on two common misperceptions about the term Anthropocene. First, the term does not refer to just any human disturbances to the earth’s environment. Ever since the evolution of Homo sapiens some 200,000 years ago, humans have been affecting the environment. So has every other living being. We know that beavers create ponds and wetlands through dam building, for example, which changes the environment for fish. Every species does this kind of environment-changing work. If we look at the collective changes bacteria have made to the earth, human effects are dwarfed. We are not the only ones shaping the earth, intentionally or otherwise. Anthropocene refers to the recently emerging scope and scale of our disturbance, and its threats to multispecies life. We see such threats not just in global climate change, but also in the extinction of so many plants and animals, in massive pollution, in eutrophication, and in the continuing release of radioactivity and toxic wastes. This is the Anthropocene problem, not human disturbance per se.

Second misperception: the Anthropocene is not the era of human mastery of nature. It is not the fulfillment of dreams of progress. On the contrary! The point of the term is to make us aware of how much we do not control, and of what a mess our species has made without really thinking about it. Far from mastery, even intentionality is not a useful guide once we take the Anthropocene seriously. This is why it makes sense to begin with unintentional design, that is, the situation we’ve helped to kick up with or without planning. Intentionality leads us in the wrong direction. First, it makes us forget that other species make the world too. Second, it lulls us into thinking that good intentions are all we need. Our problem was not caused by an evil genius, as in a children’s movie. Even when you think about the most environmentally dangerous practices, such as fracking or industrial genetics, these are not practiced in order to destroy the earth. The situation is more like this: investors, focused on short-term gains, don’t care, and no one else has been able to stop them. In fact, I might argue that this is a reasonably good description of how we got into such trouble in the last 200 years: investors, focused on short-term gains, don’t care, and no one else has been able to stop them.

This 200 years is the same time period that hosted the knowledge divide between the humanities and the sciences, and it is hard not to see these issues as intertwined. Unrealistic dreams of the reach of human mastery fueled the scholarly divide between humans, ready to conquer, and nonhumans, waiting for conquest, just as these dreams encouraged the programs of irresponsible investors. Messes, people thought—if they thought at all—would be cleaned up later. Well now we are all down inside the mess, with no signs of clean up. I don’t have the hubris to imagine that the research initiative we put together at Aarhus University will change everything [1]. But the least we can do is take another look at the world we find ourselves in. Instead of beginning with unrealistic dreams of mastery, we might explore the mess to appreciate what possibilities it still holds.

The object of our research is unintentional design on anthropogenic landscapes, that is, landscapes that have been shaped by human activity. Unintentional design is not just about humans; many other species, as well as nonliving stuff such as water and wind, shape the landscapes we study. Unintentional design is the emergent pattern of all these forms of activity, human and otherwise. This is our Anthropocene world.

We can’t possibly know what is assembling on these landscapes without help from both scientists and humanists. Human histories and activities and nonhuman histories and activities are equally relevant. This is where curiosity and imagination come into play; we need the observational skills of both humanists and scientists to appreciate what comes together—and therefore, too, what might yet emerge.

Where Human Disturbance is Evident—Yet Life Continues

Let me take you to a particular place to show you what I mean—and to introduce some 21st century tools for tackling this challenge. A few years ago, we started fieldwork in a place in central Jutland called Søby Brunkulslejerne, the Søby Brown Coal Beds [2]. Between World War II and 1970, brown coal was mined here. Mining meant digging a big hole to find a few thin layers of compressed Miocene trees. When the miners were finished, they stopped pumping out the ground water, and acid lakes filled their holes. Around them were the piles of sand they dug up from the ground. The place was abandoned: like much of the earth, it is a site of industrial ruins.

Our work at this place is double. On the one hand, we are showing each other methods to work out our collaborative approach. Biologists and anthropologists have so far dominated; each works the possibilities of this site for learning what’s possible on human-damaged landscapes. On the other hand, we are excited to see if real research results might be possible. It’s too early to offer them, but I can introduce four new research tools that make us optimistic. Each tool has roots in a particular discipline, but each addresses transdisciplinarity as it tells us both what to notice and how to notice. These are tools, then, for reshaping the imagination.

