REFLECTIONS

on the
PLANTATIONOCENE
a conversation with
Donna Haraway
& Anna Tsing
moderated by Gregg Mitman
This PDF booklet was published on June 18, 2019 by
Edge Effects Magazine with support from the Center for
Culture, History, and Environment in the Nelson Institute
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Layout design by Nicole Bennett.

Editing by Addie Hopes and Laura Perry.

Cover Photo: An oil palm plantation in Grand Cape Mount County, Liberia,
operated by Sime Darby Plantation. Sime Darby is the world’s largest palm
oil plantation company by planted area. It was granted a concession by the
Liberian government in 2009 for a 63-year lease on up to 220,000 hectares
to grow monoculture oil palm. Still from The Land Beneath Our Feet (2016).
Photo credit: Sarita Siegel

Additional support provided by the Center for Humanities, the

Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center for Science and Technology
Studies, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Copyright
Unless specified otherwise, this work is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0
International License.
REFLECTIONS ON THE PLANTATIONOCENE 1

Preface
Few scholars have been as influential as
Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing in imagining
new ways of being in a multispecies world
at the edge of extinction. Donna Haraway,
Distinguished Professor Emerita of the History of Consciousness department
and the Feminist Studies department at the University of California, Santa
Cruz, has continually pushed the field of science and technology studies in new
directions, traversing and weaving together work in feminism, animal studies,
ecology, science fiction, developmental biology, and the history of science, among
other fields, into a distinctive voice committed to the flourishing of human and
nonhuman life and in search of a more equitable and just world. Anna Tsing is
Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Between
2013 and 2018, she was a Niels Bohr Professor at Aarhus University where she
led the Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA) group. She
brings to her work an openness and curiosity to the multifarious entanglements
of human and nonhuman life and, through her mastery of the arts of noticing
and her gifts as a storyteller, opens our eyes to the many possibilities of living
on a damaged planet.

We were delighted to have these two creative and inspiring thinkers join us at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in a wide-ranging conversation on the
Plantationocene—a proposed alternate name for the epoch often called the
Anthropocene—on April 18, 2019. The conversation took place on the University of
Wisconsin-Madison campus, the ancestral lands of the Peoria, Miami, Meskwaki,
Sauk and Ho-Chunk peoples, who were forcibly displaced from their home areas
through acts of violence and dispossession. Over the course of the evening, the
discussion spanned from the possibilities and limits of the Anthropocene as a
new geologic epoch, to the enduring legacies of the plantation, to the symbiotic
and mutualistic associations that constitute all forms of life, to the capacity of
joy and play in a world facing warming temperatures, rising seas, accelerating
species extinction, and widespread land dispossession.

Gregg Mitman
Vilas Research and William Coleman Professor of
History, Medical History, and Environmental Studies
Department of Medical History and Bioethics
University of Wisconsin-Madison
 A grove of Hevea brasiliensis in Liberia. Unknown to Africa, the tree, which grew wild in Brazil, was domesticated in the
Malay Archipelago, and introduced to Liberia as a plantation crop in the early 1900s. Courtesy of Gregg Mitman.

Reflections on the Plantationocene:

A Conversation with Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing
Gregg Mitman
Well, welcome. Thank you so much for being here. It’s an honor and delight
to have you both here together. I want to start with this concept that we’ve
been hearing a lot about lately, the Anthropocene—this notion of the age of the
human, that we are now living in a geologic age where humans are a geomorphic
force on the planet at the planetary scale. I know both of you have somewhat
different relationships to this concept, and I’m wondering if you could just tell us
a little bit about what possibilities it offers, what limitations it poses, and why it
angers you so, Donna?

Donna Haraway
Or does it still?
REFLECTIONS ON THE PLANTATIONOCENE 3

Mitman
Let’s begin there.

Anna Tsing
I use the concept of the Anthropocene despite acknowledging the importance
of many criticisms, including Donna’s, concerning how this word can mislead us.
There are two reasons that I use the word anyway. Maybe a third reason is my
general position that it’s better to try to add meanings to words rather than to
subtract words. But there are two substantive reasons. The first is that it’s the
term that allows interdisciplinary conversation between natural scientists and
humanists, and I think that conversation is essential to learning anything about
what’s going on in our planet these days.

