Anna Tsing: “All forms of reconnection between humans and the earth are important, even if they take place on a rooftop”

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Witnessing the violence of Trumpism, the American anthropologist advocates an approach to the ecological crisis through the study of local situations, "patches" in which biodiversity is threatened by human activities. Fortunately, there are also places of refuge, which must be absolutely defended.

Water hyacinths cover the Citarum River in Bandung, West Java, Indonesia, on June 4, 2025. (Timur Matahari/AFP)

Black Sea, 1989. Underwater, overfishing and the dumping of effluents linked to intensive agriculture are drastically reducing the number of fish. Introduced by international trading ships that dump water from elsewhere, a species of jellyfish is finally taking their place. It will take the equally accidental arrival of another jellyfish feeding on the previous ones for the environment to regain a certain diversity.

For American anthropologist Anna Tsing, who gained notoriety in France in 2017 with her book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Living in the Ruins of Capitalism (La Découverte), this case study is what is called a "patch" : a relatively small area (the Black Sea is an exception) that is the scene of an ecological crisis, or even collapse. The destabilization of ecosystems is generally triggered by two elements. One is the fortuitous arrival of an animal or plant species—so-called "feral" species. The other is the presence of the infrastructure of the capitalist world: merchant ships, dams, and other intensive plantations transform landscapes and upset natural balances.

In Our New Nature. Field Guide to the Anthropocene (Seuil), the latest book she has published with her three colleagues Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou, translated by Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers, Anna Tsing de

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