The vermin wild is the urban wilderness of ants, cockroaches, spiders and other pests that's left once our cities have poisoned and paved away almost everything bigger than a mouse. It's the limit of our moral commons, and the hardest test of it.
How the word moved
I coined it in April 2015 in Newsletter 39, after a cockroach in my parents' bathroom got me thinking. It has come back in my multispecies work in 2023 and again in 2026. We don't have to stomp on every cockroach.
In my words
"This is the vermin wild as I call it, the true wilderness that graces our cities."
from Newsletter 39: Metamorphosis, 25 Apr 2015
Related
- Related multitude - Both are about beings outside our moral circle.