The Anthropocene as colonial discourse

Introduction

There has been a great acceleration in scholarly literature on the Anthropocene in recent years, and this trend shows no sign of relenting. Some scholars and commentators have been quick to conclude that the Anthropocene demarcates not just a geological moment of world-historical significance, but equally a philosophical event (Rowan, 2014: 447)—a radical rupture in the foundations of Western thought that is posed to reorient commonplace understandings of human relations with the non-human, usher in new paradigms of understanding, and transform ethical orientations (see for instance, Adams, 2016; Latour, 2014; Lorimer, 2012; Morton, 2013; Yusoff, 2013). Rather than reiterating the Anthropocene’s potential to disrupt and destabilize dominant political-economic structures and modes of thought, this article foregrounds ways that the contemporary Anthropocene discourse problematically reinforces aspects of these dominant structures. Specifically, I intend to contribute to a growing chorus of scholars and commentators who raise concerns about ways the concept uncritically reproduces and re-entrenches Eurocentric logics and colonial structures of power (Head, 2016; Instone and Taylor, 2015; Last, 2017; Mbembe, 2015; Todd, 2015; Whyte, 2017a, 2017b). I do this by examining the conceptual antecedents of the Anthropocene dating back to the 18th century, and by questioning how these structures of thought have been inherited and carried forward by the current debate.

Although the notion of the Anthropocene is commonly credited to Eugene Stoermer who is said to have used the term in the 1980s, and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen who contributed to popularizing the concept in the early 2000s, the concept has notable antecedents dating back at least two and a half centuries. Increasingly, these antecedents have been acknowledged in the scholarly literature (Davis, 2011; Lewis and Maslin, 2015; Lowenthal, 2016; Syvitski, 2012), however, some scholars remain averse to accepting earlier notions such as the “Anthropozoic era” as part of the Anthropocene’s conceptual history. For instance, Clive Hamilton and Jacques Grinevald (2015) affirm that prior to Crutzen and Stoermer’s formulation “there were no precursors to the notion of the Anthropocene” (59). Hamilton and Grinevald suggest that because the Anthropocene represents a relatively recent and sudden transformation of the earth’s geophysical conditions, it could not have been conceived by thinkers from centuries past. On their account, the contemporary concept demonstrates “radical novelty” (2015: 60–61).

This debate over the Anthropocene’s intellectual origins mirrors the search for a “golden spike” that demarcates the onset of the Anthropocene as a geological period. This is no coincidence. Hamilton and Grinevald note that if the Anthropocene were conceived of as early as the late 18th or early 19th centuries, then this would imply that the geological period dates back at least that far, thereby ruling out a later periodization coinciding with the Great Acceleration. They warn that placing the Anthropocene concept within a longer conceptual lineage “gradualizes the new epoch so that it is no longer a rupture due principally to the burning of fossil fuels but a creeping phenomenon due to the incremental spread of human influence over the landscape” (2015: 66). To do so “misconstrues the suddenness, severity, duration and irreversibility of the Anthropocene” (2015: 66–67).

In this article, I want to consider what work the idea of this radical geological and intellectual rupture does discursively. Without denying that aspects of this concept may indeed be novel and unique, my concern is that overstating the “radical novelty” of this concept obfuscates the ways that it inherits and reproduces other aspects of dominant discourse that may be problematic or even violent. New concepts can only derive meaning by making reference to other established concepts and frames of analysis. As Nathan Sayre (2012) notes, the Anthropocene is inherited with a “conceptual scaffolding” (4). Like all categories, it is received as a bundle, knit together from already established languages and frameworks of understanding. In some ways, new categories may challenge and extend the limits of existing discourse, but in other ways, emergent categories will inevitably reinforce the thinking that precedes it. Will Steffen et al., (2011) are thus correct to claim that the concept of the Anthropocene is “not equivalent” to its predecessors (845), however, like all novel ideas the concept introduces elements of originality while also building upon, reproducing, and making reference to inherited structures of thought that are themselves produced in cultural, historical, and geographical contexts.

The intention of this article is to contribute to the unbundling, pulling apart, and dissecting of the Anthropocene’s conceptual scaffolding in order to expose the philosophical underpinnings that are inherited with this category and which have made the Anthropocene thinkable. Much like the stratigrapher who traces the geological record in search of insights into the history of the present, I take an archeological approach to the history of this idea, tracing its development through its various antecedents and previous formations. Conceptual histories can expose both continuities in structures of thought, as well as important breaks or moments of rupture in these lineages. In this case, I want to foreground the under-examined continuities between this concept and those that came before it by emphasizing those structures of thought that appear so obvious and common-place that they often remain unnoticed. These common sense tropes of the Anthropocene have thus far received less attention than the ways in which the Anthropocene breaks with convention, but are equally worthy of critical interrogation.

Specifically, I hope to expose how the conceptual antecedents of the Anthropocene are steeped in Eurocentric and colonial understandings of modernity and its colonial Other that were inherited from the European Enlightenment. Although these Eurocentric logics are less explicit and therefore rendered less visible in the discourse of the Anthropocene as it is framed today, I want to question the ways that these problematic structures of modern Western thought have nevertheless been received with this category and continue to inform the ongoing debates about this proposed epoch and its periodization. My concern is not only that the discourse of the Anthropocene unwittingly reproduces centuries-old Eurocentric assumptions but also that its onto-epistemological underpinnings serve to discredit and delegitimize ways of understanding contemporary conditions that are less thoroughly grounded in the narratives of Western modernity. Subjecting these taken-for-granted logics that operate silently in the background of current debates to critical scrutiny, I hope to problematize this category by asking what ways of being, forms of knowledge, and ways of relating this concept occludes, delegitimizes or constrains. Rather than championing the new political possibilities that the Anthropocene enables, I therefore encourage critical theorists and scholars of the Anthropocene to interrogate the limits of this concept. My hope is that the deconstruction of this conceptual scaffolding can contribute to the strengthening and flourishing of those spaces of knowledge production where a greater diversity of ways of thinking, being, and relating are enacted.