The second reason has to do with some of the very worst things about the term’s
Enlightenment legacy. The term appeals to a false universal of homogenous
“Man,” which was created with a white, Christian, heterosexual male person as
the basis for the universal. Paying attention to that legacy can help us to figure
out what’s happening on the planet. It allows us to ask, for example, why so
many landscape modification projects were made without thinking at all about
what their effects might be on the people who live around them as well as local
ecologies. That problematic legacy can help us focus in on the uneven, unequal
features of planetary environmental issues.

Haraway
It’s not that I disagree with anything that Anna said, and I also tend to want to work
by addition and not by subtraction, multiplying terms to a point where you can
foreground them and background them to do different work differently situated.

Also, I think the term Anthropocene has simply been adopted, and that it is no
longer a question about whether to work within this category in productive ways
and in the kinds of alliances that it encourages. I share very much with Anna the
sense that my natural science colleagues understand the Anthropocene and
can speak to me or to others about it while other terms—like Capitalocene, for
example—kind of put them off. But this strength is also a problem. My natural
science colleagues—and for that matter myself and my colleagues in general—
have a tendency to think that apparatuses and terminologies like, for example,
climate change are going to be translatable somehow to all parts of the world,
even if the phenomena in question are experienced differently.

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 4 DONNA HARAWAY & ANNA TSING

For example, the astute peoples of the circumpolar north have developed
Indigenous vocabularies and both analytical and experiential ways of talking
about the changes in the ice, the changes in the waters, the changes in the position
of stars in the sky because of the way sea ice and fog will refract differently
and so on. These people who live on the land might react to the notion of
climate change as another southern
importation that tends, yet once
again, to make it almost impossible
to propose local terms for analytical
The plantation disrupts
work. I want to nurture—to somehow the generation times
force, if necessary—the attachment
sites and contact zones so that all of
of all the players. It
the players have to somehow learn radically simplifies the
each other’s idioms in a way that
changes everybody so that no one
number of players and
remains the same as they were at sets up situations for
the beginning and can perhaps find
more collaborative, decolonial ways
the vast proliferation
to address urgent problems. Often, of some and the
Indigenous people are forced to learn
southern idioms, but the reverse is
removal of others.
much less true. That is not tolerable.

The power of a term like Anthropocene, it’s importance, has a very problematic
quality. Then I’m also less generous than Anna about the potential of
remembering the Enlightenment dimension of the “Anthropos” and of “Man”
because I experience, in fact, among my colleagues across activist and scholarly
worlds, a tendency to think that Anthropocene really does mean a species act.
That the problem really is humanity, not “Man” in the Enlightenment sense,
but humanity in its evolutionary social history on this planet—its increase in
numbers, its increase in demands. This strengthens the illusion that turning all
that is Earth into resource for humanity is inevitable, if tragic.

There’s a way in which the Anthropocene is considered a species act as opposed

to an historical, situated set of conjunctures that are absolutely not a species
act. Most peoples on this planet have precisely not lived and exercised the same
kinds of processes that break generations, that radically simplify ecologies, that
drastically force labor in a mass way that creates a kind of global transformation

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and global wealth that is in and of itself genocidal and extinctionist. That is not a
species act; it’s a situated historical set of conjunctures, and I think to this day the
term Anthropocene makes it harder, not easier, for people to understand that.

Mitman
You talked about proliferation of terms and the importance of that in terms of
generative thinking. You yourself have really helped us with that in generating
some more ‘cenes beyond the Capitalocene. In the midst of a conversation
around the Anthropocene that you and Anna had at Aarhus a few years ago,
you said, “Well, what about the Plantationocene?” We’re very grateful to you for
that, because it’s something we’ve taken up here and are really playing with and
thinking deeply about. So, what is the Plantationocene? Why did you feel the
need to introduce that term? Maybe we could just begin with this question: what
is a plantation? This is actually not so simple. We’ve been wrestling with that
definition here in the conversations and seminars we’ve been having.

Haraway
We were wrestling with it, too. And I think this goes back to your introduction,
to the notion of land. In that conversation at Aarhus, we had an anthropologist
who was studying palm oil plantations and other extractive modes of agriculture
and elimination of mixed forest along rivers in Malaysia. We had a landscape
historian who was astutely attuned to the ways multiple enclosures in Britain
and Europe changed landscape forms and modes of living across species. We
had Anna with both the work in Southeast Asia with the Meratus Dayak and with
the transformations in Borneo from the implantation of industrial forest and the
elimination of various kinds of swidden agricultural and forest living practices as
serious systems for sustenance as well as market exchanges. We had this range
of concerns, including a sense of needing to think about the plants, to actually
care about the plants and their companions, human and not.