One tool is what I here call “interspecies bodies.” At the intersection of developmental biology, evolutionary theory, and ecology, a revolution has happened in the last few years. Throughout the 20th century, biologists treated organisms as autonomous units, which allowed the algorithms of population biology. Now it turns out that the bodies of most organisms are multispecies landscapes. No organism can become itself without the assistance of other species. This changes a great deal in the practice of biology. Among other things, it brings observation of interspecies relations back into professional importance. In Figure 1, the relationship between these teeming mushrooms, Paxillus involutus, and the lodgepole pines behind them, Pinus contorta, illustrates what I mean.

Pines colonize the bare sand of the abandoned brown coal beds—but only because they have the help of a mushroom. That sand does not have many nutrients; the fungus forages for them, giving them to the pine. In turn, the fungus uses the pine’s carbohydrates. Without fungi, pines could not colonize nutrient-poor spots such as this. Without the pines, these fungi could not live. They form interspecies-bodies with joint organs both pine and fungus. It turns out most life is like that. We are lucky, because without such collaborations, ruined places might just remain empty. To watch landscapes in the process of becoming, we need to notice interspecies bodies.

A second tool is disturbance ecologies. For most of the 20th century, ecologists focused on ecological communities, imagined as stable configurations seeking equilibrium. By the end of the century, however, attention had turned to disturbance, that is, the disruption of ecological relations. Disturbance is now understood not just as a problem but also as an opening for the formation of new ecologies.

There are plenty of kinds of disturbance that have nothing to do with humans. But it is good to think about human disturbance within this framework: disturbance is not just an end; it is also a beginning. What ecologies might develop in human-disturbed places?

The photograph in Figure 3 was taken in 1970, at the closing of the last brown coal mines. Take a close look at where the water is, and where the fields take over in the background. The picture appears to show us winter, so you need to take that into account. Figure 4 is the same place in the year 2000, but now it seems to be summer. The fields in back are now green. The water is in the same place. But now a lot of plants are growing on what just recently was sand. Some of those were planted. But many moved in by themselves, using the dynamics I showed in the last pictures of fungi and trees turning sand into forests.

In 1970, there was sand. In 2000, a forest had emerged. Disturbance can give rise to new species assemblages. Humanists and scientists come together in learning historical and dynamic landscapes.

Luckily for us, indeed, the minute humans allow a little room for maneuver for other species, those other species are likely to begin colonizing human ruins. Consider this formerly human space: a rug.

At the Brown Coal Beds, workers gathered from across Denmark. One lady stayed until two years ago. Since then, her house has remained empty, and the roof has caved in in places, allowing water on to the rug. A few weeks before giving the presentation on which this paper is based, I found this cup fungus, beginning the process of returning the house to multispecies life. The possibilities of disturbance ecologies are everywhere.

Let me turn to new tools from the humanities. Too often, we think of humans as capable of just one kind of relation to the natural world; in fact, human actions form a mosaic and a multiplicity. Common sense still tends to push human diversity to something from archaic times, something overcome by progress, but diversity today is thoroughly modern, even when it makes use of ancient legacies. We can only begin to address human environmental disturbance within the tapestry of multiplicity.

After the brown coal mining was abandoned, the area was considered a loss, and polluting industries, including the waste disposal facility in the background here, were allowed entry. Yet other human projects continue to shape this landscape. Forest management has included the planting of trees—many of them promising exotics. At first, those trees charmed foresters, promising fast growth. In some cases, such as that of the lodgepole pines, they spread far beyond initial expectations, becoming invasive weeds. Another important human disturbance is hunting—and management for hunting. Over the last ten years, red deer have returned to this area, and from a small initial start, they have come to define the landscape for a new cohort of landowners, who buy lands for hunting rights. They feed and encourage the deer, allowing unsustainable populations to grow up. Since the deer eat farmers’ crops, farmers object; but hunters continue to feed the deer.

Lodgepole pines and red deer, together with their human advocates and detractors, come to play important parts in remaking the landscape. The landscape is made up from the sum of these quite different human activities—as well as the nonhumans who take advantage of the opportunities each offers. This is unintentional design.

