Ferality is a concept that in recent years has been taken up by scholars working outside (or in tandem with) its traditional field of ecology. Feral comes from the Latin ferus, meaning ‘wild’. Geographer Maan Barua notes that in a strictly ecological sense, ferality is about when things “escap[e] captivity,” shifting “from being subject to forces of ‘artificial selection’ via human agency to be acted upon, once again, by processes of ‘natural selection’ (2022, pp. 897-898, citing Allaby, 2010, p. 148). In his essay on feral ornamental plants, biologist Ingo Kowarik extends the concept explicitly to plants “escaped from cultivation” (Kowarik, 2005).
Feral organisms thrive in the simplified ecologies of the Anthropocene. Anthropologist Anna Tsing and colleagues (Barua, 2022; Tsing, 2016a; Tsing et al., 2017; Tsing, Mathews, & Bubandt, 2019) have adopted the concept as a way to think through the unintentional, cascading and more-than-human effects of human action, particularly with regard to state or capitalist industrial development schemes following the Great Acceleration (Bubandt & Tsing, 2018). They term the ecologies which emerge from such escape as “feral ecologies”: those “ecologies that have been encouraged by human-built infrastructures, but which have developed and spread beyond human control” (Tsing, Deger, Keleman Saxena, & Zhou, 2020).
The Tree with a Thousand Faces 