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Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene: The New Nature
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.
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.
326 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 7, 2024
About the author
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
24 books516 followersAnna Lowenhaupt Tsing is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place and coeditor of Uncertain Terms: Negotiating Gender in American Culture.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
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February 28, 2025Well.....
This is only just my opinion, and I'm certainly no expert, but this book didn't read like a field guide to me. It was more of an overview for a certain approach to understanding what we might see out in the world. But not much mention of how to collect those observations, and very few of the authors' own observations cited. More of a position paper or not quite manifesto. As noted above, the writing was very much in the academic style.
What is it about that academic style? So repetitious. So much effort to do something, but that something doesn't seem to be conveying information. Or maybe not the information that I'm interested in. More like they're speaking to the other people in their academic specialty group.
Let's just say that I was disappointed.
I'm not going to rate this book because I don't want to be more of a downer than I already am.
Sorry.
This is only just my opinion, and I'm certainly no expert, but this book didn't read like a field guide to me. It was more of an overview for a certain approach to understanding what we might see out in the world. But not much mention of how to collect those observations, and very few of the authors' own observations cited. More of a position paper or not quite manifesto. As noted above, the writing was very much in the academic style.
What is it about that academic style? So repetitious. So much effort to do something, but that something doesn't seem to be conveying information. Or maybe not the information that I'm interested in. More like they're speaking to the other people in their academic specialty group.
Let's just say that I was disappointed.
I'm not going to rate this book because I don't want to be more of a downer than I already am.
Sorry.
August 25, 2026
File under: Totally underwhelming.
I really didn't try to do any background research on the reaction to this book, as the title was intriguing enough that I didn't have to be "sold." First off, I was surprised that this book was written by anthropologists, not by zoologists or environmental specialists. Had I been aware of that at the start my expectations would have been different, but I still might have picked it up; having had some graduate-school exposure to ethnography.
The real issue here is that this is not so much a field guide, as it is a polemic to encourage people to generate the case work needed to produce that field guide. There is an interesting concept in play of "ferality," as invasive species become more destructive outside their native habitats, with long-term negative impacts on local populations. It would seem to me that useful work might have been done with this concept, but this book never really came together for me. Perhaps if the writing collective had spent less time patting themselves on the back about the messy mosaic of a book they produced (which they seem to think is innovative in design), and more about structuring their arguments in a convincing fashion, they might have had something.
I thus can't recommend this book, and if your instructor inflicts this on you I have all due sympathy for your plight. I know that I'm not suggesting it to my nephew who is in environmental studies.
I really didn't try to do any background research on the reaction to this book, as the title was intriguing enough that I didn't have to be "sold." First off, I was surprised that this book was written by anthropologists, not by zoologists or environmental specialists. Had I been aware of that at the start my expectations would have been different, but I still might have picked it up; having had some graduate-school exposure to ethnography.
The real issue here is that this is not so much a field guide, as it is a polemic to encourage people to generate the case work needed to produce that field guide. There is an interesting concept in play of "ferality," as invasive species become more destructive outside their native habitats, with long-term negative impacts on local populations. It would seem to me that useful work might have been done with this concept, but this book never really came together for me. Perhaps if the writing collective had spent less time patting themselves on the back about the messy mosaic of a book they produced (which they seem to think is innovative in design), and more about structuring their arguments in a convincing fashion, they might have had something.
I thus can't recommend this book, and if your instructor inflicts this on you I have all due sympathy for your plight. I know that I'm not suggesting it to my nephew who is in environmental studies.
January 15, 2025
just incredible!!!! though admittedly very steeped in academic sentence structure, Field Guide to a Patchy Anthropocene is otherwise a fascinating read. it takes every way of collecting and understanding ecological history and successfully turns it on its head. i wouldve loved all the illustrations to be full color and full page but a girl can dream.
would recommend
would recommend
September 3, 2025
An interesting exploration of the various forms of human-caused environmental changes other than the typical climate framing, like the way irrigation projects create the perfect habitats for invasive water hyacinth that choke waterways when naturally flowing water keeps them under control, or 'coffee rust' that thrives in monocrop coffee plantations and then breaks containment to devastate the surrounding ecologies, or algae blooms and comb jellies thriving from fertilizer runoff. lots of stories of humankind its own (and our non-human neighbors) worst problems through hubris and industrial scale agriculture, infrastructure, trade, etc. a bit dry and academic at times but a unique and essential perspective.
and the operative question explored here is: how do we map these? and they have some interesting concepts and approaches. it's a companion piece to a website the authors made called Feral Atlas which I haven't yet poked around on but certainly will.
and the operative question explored here is: how do we map these? and they have some interesting concepts and approaches. it's a companion piece to a website the authors made called Feral Atlas which I haven't yet poked around on but certainly will.
March 22, 2026
Very interesting premise and some very interesting practical cases. The writing is however hard to follow, and not because this is especially academic. It felt way too much as superficial as essays and too often as grandiloquent as a lot of artistic endeavours/descriptions/connections.
October 21, 2026
3/5
If I wanted to read Feral Atlas I would have read it. So much of this book felt like a sales pitch to get me to read that instead of focusing on this work.
If I wanted to read Feral Atlas I would have read it. So much of this book felt like a sales pitch to get me to read that instead of focusing on this work.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews