Wildfires open a window to 'the new planetary real': They force us to confront a planet in crisis and grapple with a dissonant world of dangerous volatility. In this paper, we use wildfires as a lens to advance a micro-politics of and for the Anthropocene. Using preliminary data from five case studies (Sweden, Turkey, Portugal, Brazil, Australia), we trace how communities respond to wildfires in terms of affect, emotion, and community support systems. Our cases illustrate how the speed and intensity of interruption caused by wildfire disrupt modern fantasies of control, self-determination, and freedom, and make visible the fragile and indeterminate environmental conditions that characterize our rapidly warming world. While the fire events studied in this paper unsettle our belief in technology and the welfare state’s ability to provide care, they simultaneously suggest that climate extremes can forge new affective entanglements and loose networks of solidarity and political change. Inspired by William Connolly’s entangled humanism, we thus approach the Anthropocene condition as a moment of tragic possibility that invites us to cultivate multiple connections of care and attachment. To fully grasp these micro-political possibilities, we argue, environmental STS needs to let go of sociocentrism and cross the boundaries between new materialist, natural scientific, and political approaches to the Anthropocene.

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