The term “Anthropocene” implies that humans — as an undifferentiated whole — have created the ecological crisis. This downplays the role of the capitalist system and its class and national divides.
Rebecca Lee Kunz, Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Coyote Skin – Dusty Paws, 2022.
(Via Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research)
By Vijay Prashad
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
Reading documents from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) makes me morose. Everything looks terrible. This is largely due to the social processes set in motion by capitalism, including the harsh use of nature and the reliance on carbon-based fuels. For example:
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One million of the estimated 8 million species of plants and animals on the planet are threatened with extinction.
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The main threat to a majority of species at risk of extinction is biodiversity loss caused by the capitalist agribusiness system of food production.
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Agricultural production — currently accounting for more than 30 percent of the world’s habitable land surface – is responsible for 86 percent of projected losses in terrestrial biodiversity because of land conversion, pollution, and soil degradation.
These are three out of hundreds of points that could be made from as many scientific documents. It is important to emphasise that environmental degradation has not been caused by humans in general, but by a certain system of organising society which we call capitalism.
Michael Armitage, Kenya, Dandora or Xala, Musicians, 2022. (Via Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research)
The problem with the term Anthropocene (which began to be used first by scientists, then by social scientists) is that it implies that humans — as an undifferentiated whole — have created the ecological crisis we are facing. This subtly downplays the role of the capitalist system and its accompanying class and national divides.
However, data show that humanity is using the equivalent of about 1.7 Earths to sustain our current consumption levels. In other words, we are consuming natural resources 75 percent times faster than nature can regenerate them each year.
Unless we find another habitable planet, there is no arithmetic way to solve the problem. This is not a matter of the climate alone, but also of the environmental stress we have placed on the Earth (such as through deforestation, overfishing, overuse of fresh water, and soil degradation).
If we break this undifferentiated concept of humanity down by country, clear divisions emerge. If everyone lived like an average person in the United States, then we would need five Earths. If everyone lived like an average person in the European Union, we would need three Earths. If everyone lived like an Indian, we would need 0.8 Earths. If everyone lived like a person from Yemen, we would need 0.3 Earths.
An undifferentiated concept of humanity disguises the great differences across the world and suppresses the need of some peoples — such as in Yemen — to increase their consumption in order to have a dignified life.
The concept of the Anthropocene masks more than it reveals.
Roger Botembe, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Les Initiés, 2001. (Via Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research)
In a few months, private jets will land in Belém, Brazil, for the U.N.’s annual conference on climate change. Situated at the estuary of the Amazon River, Belém is an ideal location for “COP30,” the 30th year of the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Over the past quarter century, the Amazon region has suffered from terrible deforestation, with the Brazilian Amazon alone experiencing total forest loss of 264,000 square kilometres from 2000 to 2023 — equivalent to the combined area of New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
Brazilian President Lula da Silva’s intensive programme of conservation has made considerable advances in reversing this trend, but it needs to go further. Holding COP30 in Belém will be a strong message not only to save the Amazon but to highlight the future of the planet and of humanity.
Our team in Brazil is currently working on a series of publications on the capitalist crisis of climate and the environment to be distributed at COP30. It is already clear from our analysis that there is no solution to be found in “green capitalism,” as Jason Hickel wrote in one of our Pan African newsletters, it is capitalism itself that is the problem we face. Below, please find some preliminary demands that go beyond the façade of green capitalism.
Jagath Weerasinghe, Sri Lanka, Celestial Underwear, 2003.
(Via Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research)
1. Climate and environmental discussions must be democratised. There is no room for closed-door meetings financed by corporations that have a vested interest in environmental and climate destruction. For instance, COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, was partly funded by oil companies such as ExxonMobil, Chevron, Octopus Energy, the State Oil Company of the Republic of Azerbaijan, and TotalEnergies as well as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the World Economic Forum (itself partly funded by the U.S. government). Whoever pays the piper calls the tune, an adage that is not meaningless when it comes to money and power. Such a U.N. conference must be funded by governments and transparent about the conversations taking place in all meetings.
2. The world’s governments must strengthen their own agreements and treaty obligations. It is important to note that due to the pressure from the U.S. and EU, none of the major climate agreements adopted strong language for compensation, or what is known as “loss and damage” (i.e., climate reparations). Contributions to the loss and damage fund are voluntary, as reflected by a number of processes and treaties from the 1992 UNFCCC to the 2013 Warsaw International Mechanism, 2015 Paris Agreement, 2021 Glasgow Climate Pact, and the 2022 Loss and Damage Fund agreement.
Denilson Baniwa, Brazil, Awá uyuká kisé, tá uyuká kurí aé kisé irü or whoever hurts with iron will be hurt with iron, 2018. (Via Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research)
3. There must be a fair energy transition plan that is democratically shaped. Such a plan must include ending governments subsidies for private carbon-based fuel companies. Instead those funds must be used to promote a new energy matrix and protect communities from the adverse impact of the climate and environmental catastrophe.