The intention here is not to suggest that the concept of the Anthropocene is unsalvageable as a useful concept that could contribute to the unsettling of structures of Western imperialism. Indeed, as Chakrabarty (2009, 2014) and other critics of the Anthropocene maintain, the conceptual status of the Anthropocene remains unresolved and open to contestation. However, I do want to caution against the claim that the question of the Anthropocene is one that can be answered objectively by science alone (Autin and Holbrook, 2012). Indeed, this science is necessarily packaged within social and cultural narratives. In the words of Donna Haraway (2016): “It matters what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what knowledges know knowledges. It matters what relations relate relations. It matters what worlds world worlds. It matters what stories tell stories” (35). The objective of this paper is thus to think about whose stories are storying the Anthropocene, and what worlds these stories world. Rather than seeking to definitively resolve the question of the status of the Anthropocene and its relationship to coloniality then, my call is for scholars to destabilize the stories of the Anthropocene that remain framed in colonial narratives of progress, advancement, and civilization. By doing so, I hope to contribute to the project of opening up possibilities for a much vaster array of ways of knowing and being to shape and inform conversations about navigating through troubled times.

The Anthropozoic era: Comte de Buffon, Stoppani, and Marsh

As far back as 1778, Georges Louis Leclerc de Buffon, one of the earliest theorists of geological time, contended that there have been seven “epochs of nature,” cumulating with the current “epoch of men,” which is characterized by “the power of man assisted Nature” (1778: 306). On Comte de Buffon’s account, the ability of “man” to assist Nature emerged contemporaneously with the rise of civilizations several thousand years ago. It was at this point that man began to subdue animals, drain wetlands, redirect rivers, clear forests, and cultivate the earth. Moreover, newly civilized man used scientific knowledge to accomplish great feats, including traversing oceans, discovering a new world, and uniting nations under the singular political authority of the state (1778: 392–393). Comte de Buffon remarks that “the whole face of the earth, at present exhibits the marks of his power, which though subordinate to that of Nature, often exceeds, at least, so wonderfully seconds her operations, that, by the aid of his hands, her whole extent is unfolded and she gradually arrived at that point of perfection and magnificence in which we now behold her” (1778: 393). As proof of civilized man’s union with Nature, Comte de Buffon points to the difference between the state of the lands in which civilized people live compared with those of Native American or African peoples:

Compare rude with Cultivated Nature. Compare the small savage nations of America with those of our civilized people, or even those of Africa, who are only half cultivated. Contemplate the conditions of the lands which those nations inhabit, and you will easily perceive the insignificance of men who have made so little impression on their native soil. Whether from stupidity or indolence, these brutish men, these unpolished nations, great or small, give no support to the Earth; they starve without fertilizing her; they devour everything and propagate nothing. (1778: 393–394)

Nearly a century later, Italian geologist and Catholic priest Antonio Stoppani picked up on these same themes in his three-volume work, Corso di Geologia (1873). Stoppani deemed the current stage of geological time the “Anthropozoic era,” and much like Comte de Buffon, who Stoppani had read, he claimed that this period is defined by the geological agency of civilized humans who have lifted themselves out of a primitive state of savagery. For Stoppani, the onset of the Anthropozoic era marks a new age of human progress that brings us closer to God, comparable to the rise of Christianity, which “in the bosom of the aged fabric of ancient pagan societies […] substituted ancient slavery with freedom, darkness with light, fall and degeneration with rebirth and true progress of humanity.” Stoppani affirms that it is precisely in this celebratory and triumphalist sense that “I do not hesitate in proclaiming the Anthropozoic era” (1873: 36).

In particular, it was European civilization that drove this progression into the Anthropozoic on Stoppani’s account: “We are talking about European man, because Europe, more than other regions, feels man’s sovereignty” (1873: 39). As he explains, in previous stages of historical development prior to the ascent of European civilization, man had “been wandering for centuries, naked, through the arenas of the boundless desert; so, covered in skins torn from mild and ferocious animals, for centuries he has been driving his sled on the horrid labyrinth of polar ices that reflect the meek glow of the northern lights” (1873: 40). In other words, primitive non-European peoples of past world-historical stages existed in nature and were subject to it, but did not actively shape it in accordance with their sovereign will. Only with the advent of European civilization and its dissemination throughout the world via colonial conquest do humans arise as sovereign agents of nature, thereby expressing the creative will of God on earth (1873: 40).

As with Comte de Buffon, Stoppani points to agriculture as evidence of the marked difference between European civilization and primitive peoples. Agriculture demonstrates that Europeans no longer simply live on the earth like animals or primitive peoples, but now command and control the earth as God intended:

Greens are not allowed to grow haphazardly any longer, nor to agglomerate into messy and nameless groups. Arranged in rows, seeded in beds, grouped in woods that take their names from the essence that man planted there, cut, pruned, tormented in innumerable guises, fed by artificial heats and waters, they testify everywhere that man has taken full control of that kingdom which God has allocated him for food and shelter. (1873: 39)

Stoppani’s emphasis on the increasing impacts of human activity upon the earth may have also been influenced by his contemporary George Perkins Marsh, the renowned American conservationist. Stoppani was surely aware of Marsh’s well-known book Man and Nature (1864), which was translated into Italian. Marsh had lived in Italy as a diplomat, and he directly engaged with Stoppani’s writing in The Earth Modified by Human Activity (a revised version of Man and Nature published the year after Stoppani’s Corso in 1874). Commenting directly on Stoppani’s notion of the Anthropozoic era, Marsh notes that while he agrees that human impacts on the earth are vast, and “immensely superior in degree” compared with those of animals, he disagrees with “the eminent Italian geologist” that these impacts are somehow unique in their quality. For Marsh, these impacts are no different in kind—they are novel only in the scale of activity:

