What happens to an ecosystem and its more-than-human inhabitants after people leave? Following the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi accident, the establishment of the exclusion zone led to widespread land abandonment and the evacuation of entire towns. People left their houses, farms, vehicles, and anything else that was too large to move with them. In the absence of humans, agricultural fields transitioned to early successional grassland systems, buildings became overgrown with plants, and species adapted to the changing environment in surprising ways—including wild boards hybridizing with domestic pigs that escaped from farms.

In 2019, I began collaborating with the Don’t Follow the Wind art initiative with the original goal of creating a interspecific “visitor count” for the exhibit (“today we had 3 tanuki, 6 macaques, and 11 crows”). Over the last 6 years, it’s evolved into a large-scale acoustic monitoring project conducted jointly with several researchers across Japan, with the aim of better understanding interconnection between humans, more-than-humans, and the land itself.

Photo credit: Don’t Follow the Wind / MIT press