There is a way in which the Plantationocene forces attention to the growing of

food and the plantation as a system of multispecies forced labor. The plantation
system speeds up generation time. The plantation disrupts the generation
times of all the players. It radically simplifies the number of players and sets
up situations for the vast proliferation of some and the removal of others. It’s
an epidemic friendly way of rearranging species life in the world. It is a system
that depends on forced human labor of some kind because if labor can escape,
it will escape the plantation. The plantation system requires either genocide or

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removal or some mode of captivity and replacement of a local labor force by

coerced labor from outside, either through various forms of indenture, unequal
contract, or out-and-out slavery. The plantation really depends on very intense
forms of labor slavery, including also machine labor slavery, a building of
machines for exploitation and extraction of earthlings. I think it is also important
to include the forced labor of nonhumans—plants, animals, and microbes—in
our thinking.

So, when I think about the question, what is a plantation, some combination of
these things seems to me to be pretty much always present across a 500-year
period: radical simplification; substitution of peoples, crops, microbes, and life
forms; forced labor; and, crucially, the disordering of times of generation across
species, including human beings. I’m avoiding the word reproduction because of
its productionist aspect, but I want to emphasize the radical interruption of the
possibility of the care of generations and, as Anna taught me, the breaking of the
tie to place—that the capacity to love and care for place is radically incompatible
with the plantation. Thinking from the plantation, all of those things seem to be
always present in various combinations.

Tsing
I’ll just add briefly that the term plantation for me evokes the heritage of a
particular set of histories involving what happened after the European invasion
of the New World, particularly involving the capture of Africans as enslaved
labor and the simplification of crops so as to allow enslaved laborers to be the
agricultural workers. In many small, independent farming situations, dozens of
crops are raised that need to be tended by farmers who are invested in attending
to each one. In designing systems for coerced labor, ecological simplifications
entered agriculture. The plantation was precisely the conjuncture between
ecological simplifications, the discipline of plants in particular, and the discipline
of humans to work on those. That legacy, which I think is very much with us
today, is so naturalized that many people believe that that is the meaning of the
term agriculture; we forget that there are other ways to farm. The plantation
takes us into that discipline-of-people/discipline-of-plants conjuncture.

Mitman
I’m curious, Donna, you mentioned that you thought forced labor was an integral
part of the plantation. Yet we see today, for example, particularly on oil palm
plantations, which is a huge issue right now across many parts of the world,

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work being done through paid

wage labor. It’s not forced labor,
and yet there is still this notion
of ecological simplification,
which I think is really, really
critical and which both of your
work has really brought to us.
In the context, say, of rubber
plantations in Liberia, you
had more than 15,000 people
working a modern, industrial
plantation by hand, not by
machines. Do we need to think
about the plantation in the
context of forced labor? Or do
we need to think about it in
the context of just large-scale
manual labor?

Haraway
I would not for a minute equate
hereditary human slavery and
wage labor. I think there is a
tremendous, obvious violence in
any such equation. On the other
A Firestone worker skillfully cuts a “V” into the bark of the rubber
hand, the disciplining of human tree, Hevea brasiliensis, out of which the milky-white sap, latex,
labor in such a way that reduce will flow. In the 1920s, natural rubber was the fourth largest import
the degrees of freedom of the into the United States and drove the development of plantations
laborer to do anything other around the world, including this one in Liberia by the Firestone Tire
than that demanded labor is and Rubber Company. Courtesy of Gregg Mitman.
part of what I mean by the term
force. And maybe a radical reduction of degrees of freedom for determining
lifeways, food-getting practices, where your children are going to work, at what
age your children are going to work, and where you’re going to live. This existed
in the older systems of plantations that didn’t rely directly on hereditary slavery
but other modes—for example, various kinds of tax systems and constricted
wage labor systems. Plantation agriculture in Hawai‘i, for example, was never
directly slave labor, but it was differentiated by racial group. It depended on

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 8 DONNA HARAWAY & ANNA TSING

long-term contracts with spatially displaced people, which amounted to forced

labor, and it produced and reproduced very distinct racial categories that trouble
the Hawaiian Islands to this day. This was not free labor.

