Description
The scientific term “Anthropocene” can be read as a diagnostic frame of modernity whose mainstream uptake has largely failed to discern the (colonial, capitalist) pattern of history that led some ways of manifesting “Anthropos” to dominate over all others, human and nonhuman. The Anthropocene indexes more or less subtle assumptions of universalism, mastery, anthropocentrism, and eurocentrism (Moore, Di Chiro, Chakrabarty). To this well-established list of shortcomings, this political theoretical paper adds another: the Anthropocene is ill-suited for one of the delicate tasks required in the urgent 2020s, i.e., critiquing environmental science. One of several Anthropocene alternatives, the “Plantationocene”, is more promising. It insists on historicising today’s climate and biodiversity crisis to the social and ecological transformations of early capitalism, colonisation, and slavery—and, as I argue, it invites a helpful critique of science. For example, it shines a light on the role of early botanists to perfect monoculture plantations, ignoring racialised enslavement and catalysing the spread of plantation-based rule, under the guise of objectivity and progress. Contemporary plans to “manage the planet” through terraforming and geoengineering (Crutzen) are not so different from this legacy, and this should give us pause. Fortunately, an ameliorative role for environmental science also becomes clear by the lights of the Plantationocene diagnosis: to join a multilateral effort to “de-plantation” Earth by countering structures of domination over land and labour in the global commodity economy. Overall, the paper takes seriously the power of “epochal” frames to obscure or illuminate historic causes of socioecological destruction as well as the forms of knowledge that abet them.