The action of brutes upon the material world is slow and gradual, and usually limited, in any given case, to a narrow extent of territory. Nature is allowed time and opportunity to set her restorative powers at work […] Man, on the contrary, extends his action over vast spaces, his revolutions are swift and radical, and his devastations are, for an almost incalculable time after he has withdrawn the arm that gave the blow, irreparable. (1874: 41–42)

For Marsh, the ability to think beyond immediate needs and instincts stands as the definitive distinction not only between humans and animals but also between “civilized” and “savage man.” Indeed, on his account, the imprint of “savage man” on earth is more akin to that of animals (“brutes”) or plants than it is to civilized humans. Marsh comments that, “Purely untutored humanity, it is true, interferes comparatively little with the arrangements of nature, and the destructive agency of man becomes more and more energetic and unsparing as he advances in civilization” (1874: 38–39). Marsh then adds in a footnote that the “ruder races, and of persons with imperfectly developed intellects in civilized life […] seem to cherish with brutes, and even with vegetable life, sympathies which are much more feebly felt by civilized men” (1874: 38–39). According to Marsh, the “conquest of inorganic nature” is a phenomenon that is almost exclusively attributable to the “most advanced stages of artificial culture” (1874: 38). He suggests that in parts of the Americas that remained only “thinly occupied by purely savage tribes,” no substantial geographical change had occurred in over two thousand years, while in that same period, Europe had been drastically altered (1874: 42–43). Marsh thus shares with Stoppani and Comte de Buffon an underlying belief that the capacity of people to modify the earth on a broad scale emerges with the advancement of human cultures out of a savage state of nature and into civilization. This agency to drastically shape and alter the conditions of the earth is thought to be both a distinguishing feature of European civilization and a reflection of the advancement of European culture.

Unlike Stoppani and Comte de Buffon, however, Marsh does not celebrate the impacts that civilization brings about. Indeed, he laments the “wanton destruction” that has resulted from civilized people imposing their will upon nature, going so far as to suggest that it threatens the extinction of the human species (1874: 43–44). Nevertheless, Marsh retains a belief that this agency and ability to alter the earth might one day be mobilized to ameliorate planetary conditions. He calls upon the educated and “advanced” peoples to learn from past mistakes and apply their knowledge to repair the earth. Marsh also calls for the “diffusion” of this knowledge to other “classes” of people. By drawing on the ingenuity, science, and technology of educated people, he maintains that humanity can “become a co-worker with nature in the reconstruction,” conserving natural features, reforesting barren landscapes, and managing hydrological flows (1874: 50). Thus, despite bemoaning and foreboding the dangers that unbridled human impacts on the earth might precipitate, Marsh retained an Enlightenment-era faith in the capacity for Western agency and knowledge to remediate this damage, and encourage “plenteous and perennial sources of beauty, health, and wealth” (1874: 49).

The noösphere: Vernadsky, Le Roy and Teilhard de Chardin

The concept of the “noösphere,” developed by Edouard Le Roy, Vladimir Vernadsky and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin among others, offers a second intellectual current that anticipated the Anthropocene. The concept was developed as an extension of Edward Suess’ concept of the biosphere—the thin layer of living organisms along the earth’s surface that had evolved to become a distinct geological force. The noösphere (derived from the Greek noos, or mind) is intended to capture an additional sphere, the sphere of human consciousness, that emerges out of the biosphere to become its own distinct force altering planetary conditions. The French philosopher Edouard Le Roy was the first to write about the concept in 1927. He described the noösphere as “a human sphere, the sphere of reflection, of conscious and free invention, of thought in its pure sense: the sphere of mind” (1928: 65). The emergence of reflexive consciousness from biological organisms is presented as an evolutionary event equal in magnitude to the emergence of life from inert matter. Hence, the relationship between humans and other biota is as radically distinct as that between life and non-living geological substances: “Humanity thus appears as a new order of reality, binding with the lower forms of nature in a relationship equivalent to that discerned lower still between life and matter” (1928: 65). In other words, the noösphere is to the biosphere what the biosphere is to the geosphere. It is not only a next stage of evolutionary development of life, but moreover it marks the “next step” in the evolutionary unfolding of the planet itself.

Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky had already been thinking in a similar vein even before Le Roy introduced the noösphere concept. In one of his earliest works, Geochemistry, Vernsadsky notes the role of human activity, and particularly agriculture, in altering the geological composition of the earth: “In the course of the last few thousand years, the geochemical action of humanity has, by means of agriculture seizing the living green matter, become intensive and excessively multiplied” (1924: 27). Vernadsky goes on to describe how the metallurgical and chemical processes developed by modern humans have “change[d] the eternal course of geochemical cycles” (1924: 27). Characterized by these geochemical changes, Vernadsky describes the current geological epoch as the “psychozoic era” (a term that he adopted from American geologist Joseph Le Conte, 1877). On Vernadsky’s account, this new era is one that is guided and distinguished by the “conscious and the collective” intervention of humanity on geochemical processes. Like Le Roy, Vernadsky believed that the emergence of this consciousness was no accident, but rather it is a result of the progression of evolutionary processes that had long been unfolding and that have always been headed towards a pre-determined destiny.