I would also argue in relation to, say, modern chicken farming, which I regard
as a plantation system. The contractors in modern chicken farming might be
“independent contractors,” but the nature of their contracts is such that they
really have almost no degrees of freedom. They have to buy chicks of a certain
genetic composition at a certain age and feed them a certain feed formulation.
There is a certain kind of chicken housing situation that requires certain kinds of
technological upgrading for the management of air circulation, waste disposal,
etc., in a highly regulatory apparatus that requires massive investment that
produces a form of debt farming. It produces a kind of mortgage captivity. This
is also true in Midwestern monocrop grain farming; the mortgage captivity of
even supposedly wealthy farmers is legendary. Then chicken farmers have to
sell the chicks; they must gain weight at such and such a rate, they have to
be sold at such and such an age, and so on and so on. This is not hereditary
slavery nor is it wage labor. It’s independent contract labor. But I think it is a
system of radical reduction of the possibility of what Marx might call vital labor.
It’s the elimination of vital labor or the radical reduction of vital labor. And this
disordering and blasting of vital labor is a multispecies affair.

Tsing
I’ll just add two small points. One is to recall into the conversation anthropologist
Sidney Mintz’s argument that plantation enslaved labor inspired factory wage
labor through its model of discipline and alienation. Wage labor, which of course
followed plantation labor, was modeled on two aspects of it, discipline and
alienation, so that even with wage labor we live in that legacy of the plantation.
The second point is the importance, which I think Donna already mentioned,
of displacement and dispossession. In every case I can think of, plantations
dispossess both Indigenous people and indigenous ecologies and bring in not
only exotic plants but people from other places. The oil palm plantations that I’m
familiar with in Indonesia, for example, have brought in Javanese transmigrant
laborers just as they displace the local people who lived there before. While the
people are not a part of a system of indenture, they are there in part because
they’ve been removed from their home places and sent to this other place to
work on these plantations. At the same time, local people are being asked to
give up the places that they have lived for millenia.

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Pickers harvest strawberries from a field in California. The majority of farmworkers do not have the security of year-round, full-
time employment. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that California farmworkers earn an average $17,500 a year, which
is little more than half the annual earnings of a full-time equivalent worker in California. Photo by Glenn Nelson, 2009.

Mitman
It seems to me—and maybe this is what you were thinking about as you
introduced the term—that the act of dispossession that happens in any
plantation, anywhere on the planet, really points to the deep environmental
and social inequalities that emerge and allow certain human beings to flourish,
like many of us in this room, and others to suffer in that process in a way that
the Anthropocene doesn’t capture because there is, as you said to begin with,
this universal “we.”

Haraway
Or, I think working from the plantation as a starting point—or the Plantationocene
as one of the categories within which to think, not to the exclusion of others—
really does encourage remembering that point with force. I’m thinking of the

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10 DONNA HARAWAY & ANNA TSING

Central Valley of California or the strawberry land around the Monterey Bay and
the radical importance of immigrant labor that is displaced from home places.
There’s a serious climate migration right now across the southern U.S. border
into Texas and California. People from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras—
still losing land for the reasons for which they’ve always been dispossessed
in the inequalities of Central American society—are also abandoning farms
as it becomes impossible to get a reliable harvest because of climate change.
There is this radical loss of home. Yet the required labor force for the crops
of the Central Valley, which in turn depend on a water engineering system
that turns water into a mined resource so that
you have depletion of the aquifer and subsidence
of the soils and desertification across this area, is
composed of an essentially coerced labor force
that’s highly vulnerable and kept vulnerable by law
and by practice—kept illegal and deportable, for one
thing. This kind of vulnerability goes with that type
of farming; it’s not slavery, but it is the kind of labor
force that I associate with plantation conditions.

I think another aspect of plantation transformations

of place is not just unsustainability but out-and-
out exterminism. I think of the desertification of
the Central Valley. I think of the degree to which
plantations destroy their own base, exhaust soils,
exhaust peoples, exhaust plants and animals, and
proliferate pathologic pathogens. There are many
kinds of farming that are destructive, but I think
it is diagnostic of plantations that they have a
relationship to exterminism that is more intense.

Tsing
On the topic of dispossession, I just wanted to add a
vivid image from the period when they were making Pathogens and pests of the plantation.
Top: coffee berries show signs of infection
the oil palm plantations in the place that I did my
by the fungus Cercospora coffeicola
research in Kalimantan, Indonesia. At that time, they (photo by Scot Nelson, 2016). Bottom:
were not only getting rid of local villagers, but also a coconut rhinoceros beetle, oryctes
of the rain forest with which those people lived, and rhinoceros, common pest of palm plants
animals were running out every day from that now (photo by Arian Suresh, 2015).