Here is one more example. One economic activity situated on the mining remains is a waste disposal facility. There is a garbage dump, now covered with humus, next to the waste disposal facility. On it, we found a profusion of garbage-related species, ranging from ornamentals emerging from human-discarded seeds, to wild things that happen to like the mess of nutrients humans can offer. We saw a profusion of fungi that love nitrogen-rich spaces, including paddy straw mushrooms (Volvariella volvacea) and shaggy manes (Coprinus comatus). We also found a mushroom that does not occur naturally in Denmark at all, a Stropharia. It has been imported into the country in growing kits, and these garbage-dump mushrooms are products of that import. No one asked these mushrooms to grow there; the spores from people’s garbage germinated in what for them is an auspicious space. All this unintentional design, then, from the human project of dumping garbage. It’s only one among many.

What will it take to get to know these multiple projects and their results in unintentional design? The first task is to recognize that humans are not the only species that explores the environment. If we imagine “curiosity” not as a psychological state but as a willingness to explore, then many species exhibit curiosity. This is my fourth tool. Consider again fungi. The body of most fungi consists of thread-like filaments that spread out across soil or wood, exploring. Far from thinking of fungi as “rooted” in a single place, we are better off watching their explorations, even what we might call their curiosity. As the price of wood chips has risen, landowners in the Brown Coal Beds have cut down their invasive lodgepole pines and turned them into piles of chips. Even as the chips are sold, however, they leave enough for fungi. This adventurous Hypholoma has found the wood chips attractive, and it has spread out, exploring the medium and then erupting into fruiting bodies, the mushrooms.

Recognizing the explorations of others is one way to encourage our own curiosity about multispecies landscapes, even in the midst of human disturbance. When we arrived at the wood chips, I said with embarrassment to my fungal biologists, thinking it would be boring, “We don’t have to go here.” But the wood chips turned out to be a wonderland of multispecies life—and a great place for revitalizing all our curiosity about the ecological potential of human-disturbed places. Such multispecies adventures are the stuff of our research projects. They might bring us to appreciate not only the problems but also the possibilities of living in the Anthropocene.

This essay originally appeared in A Bestiary of the Anthropocene, edited by Nicolas Nova and Disnovation.org. It is an updated version of the text originally published in 2014 in MORE THAN HUMAN. AURA WORKING PAPERS / VOLUME 1, pp. 43-52. 

A Bestiary of the Anthropocene is an illustrated compilation of hybrid creatures of our time, equally inspired by medieval bestiaries and observations of our damaged planet. Designed as a field handbook, it aims at helping us observe, navigate, and orientate into the increasingly artificial fabric of the world. Plastiglomerates, surveillance robot dogs, fordite, artificial grass, antenna trees, SARS-CoV-2, decapitated mountains, drone-fighting eagles, standardized bananas—each of these specimens are symptomatic of the rapidly transforming “post-natural” era we live in. Purchase a copy here.

Notes

[1] Applying insights and methods from anthropology, biology and philosophy Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA) has aimed to open up a novel and truly trans-disciplinary field of research into the Anthropocene which is needed to understand the kinds of lives that are made and the futures that are possible in the ruined, re-wilded, and unintended landscapes of the Anthropocene.

[2] The fieldwork reported in this paper is the joint product of 2013 AURA team members, here listed in alphabetical order: Nathalia Brichet, Nils Bubandt, Maria Dahm, Peter Funch, Elaine Gan, Colin Hoag, Jens Mogens Olesen, Katy Overstreet, Pil Pedersen, Heather Swanson, Jens-Christian Svenning, and Anna Tsing. In 2014, we have been joined by Filippo Bertoni, Rachel Cypher, Pierre Du Plessis, Natalie Forsmann, Mathilde Højrup, Thomas Kristensen, and Pernilla Naundrup. We also have benefited greatly from our consultations and collaborations with Frida Hastrup, Hans Jensen, Henning Knudsen, Andrew Mathews, and Mikako Sasa.

[3] Working Group of the Forest and Nature Agency (Palsgård), 2000. Skov-og Naturstyrelsens interessevaretagelse i Brunkulslejerne: Intern Rapport. Copenhagen: Danish Forest and Nature Agency now Danish Nature Agency.

Cite This Source
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. “On Anthropogenic Landscapes.” A Bestiary of the Anthropocene, edited by Nicholas Nova and Disnovation.org, Onomatopee, 2020.