The Comb Lab Letter : Let’s talk ferality

In our previous letter, we once again called for a link between the global and the local. By this we mean the search for fair and evolving ways of applying global phenomena to the local scale, including our own. This concerns, for example, the decision-making autonomy of local elected representatives when a self-learning machine tells them what the ‘rational’ decision is in situations of multiple choice. In the same way, it will be a question of how to favour the occurrence of rain locally by massifying forest areas with irregular canopies in order to curb periods of drought as much as possible. We have already touched on this subject several times, and will not neglect the opportunity to return to it.

A recently published collective book edited by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing¹ opens with a tale of the wanderings of the red turpentine beetle.

« It lives under the bark of pine trees in poor condition, where it digs tunnels and galledebriefing de l’animation du jeu La Grangeries for its offspring, which can kill the tree by destroying its vascular system. In North America, where it has appeared, it does not cause much damage, even when covered by the fungus Leptographium procerum, which digests the wood, helping the beetle to burrow.

The beetle only attracted attention after hitching a ride on industrial shipments of raw timber exported to Shanxi province in the 1980s. There, it teamed up with a much more powerful local variant of its symbiotic fungus: L. procerum.

Acting in concert, this much more active local fungus and the imported beetle began to kill trees en masse. They have even made the trees work for their own destruction; the fungi have stimulated the trees to produce volatile chemical agents that attract more and more death-causing fungus-covered beetles.

It seems likely that the rich Shanxi fungus will cover the beetles making the return journey on industrial wood to North America. »²

This process of transformation, caused by human infrastructure but beyond the control of the humans who designed it, is called ferality, from feral meaning wild, as the authors explain. Appearing suddenly because it was unexpected, this beetle propels us into the silent transformations finely described by François Jullien.

This beetle is an event. « An event stands out and is detached from this continuous renewal from which duration is born. The event, isolable and self-consistent, by its irruption causes an upheaval that reconfigures all the possibilities invested in it. It breaks in, evading the present moment.»³

In short, human activities and their infrastructures are silently rewilding our local environments. Emerging out of all control, they destabilise the processes installed by our societies and force us to reconfigure the way we operate.

We cannot escape the fact that human infrastructures disorganise, at least temporarily, arrangements between species. This encourages new coordinations within and between animal and plant species.

Beyond the now well-documented phenomena of invasive exotic plants and colonising toxic algae, we need to broaden the manifestations of the dynamic wild state that is remaking the world beyond human control (the process of ferality). Accustomed to the feeling of « mastery over living things », itself enhanced by the exploration of extinct species using highly sophisticated techniques, we are not prepared for unforeseen occurrences. It could be said that the occurrence of events arising from autonomous biological dynamics, free from any control, demonstrates the power of nature in all its rigour.

Let’s finish by pointing out that these phenomena of ferality, of natural rewilding (i.e. beyond man’s control) of certain segments of our environments, can manifest themselves on the scale of large regions of the world or, just as easily, on local or even micro-local scales.

This is an environmental transformation that is gaining a foothold in our advocacy of linking resilience programmes on small territorial scales with larger geographical and administrative scales.

In the face of the uncertainty engendered by large-scale transformations in the world – major meteorological events, geopolitical versatility, the reorganisation of societies by technology – we need to think about new relationships with living things, which have the nerve to neglect our major, yet easily identifiable, concerns.

The conclusion to be drawn from these few lines is to strengthen the trio of local elected representatives, civil society and the world of science, so that we can support our regions in the new world that is emerging even from beneath the bark of our trees.

1 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, Feifei Zhou Notre nouvelle nature, Guide de terrain de l’Anthropocène Paris, Seuil 2025.

2 Ibid p10

3 François Jullien Les Transformations silencieuses. Paris, Grasset, Le livre de poche 2012, p. 116.