Within discourse regarding the environmental crisis, the focus often falls on issues that are defined and bounded: rising sea levels, fossil fuel use, deforestation, desertification — among them, perhaps the most frequently referenced concern relates to rising temperatures. In the media, in education and in policy, the explanation for the current crisis mainly underlines human activity: human-driven changes have directly caused the ecological crisis, we are the culprits.
This kind of explanation is widely accepted and naturalised- industrialisation has led to planetary-wide emissions of fossil fuels, leading to soaring temperatures, ice caps melting, sea levels rising.
This specific way of framing the current crisis can be traced back to the “Anthropocene” concept: even when not explicitly mentioned, it has strongly influenced the way in which ecological issues have been reported over the past two decades. Coined by chemist Paul Crutzen and microbiologist Eugene Stoermer in 2000, “Anthropocene” describes a geological era in which humanity has become a geo-bio-physical force on a planetary scale — an era marked by mass extinctions, extreme climate events, and environmental pollution. The periodisation of this new geological era is still debated, but it is often linked to the Industrial Revolution.
Critiquing the anthropocene
The “anthropocene” argument has often been critiqued for focusing on the effects and “direct” causes (such as industrialization and urbanization), rather than the complex, systemic roots of the environmental crisis. The anthropocene argument has also been critiqued for treating humanity as a homogeneous, undifferentiated whole without distinctions on political or economic levels. What does the term “humanity” actually refer to? Can we truly place a multinational corporation and mountain villagers whose lands have been expropriated on the same level? Do ordinary citizens and the network of industrial enterprises operating on a global scale have the same environmental impact?
Erasing these differences in responsibility lends itself well to the depoliticization of the ecological crisis: colonial, class, and gender issues are often left out of the mainstream discussion, and history is reduced to a relationship between technology and resources.
The transformation of the relationship between land, labor, and wealth
According to environmental historian Jason Moore (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvtdkZhT1yw), a sole focus on industrialization is inadequate, and raises additional questions: what were the historical conditions that made the dependence on fossil fuels possible? Is it sufficient to only point to technological innovation? How did socio-ecological relations change?
Moore identifies a key turning point in the transformation of the relationship between land, labor, and wealth. In pre-capitalist economies, the ownership of land was the primary measure of wealth. With the rise of capitalism, however, control over land became the means to increase labor productivity and enable capital accumulation.
The appropriation of “resources” — fossil fuels, timber, land to be converted into plantations or pastures — together with the productivity of labor, became the driving force behind capital growth.
Perhaps the most well-known historical example of this restructuring is the expropriation and privatization of England’s common lands (commons), which were cleared to make room for sheep walks, as they were more economically advantageous than traditional, communal agricultural practices.
Within capitalism, human life gradually ceases to depend directly on the land, and increasingly depends on wages. According to Jason Moore, the extraction of value from nature and labour contributed to the externalization of nature, transforming it—practically and ideologically—into an external object to be exploited. The ecological crisis, then, should not be seen as a consequence of capitalism, but rather as a foundational precondition for its development. This is why the environmental historian speaks of the Capitalocene rather than the Anthropocene. The capitalist system acts upon nature, but also through it: Moore describes it as an ecological regime—a reorganization of the web of life with the goal of appropriating value and increasing productivity, deeply transforming landscapes and the possibilities for life within them.
With the transition to a capitalist economic system, in which livelihood is dependent more on wage labor than on a connection to the land, the relationship between human life and land is transformed. The vital, embodied relationship between land, more-than-human animals, and human life is weakened by the rise of capitalism, and it becomes easier to accept as universal truths the dichotomies of nature–culture, body–environment.
The Anthropocene concept and the mainstream environmental narrative, by failing to acknowledge the role of capitalism and the transformation of socio-ecological relations, end up naturalizing these dichotomies. It then becomes difficult even to imagine—or remember—how to live in, with, and through nature without relegating those ways of life to a “primitive,” pre-modern stage, or framing them with nostalgic overtones.
Imagining different ways of living is a demanding task, as it requires questioning many so-called universal truths about the role of the economy and the possibilities for socio-ecological relationships.
This blog also seeks to be a space for exploring those ways of being in the world that the dominant economic system tends to erase—a space for reviving ways of imagining, narrating, and feeling life on planet Earth. As biologist and theorist Donna Haraway puts it, it means staying with the trouble of the ecological crisis.
It’s true that in recent centuries a rupture has occurred between nature and society. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Imagining possible alternatives is a form of resistance—and a way to seek solutions to the ecological crisis.
We invite the readers of this blog to comment with their own stories and critiques about the ecological crisis, in order to build a space in which to share ideas.