Vernadsky spent several years in Paris during the 1920s, during which time he met Le Roy and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, both of whom were disciples of the Nobel Prize winning neo-vitalist philosopher Henri Bergson (Guillaume, 2014; Samson and Pitt, 1999). By the 1930s, Vernadsky had adopted Le Roy’s concept of the noösphere, but specifically associated the emergence of this more evolutionarily evolved state of intentional and reflexive human consciousness with the “scientific knowledge” of “civilized humanity” and the philosophical and political ideas of Western Enlightenment:

During recent millennia, one observes an intense growth of influence of the living matter of one species, civilized humanity, upon the shift of the biosphere condition. Under the action of scientific thought and human labour, the biosphere goes over to a new state – to the noösphere.” (1938: 95)

After Vernadsky’s death, Teilhard de Chardin continued to develop this noösphere thesis within the framework of a universal trajectory of human cultural development. In his posthumously published essay “The Antiquity and World Expansion of Human Culture,” Teilhard de Chardin explains that the first stage of man’s development entailed spreading out to all regions of the globe and, as isolated societies, to “attempt every possible form of cultural arrangement” (1956: 110). Over the last century, due in part to advances in communication technologies, mankind has now entered a new stage where each of these diverse cultures begin to converge: “The movement has completely reversed its phase, with the result that, under a tremendous and incoercible rapprochement and compression of both human bodies and human minds, co-arrangement and co-reflexion are now rising toward astronomical values at the interior of the noösphere” (1956: 110). Teilhard de Chardin goes on to describe this “stage of mono-culturation” as the “biological fate of man,” at which point the human species becomes “ultra-reflexive” and “ultra-human” (1956: 111). Taking this evolutionary thinking beyond the human realm, he goes on to speculate that the earth is ultimately destined to evolve into a “thinking planet” (or a “psychical nova”) which culminates in the ultimate transcendence of its fully co-reflexive cultural noösphere “beyond the boundaries of time and space” (1956: 111). This trajectory, he contends, is in-keeping with the internal logic of planetary evolution: “[A] transhuman universe conforms perfectly to the general pattern of a physical world in which absolutely nothing can grow indefinitely without meeting ultimately some critical level of emergence and transformation” (1956: 111). Making an allusion to Marx’s theory of the emergence of a class consciousness among industrial workers in the 19th century, Teilhard de Chardin argues that it is now time to develop an awareness that our collective actions are building towards a higher state of consciousness and that this “co-reflexive self-evolution” is leading us “somewhere and forever” (1956: 111).

When comparing the distinct intellectual currents that trace through Vernadsky on the one hand, and George Perkins Marsh on the other, it is important to recognize the notable differences which reflect the distinct historical and geographical circumstances in which these ideas were developed. For instance, Marsh’s lamentation of the destruction wrought by modern civilization is characteristic of American transcendentalism, which was influential in the Northeastern US at the time of his writing. Indeed, Marsh’s cousin, James Marsh, was an important intellectual figure in the American transcendentalism movement. Marsh’s yearning for a bygone era before the “harmonies of nature” that were disrupted by the “destructive power” of civilized man (1874: 34), and his calls for the preservation of that which is left of this relatively untouched nature, speaks to the North American settler colonial imaginary of a pristine wilderness prior to European contact (Cronon, 1995; Simpson and Bagelman, 2018). This can be contrasted with the more productivist conceptions of nature depicted in the Vernadsky-inspired tradition, which reflect Soviet-era notions of humanity’s progressive productivity and mastery over nature. As Lewis and Maslin (2015) astutely observe in relation to Vernadsky’s work, “an orthodox Marxist view of the inevitability of global collective human agency transforming the world politically and economically requires only a conceptual leap to collective human agency as a driver of environmental transformation” (173).

Despite these important differences, by mid-20th century, these two intellectual currents came into direct confluence at an international symposium held at Princeton in 1955, which helped to shape the contours of the Anthropocene as it is conceived of today. This gathering of 70 scholars organized by the Wenner-Gren Foundation resulted in a two-volume collection of writings from 53 contributors titled Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. Teilhard de Chardin passed away just two months prior to the symposium, but his ideas on the noösphere where nevertheless influential at this meeting. At the time of his death he held a position as a research associate with the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and his paper on “The Antiquity and World Expansion of Human Culture” was included in the symposium’s published volumes. George Perkins Marsh’s imprint on the symposium’s proceedings was even more apparent. In his introductory remarks to the symposium’s published volumes, William L. Thomas Jr. names Marsh as one of the two central intellectual forbearers of this conference, and a person from whom many of the contributors took inspiration. Indeed, the chair of the symposium, Carl Sauer of the University of California Berkeley, described the gathering as a “Marsh Festival” (Sauer, 1956: 49).

Describing the lasting influence of this meeting, Bertrand Guillaume (2014) writes that this “famous conference led to around three decades of global environmental scientific assessments – including the International Geophysical Year (1957–1958) and subsequent satellite observations – which ultimately laid the foundations for the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program promoting in turn the ‘Anthropocene’ concept” (138). Indeed, the Wenner-Gren symposium also inspired a subsequent symposium in, 1987 held at Clark University, this time named The Earth as Transformed by Human Activity in homage to Marsh’s famous book (Turner et al., 1990). Paul Crutzen was a contributor to this latter symposium and also served on its advisory committee. Crutzen and Stoermer, who today are often credited for conceptualizing the Anthropocene, have subsequently acknowledged their indebtedness to the two abovementioned symposiums as well as the ideas of Stoppani, Marsh, Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000; Crutzen, 2002; Steffen et al., 2011).

The anthropocene as colonial discourse

While the contextual and conceptual differences of the thinkers discussed above from Comte de Buffon through to the Wenner-Gren symposium are important to keep in mind, I would nevertheless like to flag several features of this thinking that can be observed with relative consistency throughout. These common sense tropes have received less attention than the ways in which the Anthropocene breaks with convention and constitutes a radical philosophical rupture. Specifically, I would like to call attention to three explicitly Eurocentric features of these intellectual currents that preceded the Anthropocene.

