Stimpunks Foundation × More Realms · L★S · Field Guide No. 21

A Field Guide to Third Nature

Thirteen habitats nobody meant to make, sorted by what made them — an old way of working, a building, a poisoning, an evacuation. Anna Tsing’s third nature is what manages to live despite capitalism. This is a catalogue of what it is actually living on, and of the improvement now removing each one. None of these is ranked, and none of them is a comeback story.

L★S
How to use this guide Each entry gives an organism or a community, the human by-product it lives on, how the popular telling misreads it (“sounds like / actually”), and full field notes with sources. The last line of every card names the improvement — the thing being done, usually for good reasons, that removes the habitat. Click any entry to open its notes.
Where this came from The companion to Oblivious to Encounter (No. 74), which follows scalability from the sugarcane plantation to the mushroom nobody can farm. Its tenth link is the one this guide is built out of: matsutake became rare across Japan by abandonment rather than destruction, because a support nobody had named went with a change in how people heated their houses. That turned out not to be a special case.
Not the extremophile guide Life in Impossible Places (No. 3) catalogues life in conditions that were always harsh — vents, brine, boiling springs, solid rock — and argues it is about fit, not grit. Every place in this guide is one we made. The radiation-eating fungi of Chernobyl are carded there and are deliberately not repeated here.

Four things that made a habitat

The sort came out of the entries, and the first sort we tried failed. We began meaning to sort by how damaged the place is — bombsite, mine spoil, exclusion zone at one end; hay meadow and coppice at the other. That collapsed almost at once, because damage turned out not to predict anything. A lead-poisoned spoil heap and a hay meadow are at opposite ends of any damage scale and are the same kind of object here: both are by-products of human work that something came to depend on, and both are being tidied. What actually varies is what we were doing at the time — working a landscape, putting up a structure, contaminating a place, or leaving. So the sections run by that instead. They do not rank. And one thing recurs in every section, which is the reason the guide exists: the support was a by-product, so nobody wrote it down as a requirement, so nothing defends it when the practice that produced it improves.

One · The work
A way of using land, and the margin it left
Two · The structure
What we built, and the gaps in it
Three · The damage
Contamination and wreckage that made a place
And · Not carded
One place we are not going to reframe
One · The work

When the habitat was a by-product of the job

Four species that lived on the margins of an older way of using land — the firewood cut, the late hay, the dirty seed sack, the coppice rotation. None of the four was harmed by the land being destroyed. In every case the land is still there and the practice changed, which is a much harder thing to notice and a much harder thing to argue against, because each change was an improvement by any ordinary measure.

Two · The structure

When the habitat is a gap in something we built

We put up rubble, eaves, flues and ledges for reasons of our own, and things moved in. This section runs deliberately as a gradient of dependence: a bird that lost one accidental habitat and found the next; a bird whose gaps are being sealed right now; a bird we assumed had nothing else and which turns out to have kept a wild option; and a bird that has none at all. The last card goes the other way, and it is here to stop the section reading as a lament.

Three · The damage

When the wreckage itself is the habitat

The uncomfortable section, and it is uncomfortable in a specific way that is worth naming before you read it. A poisoned spoil heap and an oil platform are not arguments for poisoning or drilling. They are places where the damage is already done and something now depends on the state it left — which makes the cleanup a decision with two sides rather than one. The third card is here for a different reason: it is the one where we had the story wrong, and the correction arrived in 2025.

And · Not carded

One place we are not going to reframe

Every other entry gets a “sounds like / actually” table, because in every other case there is a settled answer and a popular telling that misses it. The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is the one where we do not have the settled answer — two bodies of published work disagree, and running our format over that would mean picking a winner in a live scientific dispute and presenting it as a correction. It gets a dashed card, no table, and an account of the disagreement instead.

Not: Not an argument that damage is good. Tsing is explicit that matsutake’s tolerance for wrecked ground “is not an excuse for further damage,” and neither is any card here. A spoil heap is not a reason to poison ground; it is a fact about ground already poisoned. Every entry in section three is downstream of harm we would prevent if we could go back. Not ruin as an aesthetic. There is a way of writing about bombsites and exclusion zones that enjoys them, and it is a way of not looking at who was bombed and who was evacuated. The habitat is real. So is what made it. Not “nature is resilient.” Every species here is holding on inside a specific and narrow requirement, and most of them are declining. Resilience is never a demand, and a species persisting in a bad place is not evidence the place is survivable — only that this one is still there so far. Not against improvement. Insulating buildings is good. Cleaning seed corn is good. Capping a dangerous flue is good. Not one of the improvements named on these cards should be reversed, and saying so is not the argument. The argument is that a by-product nobody recorded as a requirement gets removed without anyone deciding to remove it — and that a thing you have named is a thing you can at least choose about. Not a metaphor for us. No organism here stands in for a person, and none of them is Autistic. The rhyme between a support nobody named and the accommodations that quietly disappear when a workplace modernises is a rhyme, noticed after the ecology rather than imposed on it. A rhyme is not a proof. Not settled. The Chernobyl card carries no table because the science is contested. The chimney swift card exists partly to correct an assumption we would have made. And the Underground mosquito was a textbook case for twenty-six years before the genomes arrived.
Star stuff, in the leftovers

The lead in a spoil heap and the zinc a spring sandwort hyper-accumulates were made in dying stars, went into a rock, were dug out by people, and are now holding open a grassland that European law protects. Nothing in that sequence was planned by anyone, including the part that is now conservation policy.

What the thirteen have in common is not damage and it is not toughness. It is that each one depends on something we do for a reason of our own — and that because the dependence was never anybody’s intention, it was never written down. There is no line in any specification that says keep cutting the firewood, or leave the gap under the soffit, or do not sieve the seed quite so well. So when the practice improves, the requirement goes with it, and the loss shows up in the record as nothing at all — because the record only ever held the practice.

A support nobody named is a support nobody defends. That is what this catalogue is for, and it is the sentence Oblivious to Encounter (No. 74) hands over at its tenth link and does not have room to spend. The zine argues how sameness got built. This one lists what was living in the gaps.