Anthropocene: Victims, Narrators, and Revolutionaries

Abstract

Abstract:The absence of a reflection on revolutionary practices and subjects is the main weakness of the radical critique of the Anthropocene. The risk is to envision the Anthropocene as a space for villains and victims but not for revolutionaries. In this respect we believe that it is crucial to challenge the (in)visibility and (un)knowability of the Anthropocene beyond geological strata and planetary boundaries. We argue that as the Capitalocene, the Anthropocene has left its traces in the bodies of people upon which the new epoch has been created. The traces of the Capitalocene are not only in geological strata but also in the biological and genetic strata of human bodies; exploitation, subordination, and inequalities are inscribed into the human body and experienced, visible and knowable by subalterns without the mediation of -many times actually in opposition to -mainstream scientific knowledge. We inflect the concept of Capitalocene with our own Wasteocene, which serves to stress the contaminating nature of capitalism and its perdurance within the socio-biological fabric, its accumulation of externalities inside both the human and the Earth's body. We envision the Wasteocene as one of the features of the Capitalocene, especially adapted to demystify the mainstream narratives of the Anthropocene. In order to enhance our arguments we build upon the findings of the global Environmental Justice atlas (hereafter EJOLT atlas) of environmental conflicts and on our own in-depth research on the struggles against toxic contamination in

Gardening in Polluted Tropics: The Materiality of Waste and Toxicity in Olive Senior’s Caribbean Poetry

“…hile the grand narrative of the Anthropocene eschews how massively heightened degrees of anthropogenic activities impact life on Earth (Armiero & De Angelis, 2017), recent academic enquiries have experimented with terms that refine this notion, such as Capitalocene (Parenti & Moore, 2016), Chthulucene (Haraway, 2016), and Plantationocene (Haraway et al, 2019). Likewise, political ecologist Marco Armiero (2021) highlights the centrality of waste and toxicity as an indelible mark of human presence with the newly coined term Wasteocene.…”

Antropoceno, Capitaloceno E Lixoceno: Diferentes Abordagens Sobre as Relações Sociedade-Natureza

“…Sendo assim, Crutzen (2002) afirma que a raça humana entrou em uma nova Era geológica, a do Antropoceno, sendo essa Era marcada nos estratos acumulados pelos traços humanos na estrutura terrestre. Assim, o ser humano passou a ser o motor da destruição natural e catalisador de futuros desastres naturais (MOORE, 2016;ARMIERO;DE ANGELIS, 2017).…”

Wasting Democracy, Fueling Dissent: Refuse-Derived Fuels in Can Sant Joan (Catalonia)

“…In fact, a key moment in the history of the EJ movement happened in 1982 in Warren County, North Carolina, when the local community was joined by civil, environmental and religious organizations to resist the sitting of a hazardous waste landfill (Bullard, 1990). Waste, after all, is not a thing, but a social relation (Armiero and De Angelis, 2017). In this sense, disposal or reuse of waste results in a kind of sorting exercise, aiming at separating "the desirable from the unwanted; the valuable from the worthless, and indeed, the worthy or cultured from the cheap or meaningless" (Scanlan, 2005, p. 9).…”