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dwindling forest. I had never seen so many animals in my entire life. Animals can
hide very well in the rain forest, so when you walk around in the rain forest, you
don’t see animals. I saw all of the exotic animals because they had no place to go,
and they were running out, displaced from the forest. It’s a vivid image to me of
nonhuman displacement.

And because Donna already brought it up, I’ll say a word about the pathogens,
which I think are incredibly important. Plantations cultivate, if you would, pests
and pathogens, and in several different ways.

One is that plantations gather pathogens and

change their reproductive strategies because of
the monocrop availability of huge amounts of food
resources for the pathogens. This swamps an area
with pests and pathogens. Second, plantations allow
sometimes quite rapid transformations of pests and
pathogens that create forms of virulence that didn’t
exist before. The pathogens are experimenting
with ways to make use of the bounty of food in
the plantation. At the same time, plantations are
linked in global commerce. They are often sending
the same materials back and forth across the globe,
allowing hybridization across closely related but
geographically separated pathogen species. These
hybridizations produce pathogens that can attack
new hosts and in innovative ways. So we see a
proliferation of newly virulent pathogens that is really
unheard of in the world as far as I can see. They do
not stay on the plantation. They make other kinds of
agriculture, such as small-holder peasant cultivation,
much more difficult than they were before.

Top: fungal disease Fusarium wilt, also

Mitman
known as Panama disease, has severely
We could talk about the industrial ecologies of the
impacted banana cultivation (photo by
Scot Nelson, 2017). Bottom: the infamous plantation and the way in which technoscience is
boll weevil, Anthonomus grandis, feeds mobilized to sustain that and to reproduce it. So
on the bud of a cotton plant (photo by the much of your work—both of your work—is really
U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2007). not about ecological simplification, but is instead

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12 DONNA HARAWAY & ANNA TSING

thinking about multispecies flourishing, even in plantations and highly disturbed

landscapes. Donna, you originally were trained in biology and worked with one
of the foremost ecologists of the 20th century, George Evelyn Hutchinson, if
I’m not mistaken. And Anna, you hang out with mycologists and ecologists and
foresters all the time. I am wondering why you think it’s important to ponder
and think with other lifeforms that we human beings are in relationship with?
What possibilities does that create for thinking about alternative futures? What
is the humanities when we start thinking about other forms of life that live in
very, very different ways than humans do?

Haraway
I’m astonished that this isn’t simply the default position of everybody’s thinking.
Gregg, this is a question from you that’s particularly rich. I’m thinking of your first
book, which was a marvelous treatment of community ecology in the Chicago
School and the work of W.C. Allee. This was an ecology that emphasizes mutualist
interactions and cooperative biological metabolisms. I think we both have shared
throughout our entire thinking lives tremendous loyalty to the biologists and
the sociologists and the activists and the farmers and the rest who understand
the connectedness, the relationality of everything that is. Now also, even settler
scholars—we—have no excuse for not knowing the extraordinary contemporary
writing and scholarship from Indigenous authors on constitutive relatedness of
many kinds. For example, I’m thinking of Zoe Todd’s work on kin-making and
fish pluralities. As Scott Gilbert put it, we are all lichens. Anne Pringle may be in
the audience and especially appreciate this very important truth of the world:
the understanding that critters in the world are compositions that hold together
well enough to get through the day, and that in living and dying in concert with
each other, in building and decay and catabolism and anomalism or whatever
the 19th century physiologists wanted to call it, we are earthlings, living and
dying with each other. And this way of affirming being an earthling is one kind of
counter to the transcendentalism of philosophy and science and politics and the
various trajectories of, essentially, commitments to deathlessness. I think one
of the aspects of being committed to biology is being committed to mortality,
that we live within the time-space domains of the living and dying. I am not and
never have been a pro-life activist, including in my biology.

I want to say a word about G. Evelyn Hutchinson, who was indeed my dissertation
adviser, thank the powers of the Earth. It was an extraordinary privilege, in no
small part because this was a man who was committed to biogeochemistry,

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had read the Russians, who was alert to

the metabolisms of the planet before
What gave us Lovelock and Margulis invented the term
Gaia, and who was deeply interested
the crazy idea in questioning the systematicity of the

that sociality exchange and metabolisms of the planet.

