Decolonizing the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene has never been a properly geological concept—it has always been political. And, we argue, it has always been entwined with settler colonialism, at least on Turtle Island. Other places on Earth might have the Anthropocene starting at different times, with different events, but for us, here, thinking the Anthropocene outside of its Eurocentric framings and identifying the interlinking connections between the Anthropocene and colonialism helps us begin to name and then dismantle its ecocidal logics.11This is a shortened version of a longer essay, “On the Importance of a Date, or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” published in ACME journal (16, no. 4, 2017), https://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1539. Our argument builds upon the thesis advanced by Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin in “Defining the Anthropocene” (Nature, 11 March 2015) that the Anthropocene should be dated to 1610 to coincide with the geologic legacies of colonialism.

Colonialism, especially settler colonialism—which in the Americas simultaneously employed the twinned processes of dispossession and chattel slavery—was always about changing the land, transforming the earth itself, including the creatures, plants, soil composition, and atmosphere. It was about moving and unearthing rocks and minerals. All of these acts were intimately tied to the project of erasure that is the imperative of settler colonialism. The damming of rivers, clear-cutting of forests, and importing of plants and animals remade the worlds of North America into the vision of a displaced Europe, fundamentally altering the climate and ecosystems. Settler colonialism, in North America and elsewhere, is marked by this process of terraforming.22See also Eyal Weizman, The Conflict Shoreline (Göttingen: Steidl, 2015). As Kyle Whyte of the Potawatomi Nation argues, “industrial settler campaigns erase what makes a place ecologically unique in terms of human and nonhuman relations, the ecological history of a place, and the sharing of the environment by different human societies.”33Kyle Powys Whyte, “Our Ancestors’ Dystopia Now: Indigenous Conservation and the Anthropocene,” in Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, ed. Ursula Heise, Jon Christensen, and Michelle Niemann (London: Routledge, 2016), 8. Further, the forced displacement that many tribal communities suffered involved adaptation to entirely new environments, new climates, new ecosystems, new plants and animals. These processes of environmental transformation and forced displacement can be understood as climate change, or more broadly, a preview of what it is like to live under the conditions of the Anthropocene. And so, as Whyte makes clear, the current environmental crises named through the designation of the Anthropocene can be viewed as a continuation of, rather than a break from, previous eras that begin with colonialism and white supremacy, and extend through advanced capitalism. In other words, climate change and the Anthropocene, understood from an Indigenous perspective, are not new events, but are rather the cyclical recurrence of logics of extraction (of bodies, lands, minerals, fossil fuels) that have amplified to become a global phenomenon.

The ideological presuppositions of the Anthropocene were made explicit in the eponymous article by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer (2000), who rely upon the concept of the noösphere to articulate their position.44Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, “The Anthropocene,” Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–18. The noösphere places thought above the biosphere and geosphere, and is framed as a teleological progression that follows the development of the earth’s geological features and biota, as demonstrated by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s writings on the concept.55Chardin writes: “We must enlarge our approach to encompass the formation, taking place before our eyes and arising out of this factor of hominization, of a particular biological entity such as has never before existed on earth—the growth, outside and above the biosphere, of an added planetary layer, an envelope of thinking substance, to which, for the sake of convenience and symmetry, I have given the name of the Noösphere.” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man (New York: Image Books/Doubleday, 2004), 114. This conceptualization assumes that the biosphere cannot, in and of itself, constitute an “envelope of thinking substance,” which contradicts the millennia-old philosophical traditions of many Indigenous peoples.66See Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters & Social Imagination (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005); Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013); Rachel Attituq Qitsualik, “Word and Will—Part Two: Words and the Substance of Life,” Nunatsiaq News, 12 November 1998, http://nunatsiaq.com/archives/nunavut981130/nvt81113_09.html; Deloria Vine Jr., Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (New York: Scriber, 1995); Bawaka Country, Sarah Wright, Sandie Suchet-Pearson, Kate Lloyd, Laklak Burarrwanga, Ritjilili Ganambarr, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Banbapuy Ganambarr, and Djawundil Maymuru, “Working with and Learning from Country: Decentering Human Authority,” Cultural Geographies 22, no. 2 (2015): 269–283; Elizabeth Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem for Late Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). In particular, Vanessa Watts elegantly articulates the concept of Indigenous Place-Thought, drawn from her own familiarity with deeply rooted Indigenous philosophies still practiced and applied in North America.77Vanessa Watts, “Indigenous Place-Thought & Agency amongst Humans and Non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go on a European World Tour!),” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2, no. 1 (2013): 20–34. Place-Thought necessarily disrupts a concept of knowledge separate from the geosphere and biosphere, and posits instead that land and thought are integral to one another; knowledge is not another technological layer somehow presumed to be outside of the earth. Indigenous Place-Thought thus asserts that life and thought are animated through and bound to bodies, stories, time, and land. Global colonial dispossessions continue to haunt—through bones, bodies, and stories—and assert the removal of human thought and technology from the earth.

