Thinking the Anthropocene South

nthropocene” is shorthand for a story that implicates the human species in the climate crisis and other planetary ills. Grafting humanity into the geological time scale, this story has a shock value that is presumably meant to move “us” into more sustainable ways of living. But it fails to register the markedly different ways in which the “we” that it evokes are situated in relation to the imperiled planet and to one another. There has thus been a proliferating nomenclature through which critics of the term have sought to encode other narratives for our times. Some of these narratives are stories that would assign responsibility to particular practices or groups―such as capitalism, the plantation economy, or the Anglosphere―rather than to humanity as a whole. Others register epistemological or ontological bias in how the derangement of the Earth system and the degradation of environments are being thought and experienced or propose alternative ways of understanding and living through these conditions. One such term is “Northropocene.” Mentioned in M E G S A M U E L S O N