Wasteland Ecologies: Undomestication and Multispecies Gains on an Anthropocene Dumping Ground

Abstract

On the western edge of the former brown coal mines in Søby, an area in central Jutland in Denmark that is now protected as a natural and cultural heritage site, a public eyesore hides behind dirt mounds and fences: the waste disposal and recycling facility known as AFLD Fasterholt. Established in the 1970s, when prevailing perceptions were that the entire mining area was a polluted wasteland, the AFLD Fasterholt waste and recycling plant has since changed in response to new EU waste management regulations, as well as the unexpected proliferation of non-human life in the area. Based on field research at this site—an Anthropocene landscape in the heartland of an EU-configured welfare-state—this article is a contribution to the multispecies ethnography and political ecology of wastelands. We argue that “waste” is a co-species, biopolitical happening—a complex symbolic, political, biological, and technological history. We combine ethnographic fieldwork, social history, wildlife observation, and spatial analysis to follow what we call “undomestication,” the reconfiguration of human projects by more-than-human forms of life into novel assemblies of species, politics, resources, and technologies. Waste landscapes, this article argues, are the result of unheralded multispecies collaboration that can be traced empirically by attending ethnographically to multispecies forms of “gain-making,” the ways in which humans and other species leverage difference to find economic and ecological opportunity.

Placing Islam: Geographies of Connection in Twentieth-Century Istanbul

“…These are attempts at making "marginal gains, " as described by Guyer (2004). Also see Hoag, Bertoni, and Bubandt (2018) for a distinct example. See Hetherington (2011) on the ways that rural people practice government by engaging creatively with bureaucratic institutions.…”

Industrializing Bacterial Work: Microbiopolitics, Biogas Alchemy, and the French Waste Management Sector

“…It is a delicate and fragile achievement that sometimes fails to come into being and gives rise to unexpected effects (Holmberg 2021). This lack of control can be seen, according to Hoag, Bertoni, and Bubandt (2018), as a state of "undomestication," a state "whereby particular elements of human domestication are appropriated or undone by non-human species in such a way as to create novel and relatively autonomous relations of human/non-human interdependency" (p. 88). Examples of such phenomena are numerous in wasteland environments, where unanticipated living entities appropriate the space created by humans and compose with their own ecologies (Reno 2016).…”

Off-centring empire in the Anthropocene: towards multispecies intimacies and nonhuman agents of survival

“…Simultaneous to this abandonment, a unique biotope for a variety of species emerged almost unnoticed in the ruins of the imperial brickwork industry. The new species benefitted from the seasonal flooding and drying-up of the ponds, as well as the specific chemical composition of the clay soil (Eder 1999, p. 6) The abandonment of a ruined landscape by humans often proves to be an effective remedy in terms of ecological recovery (Gandy 2013, Hoag et al 2018, Zani 2018. In fact, extinction in the Anthropocene is closely related to the disappearance of seasonally transforming, transitional landscapes.…”

“…Stories narrating how lives and livelihoods emerge from ruins through multispecies collaborations offer important lessons in the Anthropocene, in which narratives of dystopian futures abound. Recent research on the recovery of wastelands through multispecies collaborations constitute an important contribution in this regard (Tsing 2015, Hoag et al 2018. Instead of further cultivating unproductive states of either false hope, panic or indifference, a turn to multispecies entanglements and vincularidad/ interdependence provides an alternative perspective for navigating the Anthropocene.…”