Marking the contiguous histories of colonialism and the Anthropocene is not an academic exercise. It is rather about taking stock, being affected by, and feeling the reverberations of the violence of European settlement.88We want to make clear that this violence was structural, and as such even those people from Europe who were fleeing poverty, famine, or dispossession (in, for example, the case of the Highland clearances) were also complicit in systems of Indigenous genocide, systems through which people of European descent benefitted regardless of their original reasons for migration. This structured violence was systematically enacted through: the instantiation of the Canadian nation-state as an English and French colony; the failure to abide by treaties; the imposition of private property and the reservation system; brutal and violent residential schools; the continued over-placement of Indigenous children into the childcare system; the imposition of patriarchy; the obvious disregard for Indigenous lives as manifested by the continued inaction in regards to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women; and immigration laws, specifically section 38, which severely restricted access to people from places other than Northern and Western European origins until 1978. Therefore, Canada must be understood as a white supremacist state in the sense that white people are systematically given preferential treatment. On the relation between white supremacy and the Anthropocene, see Nicholas Mirzoeff, “It’s Not the Anthropocene, It’s the White Supremacy Scene, Or, The Geological Color Line,” in After Extinction, ed. Richard Grusin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Colonialism tore apart and disrupted worlds in the places both of us currently reside—these unceded and unsurrendered lands across North America—and hit like a seismic shock. The seismic shock of dispossession and brutality that colonialism employed to gain entry into and claims over Indigenous lands in the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries kept rolling like a slinky, pressing and compacting in different ways in different places, as colonialism spread outwards into homelands of self-determining peoples around the globe. It worked to compact and speed up time, laying waste to legal orders, languages, and place-stories in quick succession. The fleshy, violent loss of 50 million Indigenous peoples in the Americas is something we read as a “quickening” of space-time. This seismic shock of genocide met with another one, that of the Middle Passage, again premised upon a logic of extraction and violence. Christina Sharpe describes the ongoing reverberations of chattel slavery and the rending of life-worlds in the wake of the ships and ideologies that transported captured Africans across the Atlantic. Sharpe teaches us that “in the wake, the past that is not past reappears, always, to rupture the present.”99Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 9. Building on her work, we can gesture towards how the entangled viciousness of capital and white supremacy have their direct roots in the epistemic violence of discovery, dispossession, extraction, and the horrific capture of life, bodies, and worlds. The Anthropocene-as-disaster narrative in dominant scientific and social science discourse must reckon with the ongoing disaster of the Middle Passage and settler colonialism. This seismic shockwave has rolled through and across space and time, and is now hitting those nations, legal systems, and structures that brought about the rending and disruption of lifeways and life-worlds in the first place.1010For example, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has written “the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent.” Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015), 150. This is the amplification and globalization of systems that have long been underway.

Indigenous and Black resistance in the face of apocalypse—including the renewal and resurgence of Indigenous and Black communities in spite of world-ending violence—is something that Euro-Western thinkers should heed as we contend with the implications of the seismic upheaval of worlds that began back in 1492. In order to adequately address climate change and other environmental catastrophes we need to seriously think through and enact processes of decolonization. This involves self-governance for Indigenous peoples, the return of stolen lands, and reparations for the descendants of captured Africans. It must also fundamentally question the bounds and the legitimacy of the nation-state structure itself. As we are already seeing around the world, people will not simply sit still in the face of ecological destruction, but will move, adapt, and try to find ways of recomposing with their kin and companion species. Rather than positioning the salvation of Man1111Sylvia Wynter draws attention to the ways in which the concept of Man, which is the “foundational basis of modernity,” serves to deny humanity to many people while also divorcing humans from the earth. She calls for an unsettling of Man in order to reinscribe a vision of the human in line with social and environmental justice. Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 288.—the liberation of humanity from the horrors of the Anthropocene—in the technics and technologies of the noösphere, we call here for a tending once again to relations, to kin, to life, longing, and care.1212See Sharpe, In the Wake, and Kim Tallbear, “Failed Settler Kinship, Truth and Reconciliation, and Science,” 2016, http://indigenoussts.com/failed-settler-kinship-truth-and-reconciliation-and-science/. This commitment to tenderness and relationships is one necessary and lasting refraction of the violent and unjust worlds set in motion at the beginning of the colonial moment.