The term anthropocene was first proposed by the Nobel laureates, chemist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer, at a meeting of the little-known International Biosphere-Geosphere Programme in 2000 in Mexico. The anthropocene was meant to be a new geological epoch following the 11,700 plus year-old post-glaciation period, to capture the impact humans have caused on the earth’s biosphere and climate system. The term persists, though it hardly had any takers among the environmental community — which is most engaged with environmental change — or among geologists. Nonetheless, there was a recent proposal on the anthropocene, to set the starting year of the epoch at 1950 — following the finding of an annual layer of sediment deposition with traces of plutonium in the small Crawford lake of Canada by a team led by Francine McCarthy of Canada’s Brock University.
Developed during colonial ride, Western science has been racist and Eurocentric from the start. Biology and anthropology are especially so. As a Masters student, I was shocked to find Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species repeatedly referring to countries outside Europe as “savage”. The West has not yet been liberated from that tradition. This new naming, the idea of the anthropocene, is also in line with its racial politics. Let us examine why.
The idea that all “humans” are the culprits of ecosystem damage and climate change shields the real culprits. The overwhelming responsibility for impairing the earth’s ecosystems and causing climate change rests with the corporate forces in the West, which have the capital and technology to do so, and not the majority of humanity living in the global South. They were/are victims of the depredations of Western countries and responsible for the impact of technology on the environment. The proponents of the anthropocene make both the perpetrators of planetary atrocities and their victims inseparable, and obfuscate an informed debate on the actual culprits. If this is not a conscious choice, it is a kind of inadvertent negligence that is facilitated by the legacy of colonial worldview.
Humans have been modifying the environment since the inception of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, following the end of the last glaciation period. Those modifications were within the resilience and regeneration capacity of the earth. What changed the fate of the planet is the imperial onslaught, and the politics of violence and mindless exploitation it has engendered. It is not the use of nuclear material that marks the shift in the biosphere’s trajectory but the acquisition of gun-making technology in the West. Voth Colombus — who went to the land that was later called America — and Vasco de Gama who came to India possessed firearms. Guns enabled the West to wreak havoc across the world by subjugating those who didn’t have them. And with the invention of steam engines three centuries later, the West devastated the ecosystems and biodiversity of the continent of North America and annihilated its human populations. The same took place in South America, albeit to a lesser degree. Australia and New Zealand too, no different.
In Africa, the original home of Homo sapiens, where we attained the greatest genetic diversity, has been reduced to its current vulnerability — ecological, social and political. A significant part of the human population of Africa was enslaved and transported across the Atlantic. Brutality towards humans, ecosystems and biodiversity, took place on an unprecedented scale. India endured a savage assault on its forests by the British, as noted by Ramachandra Guha.
Colonialism continues in terms of economic relations, with the West also periodically resorting to violence. The $11 trillion debt of the global South to the developed countries cripples ecosystems, biodiversity and even people in large parts of the world. The West amasses living and mineral resources, and uses them 20 times more per capita than people in the global South. And in that process, the West precipitated the climate crisis as well.
Imperialism and Industrial Revolution are the greatest threat the earth and humans have faced. Its impact will persist for two more centuries, if the pervasive industrial civilisation lasts that long. But it is also unlikely it will. Petroleum, the fuel of modernity, will be exhausted in another 60 years. The earth’s freshwater sources have already been reduced to half. With the West’s reluctance to significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions and promote false solutions instead, the climate crisis will sharpen.
While the solutions to the climate crisis that the West promotes are largely false solutions to circumvent the imperative of reducing/eliminating the use of fossil fuels, their approach to biodiversity conservation in the global South is impregnated with violence. The indigenous people who have been historical caretakers of biodiversity have been disenfranchised and alienated in the name of conservation, which led to the failure of the conservation project as shown by the estimate of one million species facing the threat of extinction (as provided in the 2022 biodiversity assessment by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services [IPBES]).
Imperialism, its violence and corporate greed are at the root of the ongoing planetary crisis, which will only deepen until it extinguishes the industrial civilisation itself. Attributing the corporate violence, predominantly Western, to the entire humanity, is imaginary and a desperate attempt to enable the culprits to hide behind humanity. Anthropocene, therefore, is an invalid proposal. Francine McCarthy’s work was part of the International Commission on Stratigraphy’s working group on anthropocene, assuming that everyone accepts this invalid term and further assuming that a bunch of predominantly Western geologists could name earth events and affairs that matter to the whole humanity as they used to in the colonial period. It is amusing to see someone looking for traces of plutonium in the deep layer of a lake bed and based on that proposing 1950 as the starting year of anthropocene, ignoring the uranium bomb of a good 4.4 tonne weight dropped on Hiroshima five years earlier, and the timing known up to the minute. That is, if the presence of radioactive substance has to be taken as a marker.
Any naming of the violence against the earth system caused by imperialism and the corporate forces should naturally reflect the objective reality that the culprits are the corporates and not the people. Corporatocene is the epoch that we are in, whether the West would like to call it so or not. Needless to say that the violence of the corporates in India, where poverty and wealth are polarised as nowhere else, is also part of this. The illogical ‘anthropocene’ is a social and political construct, so is ‘corporatocene’ or its possible synonyms.
The writer is an ecologist and UN environmental negotiator based in Trivandrum
