READING GROUP RECAP
On 1 September, our Natureculture Lab conversation with philosopher Juliana Fausto began with a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to call a life “feral”?
Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, La pensée férale, Available at: https://www.vejournal.it/blog/2026/10/05/la-pensee-ferale/
Juliana Fausto is Brazilian philosopher and artist whose work moves across animal studies, more-than-human ecologies, ferality, cinema, technique, spectrality, and theoretical fabulation. She is the author of A cosmopolítica dos animais (n-1 edições) a member of Cia Teatral Ueinzz, and co-founder of Academia Fantasma.
Fausto, whose forthcoming book The Feral Concept develops a philosophical and political genealogy of ferality, immediately unsettled one of its most familiar meanings. Feral does not simply mean wild. Nor does it describe a return from culture to nature. A domesticated animal that has been abandoned cannot simply “go back” to a state preceding domestication. The histories of companionship, labour, cultivation, dependency, and violence through which lives have been formed do not disappear when a relationship ends.
One formulation from our conversation has stayed with us: feral is what persists after a relation has faded or broken.
This shifts ferality from an identity to a relational and political position. Something has happened between beings; an alliance, dependency, or pact has been established and subsequently ruptured. Yet its traces remain. The question is therefore not how to return a being to its supposed original condition, but: what forms of life become possible after the break?
A forest that was never simply “nature”
Fausto developed this through the example of dogs living in the Tijuca Forest in Rio de Janeiro. The dogs seek shelter in a landscape where they may hunt other animals and consequently become classified through the languages of ecological management: dangerous, invasive, harmful.
But where does the story begin?
The forest itself has a complicated history. Large parts of it were replanted in the nineteenth century, through the labour of enslaved people, in response to environmental degradation and threats to Rio’s water supply. Fauna were subsequently reintroduced, and the forest eventually became protected as a national park.
To begin the story only with a dog killing a protected animal therefore produces a very particular understanding of ecological harm. It can obscure the histories of plantation, slavery, urban inequality, abandonment, restoration, and environmental management that made both the forest and the presence of the dogs possible.
Photograph of the article “Abandoned Dogs Become Predators in Tijuca Forest”, available at: https://portaldoscaesegatos.com.br/caes-abandonados-viram-predadores-na-floresta-da-tijuca/
Following Donna Haraway’s insistence that “it matters what stories make worlds,” Fausto instead pulls at these threads. What appears to be a conflict between a supposedly natural ecosystem and an invasive animal becomes an entangled history of human and nonhuman relations.
This does not mean denying ecological harm. The dogs do hunt other animals. Ferality is not an argument that everything escaping human control is emancipatory or good. One feral organism may enable unexpected forms of coexistence; another may profoundly damage an ecological community.
That ambivalence is precisely what makes the concept interesting for the kind of thinking within both, Natureculture Lab and our project, Critical Conservation.
Feral is not the opposite of relation
Fausto’s genealogy also took us much further back. Through Cicero, Lucretius, and the figure of the wolf, she traced the long material and conceptual history through which ferality has been positioned against civilisation.
Wolf Head from pleasure barge, 1-100 AD, Roman, Italy, bronze – Cleveland Museum of Art, available at: Wikimedia Commons.
Yet the feral figures appearing in these histories are rarely simply solitary beings outside society. The Luperci, the fraternity of priests associated with the Roman festival of Lupercalia, complicate precisely this opposition: feral, perhaps, but collective; associated with wolves and the outside, yet embedded within the social and ritual life of Rome.
Fausto connected this to another history: the eighteenth-century fascination with so-called “feral children.” Children found outside conventional domestic and social structures became philosophical evidence for imagined passages between nature and culture. They had to be found, classified, brought back, educated—returned to “culture.”
But what if these figures tell us less about a boundary between nature and culture than about the violence involved in producing that boundary in the first place?
Ferality, understood this way, twists domestication rather than simply negating it.
What might this do to conservation?
This is where our conversation became particularly resonant for Critical Conservation.
Conservation frequently depends upon decisions about where things belong. Native or invasive. Original or altered. Natural or artificial. Authentic or corrupted. Stable or disturbed. These distinctions are not meaningless: conservation practitioners must make decisions, and ecological damage is real.
But the feral concept asks us to examine the histories sedimented within those categories.
Terms such as pest, invasive, and control, as Fausto suggested, may sometimes tell us less about what an organism is than about what we have decided to do to it. This becomes particularly urgent when ecological vocabularies migrate into political ones: migrants described as invasive, refugees as parasites, unwanted populations as threats to the integrity of a territory.
The question is therefore not simply whether conservation should preserve or eliminate the feral. Rather, ferality exposes something about conservation itself.
If ecosystems are historical communities rather than timeless arrangements, what exactly does it mean to restore them? To which moment? To which constellation of relations? And whose histories become visible—or disappear—when a particular ecological condition is designated as the one worth conserving?
Here Fausto’s thinking comes close to, but also deliberately departs from, Anna Tsing’s influential account of feral effects as those that escape the designs of human infrastructure projects. Fausto is not interested in what escapes but rather in asking what kind of relation its escape reveals. Ferality names a history.
Conservation after the broken pact
Conservation has often been imagined through continuity: maintaining, stabilising, repairing, restoring. Ferality begins somewhere else, with a relationship that can neither simply be restored, nor thought of in “restorative” terms.
The abandoned dog cannot return to a pre-domesticated state. The replanted forest cannot return to a moment before colonialism. A damaged ecosystem cannot shed its history. And conservation itself cannot stand outside these histories and simply determine the correct configuration to which things should be returned.
What remains instead are what Fausto described as provisional alliances: forms of coexistence without guarantees of permanence or purity.
This resonates strongly with questions we have been asking through Critical Conservation and our work on naturecultures in Naturecultural Lab. What would conservation look like if its task were not always to recover a supposedly prior integrity, but to develop what Haraway calls response-ability: the capacity to respond to relations whose histories cannot be undone?
Unknown Italian Master, Portrait of Dogs with a Cat and a Rabbit, c. 1650. Oil on canvas, 81 × 107 cm. Galleria Palatina, Florence.
Such a conservation would still encounter loss, violence, ecological harm, and incompatible claims. It would still have to judge. Ferality offers no easy ethics of coexistence, but perhaps it changes where the ethical question begins.
What relations produced this situation, what persists from them, and how might we care for what comes after the break?