A first feature of this thinking is the narrative about the gradual progression of human cultures through different stages of advancement and development. This feature appears fairly consistently from Stoppani and Marsh in the mid-nineteenth century through to the Wenner-Gren symposium in the 1950s. Although each account of these stages of advancement are slightly different, typically they involve a story about an initial primitive human condition (sometimes presented as a state prior to any form of human social organization) characterized by subsistence forms of hunting and gathering activities. This supposedly primitive state is gradually transgressed as the ancestors of modern humans begin to use fire, then eventually domesticate animals, practice agriculture, and eventually develop more complex forms of social organization epitomized by the modern nation-state and the values of liberal democracy. This all culminates in processes of industrialization and modernization. Although we see variations on this general narrative, the unquestioned belief in human cultural advancement is characteristic of Anthropocene thinking from Stoppani onwards. At the Wenner-Gren symposium in the mid-1950s for instance, E.A. Gutkin described “four stages of man’s changing attitude to his environment, all of which can be seen today sometimes in close proximity to one another” (Gutkin, 1956: 21). The first of these stages that Gutkin identifies is that of “primitive man,” exemplified by the “Bushmen and Bantu Negros” (1956: 21). As human cultures progressively develop from this primitive state, they eventually reach the fourth and final stage of human development at which point they become a “co-ordinator of nature.” As evidence of this advanced state, Gutkin points to the Hoover Dam, which generates electricity to meet the energy needs of a “highly developed economy” (1956: 29).

The idea that human cultures advance and evolve to higher states of complexity over time was surely influenced by the publication of Origin of the Species in, 1859 and subsequent Darwinian theories of evolution, however, these world-historical stages of development theories long predate Darwin as features of Western thought. They are observable in the canonical works of Kant, Hegel, and Marx, among many others. Indeed, this discourse continues to inform contemporary thinking, ranging from the “critical theory” of Jürgen Habermas (see Tully, 2008) to theorists of modernization and developmental studies (Rostow, 1990). This presumption that human cultures develop along a predetermined linear trajectory from a state of savagery to advanced modernity has been roundly critiqued for its suggestion that human cultures can be compared and deemed to be more or less advanced or developed than others. European culture is typically used as the measure against which this development or advancement is gauged. Dipesh Chakrabarty refers to this racist and Eurocentric logic as “historicism”—the assumption that the histories of all societies are “variations on a master narrative that could be called ‘the history of Europe’” (2000: 27). In accordance with this “first in Europe, then elsewhere” hypothesis (Chakrabarty, 2000), all non-Western peoples are assumed to follow roughly the same developmental path toward “political modernity” as experienced in Europe. The distance between the development of European and non-Western societies can thus be measured in historical time. In a logical sleight of hand, contemporaneous societies are depicted as actually existing in different historical stages, as suggested by Gutkin above where he states that all four stages of development can be seen today “in close proximity to one another” (1956: 21). The presumed advancement of European societies is then deployed as a rationale and justification for the colonization of lesser developed societies in the name of spreading progress, and assisting these underdeveloped societies to advance to stages of greater historical development, modernization, and Enlightenment, as exemplified by Marsh's call for the "diffusion" of the knowledge of "advanced" peoples to other "classes" of people.

A second and related feature of thought characteristic of the early Anthropocene theorists is the contention that, at some stage along this trajectory of human development, human cultures step out of a state of Nature or savagery and into a state of Civilization. These states of “savagery” and “civilization” are distinguished by a society’s relationship to the non-human world. In a savage state, humanity is portrayed as being subject to nature and leaving little if any impact on the surrounding landscape. The moment that human cultures leave this primitive state of nature and become civilized is precisely the moment when they begin to exercise sovereign agency over nature. This logic is clearly evident in the work of each of the thinkers mentioned above from Comte de Buffon through to Teilhard de Chardin, each of whom distinguishes between savage and civilized humans. The account of precisely when this transition occurred varies from one thinker to the next, with some suggesting that it occurs with the origins of agriculture while others suggest that it occurs with the advent of science or industrialization (a dispute which appears to mirror the debate over the origins of the Anthropocene today). What seems to be clearly agreed on, however, is that with this gradual transition from savagery to civilization human societies exhibit greater and greater mastery over nature, as described by Marsh’s statement quoted above about how “purely untutored humanity […] interferes comparatively little with the arrangements of nature” (1874: 38–39). This supposed mastery over nature becomes the evidence of advancement. It is also worth noting that Native American peoples are often pointed to as an example of cultures that remain in a state of nature (as in the case of Comte de Buffon and Marsh), whereas European peoples are said to exemplify the state of civilization (as seen clearly when Stoppani affirms that “We are talking about European man, because Europe, more than other regions, feels man’s sovereignty” (1873: 39)). As with the stages of development argument, this structure of argument is not limited to the early thinkers of the Anthropocene; it is a well-established convention in the Western philosophical tradition, perhaps exemplified most famously in social contract theorists such as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau who theorize about humankind stepping out of a state of nature to form organized societies. However, the construction of these nature/culture and savage/civilized dichotomies is not innocent theoretical misconceptions confined to the annals of early modern political theory. These same arguments have been (and continue to be) used to rationalize colonial violence, dispossession, and the genocide of Indigenous peoples (Cronon, 1995; McClintock 1995; Braun, 2002; Sundberg, 2014; Simpson and Bagelman, 2018).