4. The global economy must be reshaped through agrarian reform. Such a reform must emphasise a science-based and democratic form of agriculture that protects the soil, water and air. Governments must carry out studies to assess what it means to restructure agriculture in order to address the climate and environmental catastrophe. We need new forms of agro-climatic mapping and data to help us understand how to harness local communities’ knowledge to protect the natural ecosystem while finding ways to sustainably use natural resources for the benefit of all.
Such a mapping exercise will help us better understand how to combat deforestation and promote reforestation, how to properly harness water resources for our own consumption and energy, and how to regulate mining activities to draw resources from the earth without causing catastrophic social and environmental destruction. Can we, for instance, pledge to reach net-zero deforestation by 2027?
Sebastião Salgado, Brazil, Valley of Javari Indigenous Territory, State of Amazonas, 1998. (Via Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research)
The photograph above is by our friend Sebastião Salgado (1944–2025), who died on May 23. Salgado portrayed the working class and peasantry with dignity and without romanticising their exploitation. He was always in solidarity with their struggles and organisations.
After the 1996 Eldorado do Carajás Massacre, in which police and gunmen who had been hired by powerful companies killed 19 activists connected to the Landless Workers’ Movement (Movement dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST) in South Pará, Salgado, alongside the singer Chico Buarque and the writer José Saramago, created a book called Terra (Land), the proceeds of which went to the MST. This, alongside Salgado’s donation of some of his photographs, helped the MST build its Florestan Fernandes National School.
Salgado greatly enjoyed the work of Tricontinental and would occasionally send a note of appreciation for the materials we produce. We bow our heads in respect for his great contributions to humanity.
In 1843, a man named Julio Cezar Ribeiro de Souza was born in Belém, on the other side of the Amazon from the Vale do Javari that Salgado photographed. Souza loved to watch birds fly, and it was this close observation of nature that provided him with the inspiration to invent the steerable hot air balloon, mimicking birds’ aeronautics. Perhaps we need to cultivate this ethos: nature does not need to be conquered; it must be learned from and lived through.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow atChongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and, with Noam Chomsky, The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of U.S. Power.
This article is from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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The four demands you present are make all the sense in the world but, unfortunately, they are inconsistent with the passions of men. And without some restraint on the passions of men, sensible demands will be ignored.
While it has become an increasing concern, in some circles, that we are facing a crisis because of declining population growth rates, I would suggest that a huge part of the ecological crisis is because of too many people. A steady state economy (Small is Beautiful; Ernst Schumacher) seems to be our best hope, and that implies a population that does not continually grow on a finite planet. It suggests we live within our means, with limits on material consumption, and that, of course, is anathema to capitalism.
The last few thousand years of earth’s changes come from the exponential increases in human numbers and the exponential technological domination of the earth’s surface (and now near space above the surface). Capitalism is a way of organizing that domination in extremely unequal ways, and is not the fundamental cause; and…more importantly…would not correct the problems we face if replaced by more a equitable economic system.
As Prashad points out, 1.7 earths are being used (of the one earth’s potential) with nearly half of the earth’s population needing more and half needing to use less, while 1% are using the earth’s resources at beyond profligate levels. This basic structure of use wouldn’t be changed by replacing capitalism with socialism as a major economic model; improved slightly perhaps with major devastations delayed, but finally it is our numbers and our technological domination that are driving the unsustainable disruptions of biophysical systems.
Afdal’s comment below very nicely expands this thought.
While it is one thing to justly prosecute the capitalist system for its exponentiation of the environmental degradation and extinction rates (including of peoples) since the 16th century, it is entirely another to come up with a longterm solution that will never again allow capitalist irrationalities to drag our entire species into extinction. The so-called ‘international’ organisations fostering one scheme after another to supposedly reverse environmental decline and degradation are nothing but institutions to provide the dominant corporations with new covers and schemes to continue extracting as much surplus from the earth and its humans as possible. No faith can ever be placed in these outfits, no matter how ‘open’, ‘transparent’ or ‘democratic’ they might become.
To address the environmental catastrophe enveloping us more or less in slow motion, the world needs rational, democratically run (through soviets) international economic planning that excises completely the interests of private profits and private ownership of resources and the means of production and distribution. For this to happen, the capitalist class must be expropriated without compensation the world over. And for that to happen, social revolutions are needed, especially in the belly of the beast, the US and Europe. This is no alternative (TINA).
Indigenous ways have been referred to as primitive and backward. They have been referred to as savages for living close to nature.
How foolish Western capitalist culture has been and continues to be. If we are to reverse the ecological damage done to our earth, technological society will have to swallow its arrogance and adopt indigenous practices. Continued pride and privilege are a recipe for extinction. Playtime is over.
