In this talk, drawing on examples ranging from pig farming practices in Denmark to Henry Ford's doomed Brazilian rubber plantation venture, Fordlandia, anthropologist Anna Tsing - author of "The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins" - argues for a need to apply a range of feminist approaches to recount and address the planetary disaster of what has become known as the "Anthropocene". Such approaches are necessary, she says, to get beneath the oversimplifying universalist pretensions of this recently established discursive field regarding the effects of "mankind" on earth. They can also show how these claims to universalism arise from a predominantly white male property-owning class, and how they both mask and are at the root of a still-ongoing history of human violence and environmental destruction, marked by the predations of plantation, industrial and finance capitalism on entangled multispecies lifeworlds.

Editing and mix: Graeme Thomson