Ecological era-naming has multiplied because no single term fits

Evidence

Countless writers and theorists on the Left, including many who would otherwise agree with the necessity of actively addressing ecological devastation, have argued that the popular use of Anthropocene is riddled with problems—ones that may not inherently be in the term itself but are foundational when Anthropocene becomes, as it almost always does, a term to describe more than a geological age. If one presumes Anthropocene to indicate how our geological era is solely or mostly determined by human activity, as the term is often understood, then one accepts a strong separation between “man” and “nature,” for instance, and sees the current relation between these two entities as slowly leading to doom and destruction. In this interpretation, “man” is essentially hostile to (and outside of) “nature.” Calling the present age the Anthropocene, some have argued, equates “humanity” with a set of relations that are more accurately attributed to particular arrangements of capitalism, not humanity as such. Rather than an Anthropocene, the environmental destruction we face is brought about by the Capitalocene, a term variously employed by writers such as Jason W. Moore, Andreas Malm, David Ruccio, and Donna Haraway. Capitalocene, instead of foregrounding the role of humans, describes the relation between ecology and, to use Moore’s words, “the historical era shaped by the endless accumulation of capital.” Some have argued that Capitalocene is too broad—or, conversely, too specific, too narrowly isolated—and it’s better to describe our era as the “Plantationocene.” It’s not industrial capitalism—its reliance on coal-powered factories, the intertwining of factory-based production with a new relationship to nature—that has led to climate change and ecological disaster, because this model mostly characterized Europe. Instead, the culprit should be identified as imperial capital and the plantation, how “large-scale, export-oriented agriculture dependent on forced labor has played a dominant role in structuring modern life since the insertion of European power in the Americas, Asia, and Africa,” to use the words of geographer Wendy Wolford. … Yet, as Donna Haraway has argued, “all the thousand names are too big and too small; all the stories are too big and too small… . We need stories (and theories) that are just big enough to gather up the complexities and keep the edges open and greedy for surprising new and old connections.” Haraway’s own neologism improvising on Anthropocene, Chthulucene, attempts to move away from the totalizing scale proposed by the varied cenes, emphasizing not a singular cause that consequentially determines the totality of the planet but the emergent, collective agencies that together compose the world. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 346

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the succession of age-concepts — Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene — that frame the book’s proposed Corpocene coinage.