About Anthropocene
The Anthropocene, considered as a new geological epoch, remains contested. One controversy concerns whether it should be understood through the framework of “species.” In “The Climate of History: FourTheses” (Dipesh, 2009), Chakrabarty argues that human activity has reached the scale of a geological force. Through the burning of fossil fuels, industrial production, and energy-intensive modes of living, humans have shifted from beings interacting with nature to agents capable of transforming the Earth’s systems. This collapse of the traditional separation between natural history and human history demands that environmental issues be examined at the level of the species. Species-thinking reframes humans as biological beings embedded in Earth systems, beyond explanations limited to capitalism or political institutions or economic structures.
However, critics emphasize that reducing the ecological crisis to the level of the species obscures crucial historical and political dynamics. In the book “Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World” (Malcom, 2019), Ferdinand highlights how slavery, colonialism drove large-scale ecological destruction and this has never been the result of “the whole humanity”. The Anthropocene narrative risks attributing responsibility to an undifferentiated “human species”, dilutes the accountability of wealthy nations, multinational corporations, and colonial systems, and erases the suffering of colonized and exploited communities who were exploited or dispossessed by these regimes in the first place.
Marisol de la Cadena’s notion of “uncommoning nature” adds another limitation that the Anthropocene assumes a universal Western idea of “nature.” In Western modernity, mountains, rivers, and forests are treated as measurable, passive “natural resources.” For communities in northern Peru, however, mountains are not objects or resources but agentive beings. Treating “humanity” as a single species flattens these diverse ontologies and the worlds they enact. Such epistemic reduction is one of the major limitations of the Anthropocene concept.
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In my view, the Anthropocene cannot be understood through species alone. While the species framework is indispensable for scientific and technical analyses, such as climate modeling, carbon accounting, Earth-system analysis, it cannot account for the social, political, and historical complexities of humanity. Human-driven ecological destruction cannot be explained strictly in biological terms, since colonial domination, capitalist expansion, and imperial violence offer far stronger explanations for ecological degradation than the category of “species”. Many of the severely affected areas, including Africa, Southeast Asia, the Pacific have contributed least to environmental damage and often maintain reciprocal relationships with the natural world. Any adequate account of the Anthropocene must therefore address race, power, structural and geopolitical inequality.
Moreover, since I believe that the desire to dominate either lands, ecosystems, or other human groups is inherently violent, I question Ferdinand’s emphasis on slavery and colonialism. While they undoubtedly systematized extraction on an unprecedented scale, forms of domination existed long before European expansion. Wars, conquests in the past had involved plunder of people, territory, and natural resources. These all reveal a deeper mindset: the belief that humans hold the right to control, appropriate, and possess the Earth. Once this entitlement emerges, environmental harm follows. Therefore, while colonialism represents a crucial turning point, I suggest that the Anthropocene requires understanding for both long-term human domination and the specific historical formations that amplified it.
Finally, I strongly agree with Marisol de la Cadena’s argument that there exist multiple ontologies of nature that challenge Western worldview. Beyond the Andean concept discussed in her text, many examples can be found in East Asian animistic traditions. In Japanese Shinto, elements such as trees, water, and mountains are kami, living beings with agency. Two famous films produced by Japanese prestigious director Miyazaki: Nausicaä (1984) and Princess Mononoke (1997) portray forests and seas as sentient entities with will, intention, and morality. They can respond, resist, or retaliate to humans if they keep making environmental destruction, reflecting a philosophy of reverence and coexistence. Humans are not separate from the natural world but embedded within a community of living presences.
Similar animistic perspectives can also be found in Taiwanese Indigenous cultures. Mountains and forests are sites of ancestral presence, a spiritually charged space governed by relational ethics. Traditional hunting practices also stresses balance, respect, and reciprocity rather than exploitation or domination. These animistic ontologies show that earth beings like mountains, animals, waters possess agency and value and remind us that the world contains multiple cosmologies, each offering distinct ways of imagining and living with the more-than-human world.
The Anthropocene cannot be understood only at the level of “the human species.” While species-thinking explains the scale of human impact, it overlooks the colonial, capitalist, and historical forces that actually produced most ecological damage. At the same time, a universal Western idea of “nature” erases other worlds in which mountains, forests, and animals hold agency, as seen in Andean, East Asian, and Indigenous traditions. These perspectives show that humans are embedded in a relational, more-than-human world. Any adequate account of the Anthropocene must therefore combine scientific analysis with historical responsibility and a recognition of multiple ontologies of nature.