Thank you for your impassioned antidotes to the ongoing ever deepening climate and earth wreckage brought us by disaster capitalism. I particularly appreciate the publicized differential contributions by social group of the destruction. And always. Vijay Prashad I give praises and gratitude for your selection of images that come from the souls of our artists , our bros and sisters, moms, dads, tíos, tías, abuelos.?
I despise capitalism as much as the next socialist, but on this subject I have to vigorously disagree. The evidence that humans, as a whole, have dramatically altered the world ecosystem not for decades, not for centuries, but tens of millenia is overwhelming and has only increased over time as we continue to compile the collective data across the disciplines of history, anthropology, and paleontology.
From the moment humans first migrated out of Africa they have left a trail of extinction. The first casualties were most of the world’s large-bodied animals outside of Africa and the ecosystems they maintained. Gone are the “mammoth steppe” grasslands that characterized vast swaths of the northern landmasses during the Pleistocene. From Eurasia to the Americas to Australia, the earliest evidence for the presence of humans in each of these areas during the most recent interglacial period coincides with a mass extinction of large mammals. For a time some weak alternative theories persisted that perhaps climate change played a roll in these mass extinctions, but of the many other interglacial periods during the Pleistocene none featured such a massive extinction. Species that had previously survived many glacial and interglacial cycles died in mass in the interglacial period that just happened to feature the spread of Homo sapiens across the globe. Furthermore, the growing body of fossil evidence shows that this current spasm of mass extinction of large-bodied animals is actually unique across the entire Cenozoic era (that’s 66 million years). Here are some recent papers on this subject for further reading:
hxxps://doi.org/10.1126/science.aao5987
hxxps://digitalcommons.unl.edu/bioscifacpub/757/
The above just covers the set of radical environmental changes that predate civilization. There are many other stories of diminishing returns and environmental changes in the written historical record that predate the emergence of capitalism. To succumb to the myopia that everything bad that has ever happened to the environment is capitalism’s fault is to set oneself up for continued disappointment and failure in a post-capitalist system. We must grapple in the broadest possible way with all of the causes behind humanity’s failures to come to a sustainable arrangement with its environment, or the post-capitalist world we seek to build might feature us all eating slime.
Agree completely. Thank you for your eloquent response.
There is clearly a difference in the human disruptions of ecosystems of the past through hunting, deforestation and unsustainable agriculture; and the current dangers posed by mining, wars, fossil fuel use for heating, transport, roads, heavy equipment, pesticides, herbicides, plowing, plastics, energy hungry communication systems all of which are pushed into overdrive by investment capitalism.
Many human communities evolved to understand the limits of growth and unsustainable ecological habits and to live in balance with other life forms as a conscious part of their culture. There is large body of information showing this. Even in capitalist societies arguments for ecological sustainability are a large and growing force among the larger public, though for many, personal habits are not in line with those goals.
Co-existent with that evolutionary ecological understanding among human communities was the ideal of living in splendor by wits, trade, and violence. This created its own literature, colonial religions, nationalisms, and technologies of extraction and social control. These are the source of what is loosely called capitalism. This organization to maximize large gains from small investments is perhaps not so different from nomadic big game hunting.
Going back to my initial sentence, I would argue that the differences in modern capitalism (which is very hard to distinguish from Mussolini’s fascism/corporatism) are a) the speed and pervasiveness of the disruption of biospheric balance, b) its total empowerment by human social practices so that there is very little social power to stop its destructiveness,( to the point where a huge and growing proportion of capitalism’s investments are in war technologies to retain social control) and c) It cannot face the fact that it has built a civilization destined to self destruction/extinction and refuses to stop even as that extinction process becomes obvious( species decline, climate crisis, rising temperatures, storm disruption, toxic contamination).
Humans have evolved in different directions over the millennia. We have developed technologies and knowledge to live in relative peace and balance as many do. These societies emerge as mostly local, even if they move around, and they tend to be participatory, to share resources and be deeply conscious of the details of local ecosystems. They tend toward the anarchic and consensus based decision making. One of the best books showing the huge variety of early human communities is The Dawn of Everything, Graeber & Wengrow.
Humans have also evolved to adapt to larger scale violent disruptive, colonizing cultures which tend to expand until they collapse or are overthrown. Technologies of war, communication, building , energy and materials proliferate with positive and negative social and ecological consequences. People tend to believe fervently in the permanence of their civilization right up until they fall.
The environmental/ecological differences between capitalism and pre capitalist civilizations are illustrated by the arrival of the original European capitalists in Southeast Asia, the Americas, and Africa all of which were teeming with big game, fish, plant foods, cultivars and diverse human communities. This abundance had been severely reduced in Europe and west Asia where plow based agriculture had created a cycle of boom and bust and ecological loss, and the speed with which that abundance has been devastated is shocking.
I also recommend Carbon by Paul Hawken, which is a deep dive into human history and these questions and is beautifully and thoughtfully written.