He was a mathematically astute materialist
was limited to systems thinker. He’s the one who first
brought up global warming to me when I
humans? was a graduate student in the late 1960s
because he was aware that the data were
already coming. The word Anthropocene,
of course, did not exist, but he was already worried about what was going to
happen as the reproductive linkage of pollinators and flowers would get out of
sync because of the different hatching times of insects compared to flowering
times. He was already deeply worried about the disruption of generational
synchronicity in organisms that needed each other, and he was always thinking
in terms of the rocks as well as the critters, the waters, and the great metabolic
cycles that make the earth what it is in the zones where life can possibly exist.
Then, he was spending his summers looking at Italian illuminated manuscripts
because he was really interested in the birds in the marginalia of 13th-century
Italian prayer books and so on. It was a kind of curiosity about the metabolisms
of the world that I feel like I inherited. This was generational kin making.

Tsing
Let’s bring the conversation back to the question, why work with biologists?
A colleague of mine, Shiho Satsuka, is writing a book called Undoing the 20th
Century, and even the title alone suggests that part of the problem is a rather
strange state of affairs where we didn’t work with biologists. I don’t know how
many of you out there are social scientists as I am, but what gave us the crazy
idea that sociality was limited to humans? It’s such an extraordinary thing when
you look back on it now, that we could come up with a whole set of disciplines
in which only humans were important. That was a big part of this 20th-century
program for human advancement, which didn’t involve anybody else except us.

You still see it very much today in all these programs who want to send people off
to Mars and other places to establish a new planet. It turns out that we can’t live
by ourselves. All of the kinds of interdependencies across species, across many

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kinds of organisms, are absolutely essential to life, and we can’t do it alone. In

that sense, just to describe the world the way it is now, it seems to me we really
need to know both human and the nonhuman dynamics, revising our ideas
about social relations into a much broader sense of the term. It’s about time,
I guess, that we all started thinking about our situation in a way that includes
plants, animals, microbes, and more, before we destroy them all.

Mitman
Yeah, I agree. It is about time. It’s
striking how much even within just
the discipline of biology, Darwinian
evolution so reigned and so pushed
out symbiotic thinking and symbiosis
and mutualism, as if these were
somehow aberrant categories to think
with. That really reinforced this notion
of the autonomous individual self,
whether it’s in biology or whether it’s
in the humanities.

Why now? Why do you think there is

suddenly this recognition? We can go
back to people like Allee, Proudhon,
and generations of past biologists
that were really thinking about
mutualism all along and yet were
A crab spider rests on the non-photosynthetic plant,
really marginalized. Now we see this
Monotropastrum humile. Because the plant cannot
perform photosynthesis, it relies on a mycorrhizal fungal moment when we recognize this is
network to provide it with the sugars and nutrients really important work to be thinking
necessary for its survival. Photo by Daiju Azuma, 2006. with. It’s curious. Why now?

Haraway
I think there are many ways to consider that question, and I think some of it
has to do with the technological capability within the biologies to actually show
phenomena that were thought possibly to exist but truly could not be shown.
There’s an irony in the way in which the apparatuses of molecular biology,
accused of so much reductionism, allow the demonstration of mutualisms at
every level of being.

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For example, today it is possible to study in chemical and ultrastructural detail

the cues for larval settlement from a bacterium releasing a molecule that can be
discriminated in the water column at such and such a dilution that can interact
at such and such a time in developmental history and result in settlement and
metamorphosis of a particular invertebrate, and so forth. These things were
simply not technically possible to show and confirm, and knowing them matters.

But I also think there are probably more profound explanations. I think that
systems theories deserve a lot of credit and blame. Systems thinking challenges
the categories of preformed units and relations in organizational arrangements.
Relating, active like a gerund, not units plus relations, is at the root of much
systems thinking. I think that the rearrangements of capital, the rearrangements
of finance, are every bit as much tuned to these kinds of elaborate mutualisms
as the biologies are. That reminds me as an historian of biology that biology is
responsible for producing the organism as an entity in the world, which is to
say a system of production, reproduction, and command control. This includes
the apparatuses of the division of labor, of executive function, and things
like feed conversion ratios that are critical to the animal industrial complex. I
remember the degree to which the calorimeter was part of the labor discipline
of the plantation and its offspring, the factory. Biology has been part of the
worlding of the Capitalocene at every step of the way, and biology is also crucial
to resistance and regeneration. My point is that worlding—making worlds—is in
play and at stake in doing biology.

Political economy and natural economy have been twins, and it’s still true. I don’t
think of the biologies of mutualism and so forth as in any sense innocent. I think
it’s an historical conjuncture, and I’m interested very much in allying myself with
the forces within this that I think are conducive to worlds that I, we, want to live
in—can live in. The enemy is not the mis-named reductionist; the enemy is the
extractor and the exploiter.