A third feature of the early theorists of the Anthropocene is that this entire process of the development of human culture through the various identified historical stages is presented as having a teleological trajectory. In other words, the progressive advancement of cultures from a state of nature to one of civilization and modernity is no accident—rather, it is the unfolding and materialization of an internal drive towards a higher state of consciousness, rationality, and enlightenment. Stoppani, for instance, believes that the Anthropozoic brings us closer to God, and describes it as a state of “freedom” and “light.” For Marsh, it is the expansion of human consciousness and reflexivity that distinguishes the civilized from savage man and mere brutes. Similarly for Le Roy and Vernadsky, the emergence of the noösphere occurs as human cultures evolve beyond the limitations of mere biological beings and develop transcendent capacities for conscious self-reflection, allowing humans to intervene as planetary agents in more thoughtful and rational ways. Vernadsky even makes reference to the theory of “cephalization” developed by American biologist and geologist James Dwight Dana, which contends that the human brain is itself on an evolutionary course towards greater and greater levels of consciousness (Vernadsky, 1945: 7). Teilhard de Chardin takes this teleological logic beyond the human, suggesting that it is ultimately humanity’s “biological fate” to develop an “ultra-reflexive” consciousness that transcends the biological realm and evolve into a planetary cosmic consciousness. What each of these cases hold in common is an Enlightenment era belief that this world-historical unfolding through different stages of human advancement is ultimately a progressive one that is leading to a higher state of being. The arrival of the “Era of Man,” the “Anthropzoic era,” the “phychozoic era,” or the noösphere are all celebrated as marked advancements. Marsh provides an important exception to this triumphalism, as he offers a stern warning against the “wanton destruction” associated with civilization. However, even in this case, he retains an underlying Enlightenment faith in the ability of educated, scientific thought to correct these wrongs and shift course to ensure the rational human management of nature.

The persistence of these common Eurocentric tropes in the early thinking on the Anthropocene should give us pause to question whether the contemporary framing of this concept remains tethered to similar conceptions of progress, development, civilization, modernity, and nature. Although I am unable to provide a complete review of the contemporary Anthropocene science here, I would like to point to one example of how the contemporary thinking appears to reproduce aspects of these narratives with which I am concerned. Will Steffen, Paul Crutzen and John R. McNeill’s (2007) article titled “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” published in Ambio is one of the most highly cited articles from the Anthropocene literature, and is written by three of its most influential thinkers. In this article, the authors contend that the proposed epoch consists of three “stages.” The first of these stages began with industrialization. Although the authors concede that humans have always modified their landscapes, they nevertheless contend that: “preindustrial societies […] did not have the numbers, social and economic organization, or technologies needed to equal or dominate the great forces of Nature in magnitude or rate. Their impacts remained largely local and transitory, well within the bounds of the natural variability of the environment” (2007: 615). This all changed with the Industrial Revolution, which occurred “[i]n the footsteps of the Enlightenment,” and marked a “decisive transition in the history of humankind” (2007: 616). The second stage of the Anthropocene that Steffen et al., identify began in 1945 with the onset of the “Great Acceleration” of anthropogenic impacts that have been experienced since the postwar period. This represents another “profound shift in the relationship between humans and the rest of nature” (2007: 614). The third stage that the authors identify is a forthcoming stage that they describe as humanity becoming “stewards of the Earth system” (2007: 618). They predicted that this would begin in 2015, at which point an awareness of human impacts would emerge due to advances in scientific knowledge, improved communication due to the internet, and the spread of democratic political systems and independent media, and the strengthening of civil society. The authors predict that this new consciousness will begin to influence decision-making bodies at all levels. Making a claim that is strikingly reminiscent of the theorists of the noösphere, the authors state that “Humanity is, in one way or another, becoming a self-conscious, active agent in the operation of its own life support system” (2007: 619).

Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill thus reproduce all three of the problematic structures of thought observed in the early thinkers of the Anthropocene. First, they present a stages narrative, where specific events in human history related to technological developments in Europe disseminate outwards, advancing humanity into new historical and geological stages characterized by a reconstituted relationship with nature. Second, they offer a modified version of the state of nature argument by suggesting that although humans have always impacted their environment, the impacts of pre-industrial humans remained “well within the bounds of the natural variability of the environment” (2007: 619). With each progressive stage of the Anthropocene, the human capacity to modify nature becomes increasingly pronounced. Finally, they reiterate the Enlightenment teleology narrative with their optimistic forecast that the spread of improved technology, scientific knowledge, and liberal-democratic ideals will eventually elevate humans to become not just masters of nature but its rational, conscious, and benevolent masters. Just to clarify, my concern here is not that political and economic processes that began in Europe (such as the Industrial Revolution) are identified and apportioned an uneven share of causality for the changes that have destabilized earth-systems. Rather, my concern is that the way discourses of the Anthropocene center the role of Western modernity often remains bound up in, and reproduces, deep-seated narratives about the progressive development of European societies through stages of cultural advancement marked by greater social and technological complexity, and greater mastery over nature, which elevated these societies above non-Western peoples and thereby justify the entrenchment and furthering of Western colonial modernity.

Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill provide just one example of how the contemporary Anthropocene discourse reproduces the standard Eurocentric and colonial tropes. A more complete review of the Anthropocene science is called for. However, these concerns about the potentially colonial dimensions of Anthropocene discourse are supported by a growing literature that critically interrogates the Anthropocene’s intersections with race and coloniality. Broadly stated, these critiques have political, ontological, and epistemological dimensions that I will briefly review, while keeping in mind that these three features remain interrelated and inseparable.

Politically, the Anthropocene discourse is critiqued for suggesting that it is the anthropos, or humanity at large, that is implicated in causing environmental crises, thereby concealing the uneven distribution of both the causes and impacts of global environmental change, and specifically overlooking the ecologically destructive impacts of racialized colonial capitalism. Kyle Whyte argues that the the Anthropocene is “not precise enough” of a term because it does not adequately distinguish between different types of anthropogenic change, such as the difference between the “reciprocal relationships” of Indigenous peoples “with thousands of plants, animals, and ecosystems” on the one hand, and colonial interventions that disrupt these reciprocal relationships on the other (2017a: 6). It was the disruption of Indigenous ways of shaping and relating to the world that “laid key parts of the groundwork” for the activities that drive climate change and other impacts that we tend to associate with the Anthropocene today (2017a: 2). Lumping these anthropogenic changes into an undifferentiated category of the “Anthropocene” conceals and depoliticizes the specific role of colonialism. Moreover, as Whyte argues, impacts such as climate change further the “intensification of colonially induced environmental changes” that have already undermined the ecological relations which “supported Indigenous peoples’ cultures, health, economies, and political self-determination” prior to colonization (2017a: 2; see also Whyte 2017b). Effectively, on this account the Anthropocene is settler colonialism by another name. Whyte’s critique is largely in line with other critics of the Anthropocene who emphasize the specific political and economic structures that are responsible for global environmental change (see for instance, Castree, 2017; Dalby, 2013; Malm & Hornborg, 2014; Millar and Mitchell, 2017; Moore, 2015; Schroeder, 2014; Swyngedouw, 2013), however, whereas these other accounts typically foreground the role of capitalism, Whyte places greater emphasis on structures of colonization.

