Feral qualities

Feral Qualities offer an alternative analytic route that can potentially make use of strengths on both sides. By beginning with the attunement between an infrastructure and an entity as the source of out-of-control spread, scholars might get used to the idea that humans and Nonhumans together are equally involved in self-transformation and in transforming world history and ecology. In studying human effects, one might consider the remaking of the earth’s surface: land, water, and air. The same is true for nonhuman effects.

Our group select a report about dust storms in the Owens Valley. From the 1980s onwards, a series of enormous, wind-whipped dust storms engulfed much of the Owens Valley and people that live there. By one estimate, up to 8 million metric tons of dust were lifted off the lake bed each year, exceeding the federal air quality standard several times over. When the dust blew, people were warned to stay indoors. But even this offered only partial reprieve; The smallest cracks and crevices of the built environment.

The effect of fine-grained particles like the Owens Valley dust on the human body is terrible. Once inhaled, the very finest and most feral of the dust particles are so small that they can pass through the lungs into the blood—essentially passing for the Oxygen molecules on which the body depends for survival. By disrupting the body’s metabolic processes, this ultrafine particulate matter can set in motion a transformation in the composition and configuration of not only the lungs but also the liver, heart, and other internal organs. Ultimately, death is a very real possibility.

In this report, we can see that the dust is uncontainable, which is the feral quality.

Reference: https://feralatlas.supdigital.org/poster/residents-inhale-settler-colonial-histories-in-the-owens-valley-california