Tsing
The only way I know how to answer a why now question is through historical
conjunctures. But before I get to an example, I want to add to Donna’s point
about technological capacity with another piece of that story, which is that the
ease of getting DNA sequenced today has created histories of other organisms
that we couldn’t have before. Phylogeographies now are so much easier and
more developed. I learned from my colleague Paulla Ebron, for example, that

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the Aedes aegypti mosquito that carries yellow fever and now Zika and lots of
other diseases is a particular species developed on slave ships coming to the
New World. It combined features that before were only known separately, from
the Mediterranean, on the one hand, and from West Africa, on the other. The
Mediterranean feature of living only around human water sources and the West
African feature of carrying yellow fever came together in a new variant of Aedes
aegypti that didn’t exist before. This is the kind of history of nonhuman organisms
that we couldn’t have done a few years ago, so it’s really extraordinary to me that
that kind of work can be done. It changes our understanding of the experience
of slavery to understand the burden of diseases of enslaved people.

Before we get off the why now, I wanted to point to one tiny conjuncture,
which has to do with Donna’s own work. I’m just amazed at the wonderful
communication between a developmental biologist Scott Gilbert who is a
friend of Donna’s and Donna in pushing forward a field. Scott Gilbert himself
has been responsible for a lot of the theoretical thinking about how organisms
develop together across species rather than autonomously. He is also reading
Donna’s work, so that in the most recent edition of his textbook on ecological
evolutionary developmental biology, there’s a mention of the Plantationocene
in the theoretical section at the end.

These threads came together at the time Donna came to Aarhus; Scott Gilbert
was there also. We had another developmental biologist giving a talk and he
said, “During my training, I read Scott Gilbert during the day and Donna Haraway
at night.” Hopefully we’re producing a new set of young people who know how
to read across some of these boundaries.

Haraway
Little did he know that Scott Gilbert did a master’s degree in history of biology
with me at Johns Hopkins, while I brought my graduate students in history of
science into Scott’s lab for various kinds of lab work that he set up for them.
This is an old symbiosis that works through generous institutions and personal
friendships and lateral mentoring.

Mitman
It’s about time for us to open up the discussion to the collectivity, but I do want to
ask you one last question. Inevitably, in these seminars that we’ve been running,
in these round tables, the question of hope comes up—and heart. Anna, you’ve

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talked about the hope of thinking of life in the ruins. And Donna, you’ve spoken
about hope and staying with the trouble. I’m wondering if you can say more
about that. What does it mean to hope in living in a damaged planet?

Tsing
I think we don’t have any choices Part of what going
except to try to do our best to live
with others and go forward. I think
forward means ... is
we need all kinds of storytelling and telling some really
appreciation, from science through
every other genre we can think of,
terrible stories
in order to do that. I will also say about what’s going
that because one of the responses
to my book on mushrooms was, oh,
on in the world.
everything’s going to work out just fine
because you’re so optimistic, that really
turned me towards the Plantationocene to say, I don’t think that’s true. We can’t
just sit back and think everything’s going to work out. Part of what going forward
means to me is telling some really terrible stories about what’s going on in the
world. I feel that humanists and social scientists have lost track of how to do
that. We’re so busy generating stories of hope sometimes, and I’m implicating
myself too, that we have to relearn some of the arts of storytelling for telling
terrible things that we need to know about. These are necessary for our ability
to work well with others.

Haraway
I think that we need to cultivate the practices of keeping heart, of giving each
other the capacity to get up in the morning with a certain capacity for play and
joy. This is not simple, and it takes many kinds of sensibilities, particularly in
times of accelerating crisis and mass extinction and many other things. For
me, part of what helps is a firm conviction that we really do need one another’s
sensibilities here, including ones which insist, not so fast with your happy story,
lady. We really need each other’s sensibilities to collect up the range of skill
and affect and commitment that will enable us to live in a thick present. I don’t
so much have hope as what I call heart, because I try to cultivate a way of
thinking that is not futurist but rather thinks of the present as a thick, complex
tangle of times and places in which cultivating response-abilities, capacities to
respond, matters.