The ontological underpinnings of the Anthropocene have been critiqued for reinforcing the colonial separation of nature and culture and the associated narratives of Enlightenment Man’s progressive mastery of nature. Although the very concept of the Anthropocene—that human activity is fundamentally altering the geological composition of the planet—would seem to undermine any such contention that the human and the non-human are ontologically separable, this is not guaranteed. Indeed, as Nathan Sayre (2012) remarks, the human-nature divide is tenacious, and even critiques of this dualism tend to refer back to it, thereby granting it additional analytical purchase. Angela Last warns that the Anthropocene’s portrayal of the human as the planet’s most powerful geologic agent could serve to “reinforce stereotypes of ‘imperialist man’ as the engineer of his own destiny” (2017: 163). Similarly, Lesley Instone and Affrica Taylor are concerned that “calls for urgent action in the name of the Anthropocene might paradoxically justify more control in the form of intensified environmental management through to the grandiosities of global geo-engineering—the kinds of ‘fixes’ that got us into this mess in the first place” (2015: 138). Likewise, Leslie Head cautions that the Anthropocene narrative could be deployed to suggest that further modernist interventions are necessary in order to carry us out of a state of environmental crises, and it thereby “risks perpetuating a modernist understanding of human domination over nature” (2016: 7).

The epistemological critique of the Anthropocene questions the forms of knowledge that this science privileges. Mike Davis (2002) has shown how earth systems science emerged historically as an “imperial science” that employed meteorological data to discredit claims that drought and impoverishment in the British colonies were a consequence of colonial violence. Zoe Todd (2015) voices concern that the Anthropocene as a form of knowledge similarly serves colonial objectives. Todd questions whose interests are served in the deployment of this knowledge, and writes that, “As a Métis scholar, I have an inherent distrust of this term, the Anthropocene” (2015: 244). Todd notes that the concept has been produced in the “undeniably white intellectual space of the Euro-Western academy” (2015: 246–247), where “not all humans are equally invited” to participate (244). Consequently, other narratives related to environmental change and possible responses struggle to be heard within the context of this discussion. As a concept that has emerged in these culturally and intellectually specific contexts, Todd is concerned that the Anthropocene will “recreate exploitative patterns from the past,” noting that “like any theoretical category at play in Euro-Western contexts, [the Anthropocene] is not innocent of such violence” (2015: 251). This concern is echoed by Angela Last who writes that “there might be a great danger that only western voices are granted airtime in the current discussions about the Anthropocene” (2017: 162).

Salvaging the anthropocene?

While these critiques are disconcerting, the narrative of the Anthropocene as a signifier of planetary crisis remains emergent and therefore its conceptual content remains unresolved and subject to discursive contestation. Indeed, many of the same scholars and commentators who have identified the risks involved in adopting this nomenclature remain open to the possibility that there could be more redemptive readings of this concept. For instance, Head identifies both “risks and opportunities in the possibility of conceptual reframing,” and calls for scholars and activists to “use the period when the Anthropocene concept is still emergent in the public consciousness, and informal as a geological epoch, to craft an articulation that is more […] generative of political possibility” (2016: 5). Instone and Taylor express their “mixed feelings” regarding the Anthropocene as a category, but entertain the possibilities of “thinking through, from and with to recast the dominant tales of a singular Anthropocene” (2015: 148). They contend that “if viewed as a potentially transformative naming event with complex affordances, rather than as a scientific validation to scramble for yet another heroic techno fix, debates over the Anthropocene can open a space for constructive circumspection and thoughtful response” (2015: 139).

Perhaps most famously, Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009, 2014) has argued that although the Anthropocene discourse can serve to downplay the role of political and economic structures such as capitalism, Marxist critiques that only see capitalism at work are also insufficient because even if capitalism were to be immediately dismantled, planetary changes are already underway and must be contended with regardless. While remaining suspicious of claims to the “human species” as a singular universalizing and essentializing political subject, Chakrabarty nevertheless maintains that it is impossible to think through the planetary crisis without thinking on the temporal and geographical scales of “species.” Hence, for Chakrabarty, the challenge of the Anthropocene becomes that of “thinking simultaneously on both registers, to mix together the immiscible chronologies of capital and species history” (2009: 220). This entails finding ways to adopt a “global approach to politics” without “subsum[ing] particularities” or smoothing over the uneven distribution of impacts (2009: 222).

All of this suggests that the verdict on whether the Anthropocene can be salvaged as a conceptual framing that is useful to those committed to decolonization is still to be determined. The fact that multiple, contradictory, and ambivalent readings, understandings, and usages of this concept remain in circulation suggests that its content remains disputed, unresolved, and thus worthy of continued contestation before reaching a definitive conclusion that it should be renounced and consigned to the hegemonic language of Western modernity. It is not my intention to make any such authoritative pronouncements here. Rather, the contribution that I hope to make to this discussion is to suggest that, regardless of where one stands on the conceptual usefulness of the Anthropocene, a careful reading of this concept’s history and attention to the theoretical, political, and cultural contexts in which this concept has emerged can strengthen understandings of that which is inherited with the concept and what is at stake.

