Patchy Publics: Fireworks, the Himalayas, and More-than-Human Environmental Care in China

This study proposes “patchy publics” to understand emergent environmental publics in China. The research analyzed social media engagement surrounding the September 2025 Arc’teryx fireworks in the Himalayas, and demonstrated how publics coalesced not to prevent damage but to sustain attention to irreversible harm inflicted on distant landscapes and nonhuman lives. Drawing from research on the patchy Anthropocene and environmental publics, patchy publics operate through three interconnected dimensions of heterogeneity: spatial diversity through translocal care, temporal multiplicity across incommensurable scales, and ontological orientations toward both human justice and nonhuman flourishing. Patchy publics distinguish themselves from previous environmental publics through these heterogeneities, and more radically, through the attempts to translate across species boundaries using emergent technologies, feral proliferations of vernacular intensification, and non-instrumental engagement refusing premature closure. The framework case foregrounds the patchy texture of environmental publics, building collective momentum through contaminated diversity rather than unification.