The environmental historian and Marxist critic Jason W. Moore asks, “Are we really living in the Anthropocene – the ‘age of man’ – with its Eurocentric and techno-determinist vistas? Or are we living in the Capitalocene – the ‘age of capital’ – the historical era shaped by the endless accumulation of capital? As Moore’s colleague Raj Patel puts it, “Using this name means taking capitalism seriously, understanding it not just as an economic system but as a way of organizing the relations between humans and the rest of nature.”
“I promise not to do this to Greenland” — Donald Trump
Saying that climate change is anthropogenic (made by humans) may obscure as much as it clarifies. A world of political difference lies between saying “Humans did it!” — and saying “Some humans did it!”
Radical thinkers and climate justice activists have begun to question a starkly egalitarian distribution of historical responsibility for climate change in a system committed to a sharply unequal distribution of wealth and power. From this standpoint, the phrase anthropogenic climate change is a special brand of blaming the victims of exploitation, violence, and poverty. Is there a more nearly accurate alternative? Ours is an era of capitalogenic climate crisis, in which nature is treated as a resource (standing reserve in Heidegger’s expression) that is freely available for the taking.
From the point of view of Geology, Earth Systems Science, Planet Earth, or polar bears for that matter, it is probably enough to identify anthropogenic effects, their distribution, and their intensities, without delving deeper into anthropological or socio-political analysis. But for many scholars of the humanities, this level of generalization regarding human history shortchanges the work of history and the human sciences. For any inquiry into anthropenic planetary consequnces, it can nonetheless be useful to identify different socio-political entities, if they are compatible with the quantifiable earth sciences and help tie cause and effect. But identifying specific actors such as corporations -- especially fossil fuel industries, with their wealth and power and their histories of falsehoods – belongs to a different level of analysis.
See the discussion of humans as species in the discussion of the Anthropocene
Terrestrial geology studies the whole earth and its history and seeks to integrate local phenomena into broader general rules. Perhaps anthropology has a similar scope, but Anthropos is not a tidy concept. It can be broken down in multiple, overlapping, or conflicting explanatory narratives. A number of different general terms have been proposed as alternatives to the Anthropocene, including the Capitalocene. That concept derives from a primarily Marxist approach to labor, landscape, and language. A convincing account of global environmental change since the sixteenth century can be attributed to the workings of capital, (see the work of Jason W. Moore, as well as other terms proposed by Donna Haraway), yet despite the powerful narrative of capital’s success and planetary damage, the concept is primarily an anthropocentric one and its direct connection to geology is secondary. The strong claim is that humans are altering earth systems into new configurations. Identifying specific human actions is relevant to any attempt to change course, but the Anthropocene starts with fundamentally physical and not social analysis. The Earth is still the only home to life we know, and it seems fair to say that all humans have a responsibility to care for it.
In The Shock of the Anthropocene, published in 2016, historians Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz characterized the disregard of politics as far more than just a naive oversight. In their view, the elites responsible for harming environments have always been aware of their negative consequences and have always worked to obscure them from public view.
The history of Exxon’s disregard for the work of their own scientists is a case in point. Exxon conducted cutting-edge climate research decades ago and then pivoted to work at the forefront of climate denial, manufacturing doubt about the scientific consensus that its own scientists had confirmed.(See Banerjee, Cushman, Hasemyer and Song Exxon: The Road Not Taken)
Moore argues for an earlier starting point for the Capitalocene than most scientists working on the Anthropocene. For Moore, if we “Start the clock in 1784, with James Watt’s rotary steam engine, we have a very different view of history – and a very different view of modernity – than we do if we begin with the English and Dutch agricultural revolutions, with Columbus and the conquest of the Americas, with the first signs of an epochal transition in landscape transformation after 1450. That transition marked a turning point in the history of humanity’s relation with the rest of nature.”
“Capitalism is best understood as a world-ecology of capital, power, and re/production in the web of life….Instead of asking what capitalism does to nature, we may begin by asking how nature works for capitalism.”
While Moore’s insights into the rapacious appetites of Capitalism for “free” resources and “cheap” labor show clear links between a particular economic system and indifference towards the environment, it is hard to imagine scientists agreeing to call this same time-frame the Capitalocene, which provides little overlap between earth sciences and human activity. If geological periodisation requires unambiguous markers in the rocks, those earlier dates, while important ones in human history, would be less evident than the later candidate for global geology.