Scholars ought to be especially attentive to the ways that these Eurocentric narratives of historical development get taken up and uncritically reproduced in the discourse of the Anthropocene as a science. Whitney Autin and John Holbrook (2012) have argued that the question of the Anthropocene should be approached strictly as an objective matter of science, and warn against the ways that the Anthropocene is being employed unscientifically in “pop culture” to serve the agendas of social and environmental activists. However, tracing the history of this concept reminds us that the science itself is bound up in social and cultural narratives. This is most certainly going to be the case given that the concept of the Anthropocene, by its very definition, implies that social theory and physical science can no longer be clearly separated or delineated as distinct and bounded practices. Indeed, as a proposed period of geological time, the Anthropocene is unique because the concept suggests that geological processes can no longer be explained strictly by examining the stuff of physical matter such as rocks, fossils, or atmospheric chemicals. Moreover, whereas previous geological stages could be identified by pointing to discernable markers etched into the earth’s strata, the geology of the Anthropocene is still in the making, therefore leaving stratigraphers no choice but to conjecture as to what physical evidence (or “golden spike”) geologists of the deep future might find as evidence of our impacts. Given that the Anthropocene must be approached as a hypothetical question about how past and present changes in human behaviors will impact the geological strata of the future, the question of the Anthropocene’s periodization demands that scientists engage in social theorization. It should not be surprising if the default social theory that this science would turn to is cast in the dominant narratives of European cultural and technological advancement that are commonplace in virtually all of the philosophical thinking of Western modernity and hegemonic in contemporary discourse at large. Not only are these narratives troubling on their own, but they also risk leading to the conclusion that the socio-ecological crises of the Anthropocene can be resolved by continuing to pursue the unfinished projects of Western colonial-modernity and technological mastery over nature through to their triumphant conclusion.  Critical theorists therefore have an important role to play in these conversations, and can use careful discursive analyses to help identify the ways in which problematic conventions of social theory are unquestioningly replicated in ways that legitimate ongoing violence in the colonial present.

Moreover, so long as the concept of the Anthropocene continues to privilege Western scientific knowledge and remains a construct that is deeply invested in the onto-epistemological categories of Western philosophy, it will continue to exclude and silence ways of knowing that are considered beyond the bounds of the Western philosophical tradition. Regardless of whether the Anthropocene is to be conceptually salvaged or discarded, the task of decolonizing this discourse requires the destabilization of these categories, the provincializing of the Western imaginary, and the opening up of space for ways of knowing and being that offer counter-imaginaries and possibilities for rethinking how we might navigate these challenging times. Indeed, as Achille Mbembe has described, the “decolonization project” has “two sides”—the first of which is the deconstruction of “epistemic coloniality,” while the second side is “an attempt at imagining what the alternative to this model could look like” (2015: 18). My intention here is to contribute to the former—the critical dismantling of colonial structures of thought that discredit and suppress other ways of knowing and being.

There are many who are far better positioned than myself to take up Mbembe’s second side of the decolonization project by providing accounts of what epistemic alternatives might be, and thereby helping to answer Zoe Todd’s question about the Anthropocene: “What other story could be told here?” (2015: 244). Indeed, numerous other scholars have pointed to examples of how the problematic separations between nature and culture, or the human and the non-human, can be rethought without drawing on the conceptual apparatus of the Anthropocene and rigid structures of Western philosophy. For instance, Mbembe notes that African thought has a “rich archive” from which to rethink this alternative in the context of the Anthropocene (2015: 25). Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (2013) and Angela Last (2017) point to the Suzanne and Aimé Césaire’s “cosmo-political” approach to rethinking concepts of the human and the material within an explicitly anticolonial and antiracist framework that is often missing in posthumanist literature. Mabel Gergan calls for more engagement with the “sacred, sentient, and spiritual” (2015: 262), and calls on critical posthumanist scholars to consider the analytic value of “accounts which take seriously the agency of gods, spirits, and deities” (2015: 262). Leanne Simpson explains that “coming into wisdom within a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabe epistemology” involves the embodied practice of learning “from the land and with the land” (2014: 7). This approach to “land as pedagogy” cannot be taught in the abstract context of the classroom (Simpson, 2014; see also Watts, 2013). Robin Wall Kimmerer describes how learning the language of her Potawatomi ancestors taught her to understand relationships between the human and non-human in different ways, and leads to “whole new ways of living in the world” (2013: 58). Taking inspiration from the Zapatistas, Juanita Sundberg (2014) also calls for more dialogue and engagement across epistemic worlds in order to create a more “pluriversal” understandings of the problems we face in the Anthropocene (see also Panelli, 2009; Collard et al., 2015). These are just a few examples of the multitudinous archives of knowledge that have largely been absent, or marginalized at best, in discussions about the Anthropocene to date.

As Hamid Dabashi (2015) argues in response to his rhetorical question “Can Non-Europeans Think?,” there is no shortage of ways of thinking about the world that draw from traditions other than Western philosophy and science. Perhaps the more salient question is thus, “Can Europeans Listen?”; or more precisely, can the limited epistemes that bound and govern discussions about concepts such as the Anthropocene be pried apart and dismantled in such a way that allows a much wider range of voices and ideas to be heard in these conversations. This challenge is particularly salient and urgent given the Anthropocene’s rapid rise as a grand narrative that traverses disciplinary boundaries and could rapidly ascend to become the dominant discourse with which we story contemporary global environmental crises. Exposing the taken-for-granted logics that operate silently in the background of current debates can contribute to the destabilization of the concept’s limits, and the opening up of possibilities for forms of knowledge and ways of being that this concept has otherwise occluded, constrained, and delegitimized. This is not merely a discursive or intellectual undertaking; the categories and concepts that we deploy in our understandings of the world have material implications and impacts on the ways that we live, relate, and mobilize politically.