Book Review: A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Kathryn Yusoff. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. ISBN 9781517907532

To make up for the absence of engagement with environmental issues, increasingly the Anthropocene label is getting slapped onto conferences, journal themes, and book titles to signal an ecological turn across disciplines. Triggered by the emerging alarm of looming threats of the climate crisis, extinction shock, and pandemics (among a long list of environmental dangers), this evolving environmental attention is welcome, but the careless and uncritical application of the term, Anthropocene, is perhaps less so. Worldecologist scholars Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore argue that using Anthropocene as a marker for the human-altered environment (as it is commonly conceived of in geology and in popular discourse) assigns blame to humans being humans, but misidentifies what is actually the results of particular human activities governed by the structure of capitalism. Instead, they advocate using “Capitalocene,” because it’s not just an economic system but “a way of organizing the relations between humans and the rest of nature” that is the source of our planetary ecological crisis (Patel and Moore 2017, 3). The Anthropocene equalizes the infinitesimal contributions of its primary victims—the majority of humans who did not create the planetary ecological crisis—with its main perpetrators.