I’ve been wrapping my tongue around the anthropocene for the last 4 years, though I am not (yet) using those four syllables in a sentence consistently.
Today, as I looked for background story and details of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, I did not find much of her origin story on Wikipedia. Instead, what I did find was new terminology for the Plantationocene followed by these two paragraphs :
Together with scholar Donna J. Haraway, Tsing coined Plantationocene as an alternative term to the proposed epoch Anthropocene that centers humans activities in the transformation of the planet and its negative effect on land use, ecosystems, biodiversity, and species extinction.
Tsing and Haraway point out that not all humans equally contribute to the environmental challenges facing our planet. They date the origin of the Anthropocene to the start of colonialism in the Americas in the early modern era and highlight the violent history behind it by focusing on the history of plantations. The Spanish and the Portuguese colonists started importing models of plantations to the Americas by the 1500s which they had previously developed a century earlier in the Atlantic Islands. These models of plantation were based on migratory forced labor (slavery), intensive land usage, globalized commerce, and constant racialized violence, which have all transformed the lives of humans and non-humans worldwide. Current and past plantations have been important nodes in the histories of colonialism, capitalism, and racism—histories inseparable from environmental issues that made some humans more than others vulnerable to warming temperatures, rising seawater levels, toxicants, and land disposition.
I am amazed to read that The Mushroom at the End of the World: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins was published nine years ago in 2015. I like this excerpt from the book, “understand capitalism … we can’t stay inside the logics of capitalists” since we need alternatives to the destructive systems that define our lives. This phrase reminds me of the Audre Lorde quote that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” There is much more from Lorde on this.
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 