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I was instructed in this by Deborah Bird Rose and her work with Australian
Aboriginal teachers from the Yarralin community in the Northern Territory of
Australia. Her teachers talked to her about how a serious adult person takes care
of country—the Anglo translation of that extraordinary complex of ancestors,
living beings both human and more than human, landscapes, and more that
constitute country. Contemporary living people are responsible for taking care
of country, which means facing those who came before so as to leave to those
who come after less wild, less blasted country. You don’t look forward toward
those who come next. Mind you, the people who are telling Deborah Bird Rose
this have experienced the elimination of approximately 80 to 90% of their own
genealogical lines and dream lines and tracks. These are people who have been
subjected to the end of the world in an extremely radical way, who are talking to
her about continuing to take care of country and to continue to care for the lines
that still exist as well as being somewhat open to building in new dream tracks
and new lines in country, to make kin in new and old ways. There’s a complex
set of relationships here.

But this kind of present—the Anglophone word for the time of being serious
about taking care of country—is about a hundred years in duration. It’s the time
of the possibility of telling stories about named beings, people whose names
you remember or somebody remembers, or an animal you encountered. The
storytelling has the quality of a life story, that’s the present. The present is about
a hundred years, not instantaneous but thick.

I like that way of thinking about how we somehow cobble together the capacity
to do the kind of repairing that can be done, to block that kind of onrushing
damage that can be blocked, to affirm mortality and to refuse various kinds of
techno-optimism or techno-pessimism and to truly refuse transcendence in all
its forms, which involves a kind of understanding that there will be no status quo
ante. There will be no going back to some fully repaired place. That is not the
same thing as saying there can be no repair, restoration, restitution, cobbling
together again, and including new stuff, beings who are coming into the world,
ways of living in the world that haven’t been on this planet before.

I think every single time critters play with each other, a couple of dogs, for
example, they’re using their inherited repertoire. They’re choreographing in a
biologically pre-saturated way, and in any play bout worth the name of play,
they take that inherited set of capacities and they do something with it that has

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quite literally never happened on this planet before. Play is exactly that. It is that
taking up of inheritance in choreographies and interactions that produce what
has truly never been on this planet before. Play is sustained by joy. Nobody is
going to stay in a play bout unless it’s sustained by joy. For one thing, it’s too
dangerous. Play is never safe. There’s something about that that feels to me
really fundamental to being an organism.

Audience Question
A number of livestream viewers are very interested in the idea of joy. They’re
wondering if you could speak a little bit more about joy that sustains within the
work you do and the work that those interested in speaking in a dying world will
do to sustain us.

Haraway
I want to appeal to Deborah Bird Rose again to do this. She died a few months
ago, and she’s been much on my mind because she gave me, us, so much. She
wrote in recent years about shimmer, the shimmer of the living world and the
bling, the bling of the living world. She did some very interesting studies of the
flying foxes—the bats, the big bats—and the flowers that they pollinate. They
are highly endangered, they’re highly vulnerable, these bat-flower associations,
and Deborah was really tuned to the Aboriginal peoples who most care about
and knew about the particular pollination relationships of these beings. She
was deeply committed to the wellbeing of the flowers and the flying foxes and
their worlds. She talked about how, when she engaged in working on these very
troubling but important matters, she experienced the shimmer, the sheer bling
of life, when she watched one of those flying foxes. The things that we care
about sustain us because of their bling.

It’s not all that hard to play. It’s actually not all that hard to sustain joy if we let
ourselves. Joy is not innocence; it is openness to caring. If we let pleasure in, if
we let the light in, if we let it seep in, there’s a kind of leaking of the bling of the
world. Really we live on an astonishing planet, and we may as well just let the
astonishment in.

edgeeffects.net
 Acknowledge- The event was part of a John E. Sawyer
Seminar, funded by the Andrew W.
ments Mellon Foundation, which includes a
series of public talks, roundtables,
workshops, film screenings, and library and museum exhibitions running from
February of 2019 to May of 2020, to explore and deepen the concept of the
Plantationocene. The seminar interrogates the past and present of plantations,
their materialities, the economic, ecological, and political transformations they
wrought, and their significance to the making of human bodies, capitalism, and
land over the course of four centuries. Additional support for the event came
from the Center for the Humanities, the Holtz Center for Science and Technology
Studies and the Nelson Institute’s Center for Culture, History, and Environment
at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, along with grants from The Anonymous
Fund, and the Brittingham Funds, for which we are grateful.

Gregg Mitman, Donna Haraway, and Anna Tsing answer audience

questions following their discussion of the Plantationocene at
University of Wisconsin-Madison on April 18, 2019.
Photo by Romulo Ueda.