User:Savlatt/sandbox

The context and controversial feelings behind the meaning of the terms ‘Anthropocene’ and ‘Capitalocene’ are not as new as the words themselves. The branding of more recent terms, like Anthropocene, seems like a discovery of an old narrative for many. For women, indeginous, non-capitalistic, and poorer communities, the blaming of humankind for the epoch surrounding Anthropogenic climate change has not been legitimate. Some historians have suggested that the recent coining of these terms for disaster shows that the people that have historically suffered from the impacts and spoken out against capitalism the most have been left out of the conversation for a very long time.

The Anthropocene epoch has no definite start date and is still a loosely defined term, which makes the debate between it and Capitalocene difficult to articulate. According to the article, Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492, Native Americans contributed to the warming of the atmosphere which was shown through a decrease in carbon dioxide parts per million (ppm) after an estimated 55 million Native Americans were killed after the arrival of European colonizers and through the 1500s. This shows that even before colonial times and the industrial revolution, humans that were not participating in a capitalistic society were still contributing to the warming of our atmosphere. However this doesn’t seem significant to many scholars, such as Donna Haraway and Wendy Arons. They would argue, while yes, humans do have an impact on the warming of the planet, we hadn't seen anything significantly changing the earth's natural thermal cycles until the rise of global capitalism in the last few hundred years. Indigenous peoples did clear lands which lead to the release of carbon dioxide, but comparing that to now when there has been a much more significant amount of deforestation and carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels, it seems that the rise of capitalism is more to blame for the rampant warming of our atmosphere than any socio-economic-ecological practice that came before it.

Jason Moore states that the Capitalocene has encompassed the past five centuries as the “Age of Capital” which is relatively the beginning of colonial times. Scholars such as Moore argue that generalizing human caused environmental disaster to all of humankind erases much of what needs to be addressed in the current acceleration of global warming. Donna Haraway similarly argues that, for as long as our species has been identified and agriculture has advanced, humans have been changing the planet. However naming the current epoch surrounding the changing climate has more to do with speed, acceleration, balance, scale, and complexity. Her writings seek to find when the largest and most rapid change began in recent history that has brought us to our planet’s current state.

Wendy Arons suggests that the term ‘Anthropocene’ is problematic because it assumes there is no diversity in thought, practice, and harm among human behaviors globally and blame has been too evenly distributed. She defines the ‘Capitalocene’ by the global spread of capitalism and the injustices that have derived from the socio-economic-ecological system. She explains that when we put blame on humanity and not the primary perpetrators, then we cannot easily agree on how to create solutions. Arons and Moore both also address that through ignoring the disastrous effects that capitalists have had on the environment through devaluing nature, we also ignore that capitalists have largely devalued certain groups of people that have experienced the backlashes of capitalism the most. Many of these groups that have been lumped with nature as “less than human” are devalued or cheapened in the same way by people that have more power than them. Lumping the oppressed with their oppressor in blame for the destruction that they were forced to take part of doesn’t seem fair.