The Industrial Revolution has written its signature on the Earth. The acceleration and proliferation of fossil fuel use, factories, transport, and human populations have changed the growth and ecology of mosses and lichens. For the digital exhibition Feral Atlas, I explored the ways these vegetal sensors register the effects of climate change and signal threats to ecological communities. “As Lichens Absorb Air Pollution, They Show Us the Limits of Livability” draws on Citizen Sense Wild Sensing fieldwork.
Feral Atlas invites you to navigate the land-, sea-, and airscapes of the Anthropocene. It has been designed to reward exploration. Taken together, the 79 field reports within Feral Atlas present a distinctive reorientation towards seeing, knowing — and further attending to — the proliferating environmental challenges of our times. This transdisciplinary study of the Anthropocene urges a collective shift in how we make sense of the world.
Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene is edited by Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, and Feifei Zhou, and published by Stanford University Press.